Dr. Pepper

Welp, it's been quite a busy week. We've had two Christmas parties to prepare for, a grad school final to turn in, a major cookie/brownie sale and a little boy still recovering from surgery. Whew! I'm tired just thinking about it. But, it's over. The husband still needs to wrap up his grades but today, we've taken some time off and it's been glorious.

I feel like I've been in the middle of about 10 huge projects lately. A few wrapped up this week and I was really thankful to have seen them through. One of them in particular turned out better than I could've ever hoped for. Here's the story.

About six weeks ago, after buying some Dr. Pepper from the store, I noticed that they were giving away scholarship money. Not only is my husband the BIGGEST Dr. Pepper fan but, he is also a student and we could always use some tuition money. It turned out that we had to turn in a video detailing why they should give us a scholarship. I thought we had a compelling story but I wasn't super stoked on that because I'm not great with video...I'm MUCH better with words. But scholarship money is worth fighting for, so I determined to figure it out.

We have an incredible camera so, we started there and began putting together different snippets of video. I started editing it all and putting it together. However I ran into TONS of roadblocks. Either my final video wouldn't play or the end product just wasn't what I was trying to portray. When I finally decided to just give up and submit what we had, the video wouldn't submit on the Dr. Pepper website. I even tried getting the IT guy here to help and he determined it was something with their website as I wasn't doing anything wrong.

I was at a turning point. It would've been easy to quit, but I didn't want to. I was determined to see it through.

During that time though, I definitely came to understand two things: I didn't have the software to pull-off a great video and I also didn't have the knowledge. I needed help.

On the suggestion from a friend (thanks Debbi!), I contacted our graphic design teacher here (who is also a friend) and asked for his help. He jumped right in.

I can't tell you how grateful I am that he did.

For he did FAR better than I ever could've done.

We won't know for awhile if Steve got a scholarship, but I'm just so glad that I fought through all of that because the product I ended up getting was way better than my original. It was worth the wait.

And even better than that, is that I was actually able to submit the video today. I tried at least 30 times before. So they must've fixed some things on their end too.

It was a fun project and I'm really thankful for a generous graphic designer/video editor (Thanks Grant!).

And we'll just see what God does with it.

Hope you all enjoy it!!



(The YouTube version is a bit more choppy-that's just YouTube- than the mov file that I turned in but the mov file wouldn't play the song in the background for some reason on the blog so....enjoy it a bit choppy.)