There is an upside to this year’s brutal, wicked-cold winter. Simply that it’s coming to an end. And now it’s time to start looking for spring.
Yes, there are colder places on this planet with more extreme winter conditions right now. But let me just say as I don my weatherman’s hat from the greater New York City area… it’s been a brutal winter.
Blizzard. Ice. Single-digit temperatures. Yeah, lots of fun.
I like to say it’s been “wicked cold.”
That line harkens back to a past life when I lived up in the Boston area and just about every winter was brutal. “Wicked cold” was simply… winter.
But I’ve softened considerably across years of experiencing coastal Connecticut’s gentler winters. And now, it’s been something of a rude (re)awakening.
I will say, however, that shoveling all the snow hasn’t been quite as difficult. Why is that? Well, we’ve got the power of a high school sophomore on our team. And that’s made a huge difference. #TeamLester #grateful.
Power Up
I’m also grateful that we haven’t lost power across these winter storms. Sure, I charge everything up, including my portable power banks. But… as we all know, without a full generator back-up system, portable power banks will only cover you for so long.
Plus, I know we’ve got an exit strategy. #thankstofriends
Wicked Fun
But here’s the really good news. Wicked cold doesn’t necessarily have to mean wicked bad. Winter can be wicked fun.
Plus, I’ll always take the bite of brisk over summer humidity.
A fire in the winter fireplace is always a special experience.
And I’ve got admit, there’s a certain satisfaction that comes with surviving a certain amount of adversity.
And suddenly, spring is right around the corner.
Hello Spring?
Yes, it’s early, but I hope we’re close to that tipping point. Not to predict, but I see early signs beneath the retreating snow line.
And to celebrate this pending seasonal shift, I present to you yet another Barrett poem.*
Ode to the Fading Winter
My weatherman’s hat is placed on my head, To report on single digits I dread. From cold New Yorks streets to the Norwalk shore, It’s wicked cold, like Boston days of yore. Though I’ve softened in the years in between, This brutal frost is a rude, chilly scene.
The shovel goes fast, I’m happy to say, With my high schooler’s strength to lead the way. Go #TeamLester! We have strength in the snow, Using three shovels and stacked in a row. With an exit plan and friends close at hand, We’re weathering storms across frozen land.
But wicked cold days can be wicked fun, More than humidity and summer sun. Fire in the hearth and pride in the soul, When you’ve survived the freeze and reached your goal. The struggle stings, but the win is so sweet, As we clear ice and the slush on the street.
Now snow retreats and the sun starts to climb, We’ve reached the tipping point, it’s about time! The signs of the green are starting to show, Peeking from patches of melting white snow. Goodbye to the ice and winter’s sharp sting, I’m ready to say a “Hello” to spring.
*Editor’s note: I prompted the videos and structure of this poem into existence using a little GenAI assistance via Google Gemini and Flow. Thank you! (My ice photos are still the real deal.)
Using generative AI to create images from your life in cartoon form is one way to reflect the essence of a memory, especially when you don’t have a photo.
I’ve always been a bit obsessed with capturing family photos to document our story. And I often refer to my photo library as the official record of our lives. More than just the images themselves, the metadata of the ‘where’ and ‘when’ is quite useful.
But the photos we collect may not always live up to the memories we hold onto.
And this limitation often crops up for me when I sit down to design and print a photo collage card. Sometimes the pictures from yesteryear just aren’t there.
So, I’ve just tried an experiment…
Text-To-Photo Prompts
I decided to generate new images for a photo collage from my memories. No, this is not science fiction. Thanks to the magic of generative AI, I scanned through my memories and turned a few into photos.
How? Simply through some simple AI text-to-photo prompting.
I didn’t try to create photo-real images. Instead, I decided to visualize my past in cartoon form… as far away from reality as you can get. That way, it’s just the essence of a memory that’s represented. That’s all I wanted.
4 Steps to Bring the Past Back to (Cartoon) Life
So yes, I sat down at my computer and created cartoon scenes from my life to weave into a photo collage.
Here’s how:
Design your character prototypes. You can type in the physical characteristics or use a photo as a reference. A partial similarity is all you need to get to. Remember, it’s just a cartoon. I’m going for fun here… not accuracy.
Once you’ve got your character blueprints, upload them as your subjects.
Then simply type in a couple sentences from your memory as your prompt.
If you happen to have an actual photo from the location of your memory, you can also upload that as part of the ‘scene.’
I found this process remarkably easy and successfully generated a variety of fun cartoon scenes from my life to stitch together into a unique photo-collage card.
I used Google Whisk for this first experiment, but there are many other generative AI platforms to use, including Adobe Firefly.
Cartoon Barrett
Let me share a few examples how this all works. First, here’s cartoon Barrett I created.
This is the blueprint.
Then I got to work reviewing some of my recent trips and thought about a few key moments that weren’t photographed.
I accompanied a group of hikers for this challenging trek, but I was a real slow poke. After a couple hours, I was pulling up the rear. Near the top, I realized I had fallen so far behind, there wasn’t a soul in sight. And the trail through the rocky surface had disappeared. Then, there were a few minutes when I was totally alone… and effectively lost.
I’m on a mountain, next to a glacier, and it’s cold. Now what?
My heart pumped harder. I had no choice but to keep moving. Fortunately, I walked in the correct direction and soon spotted the lead from our group (who was looking for me).
So, my ‘moment’ was really just for a moment. Still, I hold onto this vivid memory.
Crashing a New Orleans Parade
During our 2022 vacation to New Orleans, I captured some great street photos. But there was this one amazing scene I walked through that I just couldn’t get a shot from. It all happened too fast.
We were strolling through the French Quarter, turned a corner to cross a street and crashed into one of those glorious small parades with music and dancing down the avenue. I was literally in the middle of it all, and before I knew it, they were gone.
The lingering memory feels something like this…
The space was much tighter as everyone swarmed around me, but this cartoon does a good job capturing my feeling.
This represents the great photo in New Orleans I never snapped.
A Wild Turkey Flew into My Car
One of the freakiest driving experiences I ever had was during a spring road trip with my family. I was driving through the countryside, and a wild turkey flew into our car.
Thankfully, it wasn’t a direct impact. As I tried to veer away, the turkey clipped the passenger’s window and tore off the side mirror. Fortunately, we were all fine (not sure about the turkey).
This is certainly not a moment you’d expect to get a photo from. This representation does plenty justice to the absurdity of it all.
Camera Overboard?
The truth is none of these memories could really have accompanying photos.
The fact that I can now quickly generate images (however silly) with a few clicks to reflect my experience is quite powerful.
And sometimes, it’s the story behind the story. Like the time I worried I would lose my camera overboard on our cruise while I shot a few timelapses.
This never happened. It’s simply a memory of how I felt. (Now, we’re drilling deep into my head.)
A New Way to Tell Your Story
Whether reconstructing past moments or simply visualizing old feelings, this AI-fueled image creation process is just another way AI is empowering us with new artistic and storytelling skills.
The past has its ways of talking to you, even if you can’t directly hear it. Here’s what I learned after digitizing my fathers’ old 8mm film reels.
There’s that movie scene from “Iron Man 2,” where Tony Stark reviews old film outtakes of his deceased father Howard Stark. The raw film clips show Howard making a promotional film decades earlier. First, Howard is annoyed by child Tony, who plays in the background and ruins the scene. There’s no fatherly love expressed here.
But at the back end of the reel, Howard unexpectedly turns to the camera and seemingly breaks through time, talking directly to future Tony. Howard shares his love for his son, knowing at some point, Tony would receive his heartfelt message at the moment Tony needed it most.
On the one hand, this all seems a bit contrived, though not entirely implausible. But the scene really spoke to me. I’ve watched it many times. I’m drawn to it. And now, I finally understand why.
My Father was a Filmmaker I’ve just finished converting my father’s old 8mm family movies to digital files. He began shooting them before I was born and then continued throughout my early years.
But he gradually stopped his hobby, focusing more on his photography. My dad’s old film reels simply sat in a white box forgotten in the back of my family’s hallway closet.
My mother and grandfather with me on my first birthday
These films reappeared many years later when I was an adult visiting my parents for the holidays. My father felt inspired to set up his aging movie projector for me and my mom, and he ran some of these old 8mm films for us. It was remarkable to watch them for the first time.
My parents on their honeymoon
I brought along my camcorder, and I recorded his presentation displayed on a pull-up screen that he had also lugged along with his projector out of the closet. But we didn’t get through all the films. More than half remained unwatched.
Fast forward a few more decades, and that white box of family memories eventually found its way to my house. (My father passed away in 2022.)
Rescuing Our Family Films A few months back, I decided it was finally time to try to properly convert all these time capsules, which had deteriorated somewhat, but were still viewable.
But the film-to-digital converter worked well enough to bring these silent moments back to life. And the quality was fine for my needs.
The conversion process was wicked slow, and I also found much of the content not worth saving. On the other hand, certain reels contained priceless moments of my parents and my paternal grandfather. And of course, I had to go through what seemed like miles of film to find them.
And then I stumbled upon one huge surprise buried in a strangely unlabeled reel. It was the day my parents’ families first met at my maternal grandparents’ house. It was shot like an old news reel covering some massive public event. (Of course, this was a big event for the two families.)
After I first watched it, it felt like I had jumped through a time portal to witness history. It’s a true gem. And now I’ve got it properly archived.
A Baby Surrounded by History I also converted numerous clips of young Barrett, from baby and toddler to little kid. Sure, I was cute, but I think the greater value in these scenes comes from looking at everything around me- the people, the styles and the environment. Here’s my grandfather with me and my mother on a sunny 20th century afternoon in New York City’s Central Park.
A summer day in Central Park
This is such a cool moment from another era.
Was the Payoff Worth the Grind? I mentioned the digital conversion process takes time. Yes, lots of time!
Each 3-minute reel took me 33 minutes or so to convert, as the digitizer snaps a photo of each frame and then stitches it all together into an MP4 file on an SD card (slick but slow). And I also had some larger reels to deal with… those took hours!
And it’s also not a ‘set it and forget it’ process. You can’t totally walk away. That’s because the film can easily jam in the converter. It’s not so much the unit’s fault. It has more to do with the condition of your film and quality of the splices. Any aberration, and the converter will jam. So, I needed to stay in the room to be able to see what was going on.
Plus, I found on several occasions that the film had broken mid-reel. This happened at some point decades back, and my father had never rejoined the pieces. Rather, he simply wrapped the rest of the film on top of the reel, leaving this booby trap for the future to figure out.
Give the Job to the Pros? You might say that my experience clearly points to the value of simply shipping your box of misbehaving film reels to a company to do the work for you. They’ll deal with the mess and create better-quality conversions. And think about all the time you’ll save.
The only big downside is accepting that you’ll also be paying to convert footage that you otherwise wouldn’t want to save. Plus, depending on the number of reels you’re converting, it eventually becomes more cost effective to do it yourself.
There’s no right answer here. It’s whatever makes more sense for you.
Silent Truths and Manufactured Moments I don’t think my father ever considered that I would attempt this project. Our family history is sufficiently documented in photos. I imagine as far as he was concerned, these films were simply his own hobby for him to enjoy during those years. Nothing more.
But of course, I was searching for something more. I wanted to understand more about my past.
As I reviewed the converted films, I looked for glimpses of certain ‘truths.’ I thought people in motion would reveal more than a posed photo. But I quickly realized there was plenty of posing going on here as well.In many of the scenes, my family acted like movie stars in front of the camera, exaggerating their movements and constantly smiling.
My parents enjoying their vacation
Those mannerisms may also have to do with the silent movie nature of 8mm film. Without audio on these 8mm film reels, of course my father couldn’t talk to me. So, I never got my Tony Stark moment.
First Steps But watching my parents interact during their early years together helped me fill out this optimistic first chapter in my own mind. Every story has a beginning, and I was watching theirs, however manufactured.
I got to see a bit more of my paternal grandfather. I have fond memories of him, and it was nice to see Grandpa in action again.
My grandfather walking down Madison Avenue
There was also a lot of footage of my mother, who loved the camera in those early days. She was my foundation as I grew up, and the film clips of us together warmly displayed those beginnings.
My mom and me dancing by the pool during a vacation
I can’t believe she’s been gone for twenty years. I’m so happy I now have these additional recorded moments of her.
But this project eventually leads me back to my father.
Look, we had a complicated relationship. Suffice to say, my father was a master storyteller, and I spent a lot of my adult life with him trying to figure out any number of little truths… and some bigger ones.
No, these old films didn’t answer any of them. But they did provide a bright view of my family’s life at the beginning. And I’d say that’s a real gift.
So, thank you, Dad. You were a pretty good filmmaker.
“I Built This for You” My 8mm family film conversion project is complete. No, my father never sent me a secret message like Howard Stark to fundamentally change my understanding of my past. But he did show me some things, and he captured a few priceless family moments along the way. There are even a few scenes of my father with boy Barrett having fun.
My dad and me spending some quality time together
These clips are important reminders, as memories have a way of blurring the past. So, mission accomplished.
My cinematic journey back in time has wrapped. And now it’s time to move on.
At Home with Tech 