Goal Setting | How to Stop in Figure Skates

I had to share my excitement in achieving my first goal. When I threw out the challenge to you last month to document your goals through your photos and video, I included my own goal to stop on skates. I was hoping to learn, seeing as I signed myself up for a skating race without really knowing how to skate! Today, I’ll show you how to take photos and video of your goal and turn them into a memento using Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

To start, I taped myself that first day failing to stop and smashing into the boards. Then I continued to make everyone with two hands, hold the camera, while I kept right on learning. In the mean time, I managed to become addicted to skating. Who knew it could be so much fun once you learned to stop?

Silver Skates Competition, here I come. Didn’t find out til I got there that I’d have to skate 9 laps in an olympic sized rink! Here’s some footage of me on that 9th lap, right after wiping out on the 8th lap. This is all the video my bored cameraman was willing to take:

That’s me, arms flailing, but somehow still won! It helps that only one other person born in my decade entered the race – and she was even slower than me! You can see my trophy up above, after I cleaned up the photo. Here’s what it looked like originally:It’s a little skewed, so here’s the Photoshop portion of the post…

1. Using the ruler tool, I measured from the top left corner to the top right corner of the trophy.
2. Image>Rotate>Arbitrary … This rotates the photo by the degree measured in step 1.
3. View>Show Grid… so we can really align this puppy.
4. Edit>Transform>Distort… drag the bottom corners along the grid until it looks more like a real rectangle.
5. Adjust levels to make it brighter.

And here’s the trophy at home on the ice… where it belongs:Aaah, but that was only one part of the goal. The real thing was learning to stop. As I said, I took video most days that I had someone willing to shoot it. I became addicted to learning to stop. It was so much fun. Except for the fall on day 21. Still hurts.

Here’s what I learned: it’s a lot more fun to skate when you know how to stop. You can go much faster and know that you won’t crash into the boards. Your kids will no longer literally skate circles around you. You can skate drills with your kids for exercise. Believe me, full speed drills, even on a small rink, are exercise. And what else are you going to do on a cold wintry day?

These videos were created in Final Cut Pro, using custom Motion titles. You could create a similar effect in a consumer program so long as you have the RAM for the special effects, 2 tracks of video and 4 tracks of audio.

The special tip I would offer when editing your home movie together is pay attention to the sound editing. Bad sound editing can ruin a perfectly good movie. Here are some helpful hints:

1. Yes, I’ll beat this dead horse, if you’re going to show anything publicly, make sure you use licensed music.
2. Set your out point in the timeline, then open your music track in the viewer. Set your outpoint in the viewer just after the sound fades.
3. Overwrite the sound into the timeline with a fade-in transition at the start. Final Cut will align the outpoints so that the killer ending of the song aligns with the ending of your video sequence. If your video editing program can’t do this, simple fades at the beginning and end will work.
4. Lower the song volume at points where there are key conversations taking place in the video. For example, your camera-man making fun of you by threatening to post video of you on Facebook.

Here’s what else I learned, documenting my goal made me stick to it. Seeing my progress each day showed me what I had to work on and helped me improve much quicker. I also now have a fun memento that I can watch while I sit on the Lazy Boy icing my knee, hip, and ego!