As I expected, my understanding of Windows Movie Maker, and my ability to work with it, have stayed least in my memory since my 2008 work with it at DMAC. As most of us have experienced in connection with some technology, without constant practice, technological skills simply evaporate.
Still, I had confidence that the ability to work with this particular technology would be the easiest one to recover, partly because its ease of use created confidence during my first experiences with it. To prepare myself for DMAC’s immersion-intense learning experience, I read about the basics of Movie Maker from Nick Vandome’s Digital Video in Easy Steps. This early textual work prepared me well for some of the technical vocabulary I would encounter during my early days with DMAC’s staff, and allowed me to make more focused use of their expertise. And once I was involved with the daily work of crafting Mr. Secrets, I was lucky enough to have a unique resource—my wife, professor Debra Journet, who had attended DMAC the year before, and who had remained connected with its technologies far more intensely than I did after I had returned to my traditional academic work.
My work with Movie Maker was also simplified by the fact that Mr. Secrets demanded no video elements beyond still images. This allowed me a more singular focus on one particular kind of image embedding, and gave me more repetitious practice with that skill. All of this allowed me to produce more work, and better work, than I could have anticipated when arriving at DMAC.