Movie: Our 2004 Christmas Holiday

The latest addition to our Christmas movie set (including 2001, 2002 and 2003) is Our 2004 Christmas Holiday. Like in the past it's a short home movie of us with our families.

In a radical departure from past years, I didn't set the camcorder on the tripod. I didn't record everything. We shot only what we thought would be interesting, hoping to cut down on editing time and maybe capture some really good activity. We actually only shot 13 minutes of tape! It helped on one part: editing time was much, much shorter than past years. I don't know that we captured anything extraordinary, but it certainly lets you feel closer to everybody and more involved.

Unfortunately, I really didn't feel inspired when putting this together. I couldn't come up with any good ideas to tie it all together or anything like that. As a result, I think it's weaker than the previous years' films.

You can watch Our 2004 Christmas Holiday. It's a 5-minute, 17 MB MPG-1 file--playable by just about every video player.