The Story of a Gift.

I thought I had become rusty. It had been a while since I had given gifts, great gifts, and here I was a few days away from the birthday of a special person in my life, and I had no gift idea. I was scrounging the internet desperately, but there was nothing there. There was nothing that was made for that person, and nothing else seemed good enough.

So, I took a deep breath, and wrote down everything that I thought was important to this person. Everything I wanted him to feel, and everything about him that I wanted to remind him. After all, that is what presents are about, right? Then I put together a way that I could convey ALL of that. For lack of time and ideas, I decided to stick to the clichés - books, videos, letters, scrapbooks… I could do any one of them, and tell the story putting in the elements that HE liked.

Slowly, a story began to form. It began to take visual shape in my head. There was music, there was a narrative, and there were pictures. I started with a  comic book, but it was taking too much time. It would have been perfect, but I wouldn’t have it in time. So I worked with what I had. I looked up his facebook pictures and downloaded the ones that had to do with my story. I had something to start with. I called up his sister and got more pictures. There, I have the raw material.

Now I had all the memories these pictures brought forth, and I had the music he liked, and I knew the things about him that I wanted to tell him we all cherished. I knew his story, and now I had to just piece it together. Video seemed like the most obvious option, but I am not really a mass media person. But, I had to get something out there!

I started with putting up the pictures on powerpoint, putting in descriptions and converting them into pictures. Then I went to paint and added arrows and little personalised shapes, pointing to the things I wanted to be seen. Sometimes, I made multiple duplicates of the pictures, each with a little more detailing then the previous - this was the basic of animation I knew. I put it all together in order, and tied it together with captions in the same way (windows movie maker is really way too basic for interesting caption animations, and I didn’t have time to download any). Some stuff fit, and some stuff I got while making it. I put in the soundtracks I wanted, simply splitting, fading, and ordering. Plain black background, pictures that faded in and out, captions that just appeared one after the other, and music that was sometimes mismatched and sometimes luckily perfect, and a little message in the end. It wasn’t the brilliant job I had hoped to do, but it was a video. It was not my best gift, but it was something at least. I uploaded it on facebook, making it visible only to a select few. I asked a friend to open it for him, and I had goosebumps while I saw him watching it on Skype.

It didn't make people want me to make films for them, but he was touched, and that's all that mattered. In that moment, it didn’t matter that it was not the most wonderful, most life-changing idea put in that gift, what mattered is that I had put forth those things that he wanted to say on a day that was officially an excuse to make people say these things, and he was glad to hear it.  After all, aren't that what gifts are all about? Being able to think of the person a little more lovingly than you normally do, and then saying it, so that they know it for sure. And now I believe, that so longer as it does that, it is a great gift. It really is. :)

Jayati Doshi

6th Feb, 2013. 11.35 pm