From Photos to a Video

Recently my friend celebrated her 60th birthday. As part of her celebration we put together a short video of highlights, from the last 60 years, to share with her guests during the party. This involved searching through tons of images to select the right combination, arranging them in a meaningful order, and selecting the music. Karsen didn’t want to show her photos in a chronological order. We looked at different possibilities like; similar expressions, relationships over time, moods via nature scenes, travel, work, and pets.

Before starting on the video I cleaned up some of the photos. Photoshop has made the process much easier with new tools like the ‘content aware fill’ option. Here is one example of a before and after. I removed a red line across the image, that was from the camera, as well as reduced the visible dust from the initial scan.

We used iMovie to put everything together. The final movie was about 120 images, 250 MB, and ran just over 10 minutes. At the party we set up a movie screen and used a digital video projector connected to a laptop. Karsen is the founder and director of Arts for Humanity!, in Santa Barbara, a non-profit organization I got involved with about 10 years ago.

Here is the final video (without the sound and smaller size for web)