Saturday, March 31, 2007

Alex's New Blog - Runman

Although his Autistic Celebration Run has long since ended,
Alex continues to Run For Autism.
You can follow him & his running on his new blog Runman
at therunman.blogspot.com

Friday, March 16, 2007

Alex's Movie - Tip-to-Tip PEI

When Alex first told me he wanted to run across PEI, he told me he wanted to make a documentary about it. So, shortly before we took off, I rolled up my jars of saved quarters and loonies ($1. coins) and we bought a little video camera.

We didn't get a lot of footage. It was hard enough biking and keeping my balance, snapping all the photos I did was quite a bonus, but trying to video as we were in motion proved next to impossible. Every morning (except the morning we were in Charlottetown and discovered the camera had been left on and the batteries were dead) we started our day with Alex's commentary. We do have some footage from the trail, far more than made it into this final cut. His first movie was over an hour and a quarter long. Because, at the time, he was putting it together to show during our PEI Marathon presentation I told him he'd have to cut it down to about 30 minutes and he cut out all the actual Run video except, I think, a bit in Summerside, the Police escort into Kensington, and the bit at the end as he reaches the East Point lighthouse.

What he ended up with in this video short is a 21 minute video that tells the story of his run, in daily commentary of where we are and where we're going, his choice of photos from that day, and his choice of music to help tell his story. He has captioned it to accommodate his poor articulation so you'll all understand him.

Again thanks to everyone who helped make the Run possible and helped out along the way. And thanks to our friends who actually put it up on YouTube for us.

As much as we love this beautiful little Island, if you live in a spot like we do, you end up beyond the world of highspeed, somewhere just out of reach of Route 2's towers on one side, Ruranet's towers on the other and despite Aliant's promise that we'd have highspeed years ago (and all the money the Government gave them to make that happen), it never happened. Even if Eastlink cable ran past our lane, running the cable in our (very long) lane would cost a fortune. Satellite, our only "choice", is just too expensive and too restrictive. Consequently, YouTube (among other things) is virtually inaccessible to us. It can take hours (and more than one try) to load a video that's just a couple of minutes long. I look forward to the day I can thoroughly explore the videos on the Posautive YouTube group.

So, with all that said, here is Alex's 21+ minute movie, split into 3 parts to accommodate YouTube's 10 minute limit. Enjoy....