Family Picture Project

View Pictures / View Video

My Grandmother on my mother’s side of the family has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years and has been getting worse over time. For Christmas this year, my aunt decided to create a video montage of old family photographs honoring my Grandmother and give this to my relatives as a present. She asked me to create this video for her, and I accepted the challenge, figuring it would be an interesting exercise and it would be enjoyable to look at all the old pictures of my family.

I scanned some four hundred odd photographs using a Canoscan LiDE 70 that I borrowed from the school I worked with. These originals were saved as TIFFs and backed up to DVD. I then used Photoshop to touch up the photographs. The retouching ranged from simple color correction to almost repainting entire pictures. Because of the tight time frame with which I was working (and final exams), I didn’t have time to fully restore each photo (and many of them weren’t worth a full retouch). However, all the photos were restored to a viewable level. I then used Premiere to create a “movie” from the pictures, which allowed me to create path-based motions in the pictures, as well as full control over all transitions. I ran out of time and was not able to add motion to every picture, but the ones that do have motion worked very well. The finished video was output to DVD and Flash using Encore, and can now be viewed online (the film may stutter, this is due to connection speed - I think that I exported the film at too high quality for internet download). Downsized copies of the originals and modified photographs are also available online!