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| Vic, narrating a fashion show, 1992 |
About Victor Dino
My favourite saying is "Life is what you make it".I love classic movies. My favourite movie is "From Here to Eternity". It's also one of my favourite books.Other favourite movies are "Casablanca" and "Body and Soul".
Other favourite books are "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (Hemingway) and "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (Shirer).
Indomitable spirit is that part of a person which makes them unique, that part of a person which provides hope, strength and courage to get up and face each day with a smile. Indomitable spirit is perseverance on a long term basis.
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| Vic's workstation, 2018 |
About This Project
This web project came about for a number of reasons:
First and foremost, Vic wanted to tell his story, and in particular, he wanted to tell the story of the life and career of a fashion producer.
Vic seemed to initially have little interest in saying much about himself personally or about the unique challenges posed by his cerebral palsy and partial paralysis. In his eyes, those parts of his story didn't interest him much.
Secondly, he had found it challenging to tell his story in book form. He'd mentioned his hero Frank Sinatra numerous times to me over the years, and it seems that Sinatra's autobiography was a major influence on Vic's decision to write his own. Frank was always one of Vic's heroes.
In December of 2014, I learned of Vic's life story project when I watched him narrate and suggest edits to a contract writer over the telephone, while he was still stuck in his hospital bed in Burnaby General Hospital healing from his burst appendix. I couldn't believe that he'd been working that way on and off for years, but I admired his tenacity. Once we understood that he was doing it on a pay-for-work basis with no contract in place with the publisher, I convinced Vic that I would help him to tell his story, but that it would be better to put the publisher and book project off to the side until he was stronger and out of danger. Practically, I felt that he couldn't afford the commitment of time or money until after he was more healed.
I began wondering how inexpensive enabling apps might help him to express himself. I introduced him to a few speech-to-text apps, and we used his smartphone to recite an email message to one of his favourite actresses. Soon, we bought him an inexpensive tablet and started showing him how he might tell his story as a website instead of a book - something he could do for free, on his own time, and with less reliance on others, which really seemed to suit him.
In the short-term, I wanted Vic to have a writing project that he had more control over, and that he could look forward to working on if he was ever stuck at home convalescing. I also saw the project as as a chance to help Vic come up to speed with the Internet and with connecting to others online.
Initially, we worked from Vic's typewritten manuscripts, but after a dozen or so chapters, it became very apparent that transcribing was slow and frustrating work and might take us forever. It also became apparent how much Victor enjoyed reciting his stories as if he had a live audience. He'd had a microphone in his hand throughout his career, narrating as his fashion models walked the runway at a show, and ever since he was a kid, he'd loved narrating the play-by-play of hockey games on TV in his father's living-room. Narration seemed to be his natural strength, so it made the most sense to just record Vic's stories as audio files and post them into the pages on his website.
This also made production much faster, made the process more direct and more enjoyable for Vic, and made each story more interesting and personal for the audience. It also validated the whole online idea: audio is something that a paper book cannot do.
Oral storytelling seemed to be Vic's natural medium. He loved recording stories for his website, and he learned how to do them himself, often recording a new one during the day and then reviewing it with me when I visited in the evening.
As the chapters progressed, his narrative evolved away from a focus on his fashion career, and more into the personal relationships he had built through the years, his loves and losses, and his growing health burdens. We tried to be respectful of others, changing names of people when Vic could not get their permission to be added to his story. With those aspects of privacy respected, Vic did not need my encouragement to be honest and emotive. He never shied away from recounting his own sometimes painful memories, and wanted to render with fidelity and emotion. He'd often ask me if I'd thought that he'd done a good recording. once in a while, we'd re-do a sequence if there was some technical issue, or if he lost his way while telling a story, but these were rare occurrences. Most of the time, he knew exactly he wanted to say and he said it with earnestness and conviction. Vic totally owned his stories.
Vic's words leave us all with a very direct portrait of the man himself, delivered in his own words and unfiltered by another artist's perception.
Ultimately, Vic succeeded in telling his story, his way.
First and foremost, Vic wanted to tell his story, and in particular, he wanted to tell the story of the life and career of a fashion producer.
Vic seemed to initially have little interest in saying much about himself personally or about the unique challenges posed by his cerebral palsy and partial paralysis. In his eyes, those parts of his story didn't interest him much.
Secondly, he had found it challenging to tell his story in book form. He'd mentioned his hero Frank Sinatra numerous times to me over the years, and it seems that Sinatra's autobiography was a major influence on Vic's decision to write his own. Frank was always one of Vic's heroes.
In December of 2014, I learned of Vic's life story project when I watched him narrate and suggest edits to a contract writer over the telephone, while he was still stuck in his hospital bed in Burnaby General Hospital healing from his burst appendix. I couldn't believe that he'd been working that way on and off for years, but I admired his tenacity. Once we understood that he was doing it on a pay-for-work basis with no contract in place with the publisher, I convinced Vic that I would help him to tell his story, but that it would be better to put the publisher and book project off to the side until he was stronger and out of danger. Practically, I felt that he couldn't afford the commitment of time or money until after he was more healed.
I began wondering how inexpensive enabling apps might help him to express himself. I introduced him to a few speech-to-text apps, and we used his smartphone to recite an email message to one of his favourite actresses. Soon, we bought him an inexpensive tablet and started showing him how he might tell his story as a website instead of a book - something he could do for free, on his own time, and with less reliance on others, which really seemed to suit him.
In the short-term, I wanted Vic to have a writing project that he had more control over, and that he could look forward to working on if he was ever stuck at home convalescing. I also saw the project as as a chance to help Vic come up to speed with the Internet and with connecting to others online.
Initially, we worked from Vic's typewritten manuscripts, but after a dozen or so chapters, it became very apparent that transcribing was slow and frustrating work and might take us forever. It also became apparent how much Victor enjoyed reciting his stories as if he had a live audience. He'd had a microphone in his hand throughout his career, narrating as his fashion models walked the runway at a show, and ever since he was a kid, he'd loved narrating the play-by-play of hockey games on TV in his father's living-room. Narration seemed to be his natural strength, so it made the most sense to just record Vic's stories as audio files and post them into the pages on his website.
This also made production much faster, made the process more direct and more enjoyable for Vic, and made each story more interesting and personal for the audience. It also validated the whole online idea: audio is something that a paper book cannot do.
Oral storytelling seemed to be Vic's natural medium. He loved recording stories for his website, and he learned how to do them himself, often recording a new one during the day and then reviewing it with me when I visited in the evening.
As the chapters progressed, his narrative evolved away from a focus on his fashion career, and more into the personal relationships he had built through the years, his loves and losses, and his growing health burdens. We tried to be respectful of others, changing names of people when Vic could not get their permission to be added to his story. With those aspects of privacy respected, Vic did not need my encouragement to be honest and emotive. He never shied away from recounting his own sometimes painful memories, and wanted to render with fidelity and emotion. He'd often ask me if I'd thought that he'd done a good recording. once in a while, we'd re-do a sequence if there was some technical issue, or if he lost his way while telling a story, but these were rare occurrences. Most of the time, he knew exactly he wanted to say and he said it with earnestness and conviction. Vic totally owned his stories.
Vic's words leave us all with a very direct portrait of the man himself, delivered in his own words and unfiltered by another artist's perception.
Ultimately, Vic succeeded in telling his story, his way.
