Valentine

This was the first video I ever made.

While working at AOL I got an early morning call from my boss. She told me that Susie was working on a new feature to be called "Member Movies" that would go live on Valentine's day (YouTube came along exactly one year later, in 2005, so we were pioneers.) They knew of my theater background, and that I had been experimenting with uploading videos in my area of AOL. She asked if I could make a home made video, engaging, but not so professional that AOL members would be intimidated about uploading their own videos.

That wasn't a problem. I had never made a video before. So of course I said, "Sure, I'd love to. When do you need it?" "Close of business (COB) today," she said.

I had meetings scheduled all day except the 2:00pm hour, but they were all either phone meetings or in AOL chat rooms. So I went to the meetings (with my phone muted) but worked on the video all day. The first issue was who would act in it. There was no time to recruit actors, so I decided to do a "Roses are red..." poem recited by a flamingo hand puppet my wife and kids had given me. The next problem was that I only had the software that came with my web cam, and I spent most of the morning getting the sound to work on it. I finally had a finished video soon after lunch, and I uploaded it to a private AOL library (and tested it on AOL's system) by 2pm. I spent the rest of the afternoon testing it (and attending meetings), and just before COB I emailed my boss with the details on where she could find it.

The next day she called to say Susie loved it, and soon after I could see it in the Member Movies feature. There were only two videos, my flamingo video and an animated "how to" video. When the animated AOL member showed him uploading his video, it was my video that appeared on the cartoon screen!

Valentines Day came, and I got an email from one of the folks in my group. She said she wasn't supposed to share this, but she thought I should see the "Top ten Videos on AOL of the Week" for the Valentines Day week. The top video was my flamingo! It had more views than Ellen DeGeneres (they were uploading her talk show monologues to AOL at the time), and the Beatles, among others. I was astounded.

Then I started hearing rumors they were showing it at corporate meetings. That summer I was at a meeting led by our group's new vide president. It was a huge room, and he stood on a raised platform with a large screen behind him. it was sweltering hot, and we had been meeting for hours. I started to zone out when I heard him say "This employee has his thumb on the pulse of the AOL member." I looked up. He was talking about me! And behind him was my hand in the flamingo puppet, ten feet high!!!

My boss said it was so successful they wanted me to use actors from then on. I said OK, but I'll need more lead time. My family and I made four more, for Fathers Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, and New Years. But I was bitten by the puppet bug, and we made a bunch of puppet videos, most of them music videos, just for the fun of it.