From the Editor: A Great Man Has Passed
Passage
Baker Lake MLA Speaks Out in Support of Nunavut's Inuit Dogs
Proposed New Dog By-law, a Threat to Iqaluit Dog Team Owners?
Published Research Has Implications for the Aboriginal Inuit Sled Dog!
Fan Mail
The Chinook Project’s July 2013 Visit to Labrador
NFB Increases Internet Accessibility to its Film Library
Movie Review: Vanishing Point
Problems Accessing/Viewing Pages
IMHO: The Back Story of the Thank You DVD
Index: Volume 15, The Fan Hitch
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Editor: Sue Hamilton
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The Fan Hitch, Journal
of the Inuit Sled Dog, is published four
times a year. It is available at no cost
online at: https://thefanhitch.org.
The Fan Hitch welcomes your letters, stories, comments and suggestions. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit submissions used for publication.
Contents of The Fan Hitch are protected by international copyright laws. No photo, drawing or text may be reproduced in any form without written consent. Webmasters please note: written consent is necessary before linking this site to yours! Please forward requests to Sue Hamilton, 55 Town Line Rd., Harwinton, Connecticut 06791, USA or mail@thefanhitch.org.
This site is dedicated to the Inuit Dog as well as related Inuit culture and traditions. It is also home to The Fan Hitch, Journal of the Inuit Sled Dog.
The Fan Hitch welcomes your letters, stories, comments and suggestions. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit submissions used for publication.
Contents of The Fan Hitch are protected by international copyright laws. No photo, drawing or text may be reproduced in any form without written consent. Webmasters please note: written consent is necessary before linking this site to yours! Please forward requests to Sue Hamilton, 55 Town Line Rd., Harwinton, Connecticut 06791, USA or mail@thefanhitch.org.
This site is dedicated to the Inuit Dog as well as related Inuit culture and traditions. It is also home to The Fan Hitch, Journal of the Inuit Sled Dog.
Image shows the Menu screen for the DVD
The Back-story of the Thank You DVD
by Mark Hamilton
This isn’t an opinion piece. This edition of The Fan Hitch is dedicated to John “Umelik” McGrath. My opinion: John is widely missed and he can’t be replaced. Instead I want to tell you the back-story of the thank you DVD that you can receive when you make a donation to honor his memory.
As reported elsewhere in this issue of The Fan Hitch, in 1998 we travelled with John McGrath to Massachusetts where he made a presentation on the Eskimo Dog Recovery Project. It was a memorable experience for a number of reasons, the primary of which was that John was such a memorable person.
We videotaped that presentation. For something over an hour I stood behind the video camera, monitoring the battery level and remaining tape in the cassette while I silently prayed neither would require attention. Thankfully, they didn’t.
Once home and after John and his traveling buddy headed back to Canada we made a copy of that original video tape and then put the original away to preserve it.
Flash forward 15 years to August 2013
Upon learning of his passing, Sue suggested we make a DVD of John’s 1998 presentation for his family and for Bill Carpenter. Oddly enough the original tape was exactly where we put it 15 years ago. Our next surprise was that the 15 year-old tape played exactly the same as it did when we made that copy back in 1998.
We ripped a file from the DVD created during the process of digitizing the analog video cassette to one of our computers, created the file for a DVD and burned some copies. It was sometime after the DVDs were mailed off that the idea of making more DVDs to serve as thank you gifts for contributions made in John’s name to the Ilisaqsivik Society was born.
All the recipients of the DVD enjoyed having it. Bill Carpenter did suggest that a techie-person might be able to improve on the audio track. Sadly, I’m not that person. Even though I likely have the software I’ve never attempted such a thing.
That was when the amazingly talented and helpful-by-nature McGrath family came through for someone else yet again. John’s wife, Judy put us in touch with her granddaughter May-Jun. May-Jun not only touched up the audio on the mp4 file I provide for her, she also separated the audio track from the file and enhanced that as well. About the time I figured out that I should be able to replace the audio track in the mp4 file with that enhanced audio file, May-Jun had created the enhanced composite m4v file and placed it in my Dropbox. What else was there left for me to say except a profound thank you to May-Jun?
Those of you who choose to make donations to the Ilisaqsivik Society with the gift DVD option, your video be a burned from the video file with the enhanced audio track that was the product of the direct involvement of the McGrath family.