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PART III SHARING YOUR WORK
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of expectation. Audiences for personal media expect short pieces. Third, the longer the piece, the more variety required between sequences ranging from thirty seconds to three minutes. Viewers need variety or they zonk out. Thus a longer slide show or video needs contrasting segments: voice-driven information dumps, lyrical pieces cut to sound, a first-person account, countering points, montages to set place, montages that establish time frame.
At some point you will want to try “long form”—anything over twenty-two minutes (the default running time in a TV half-hour format). But first get really good at the structure of shorts before taking on the structure of pieces longer than five minutes.
Step 4. Duplicate via DVD. Make copies for all of your family members. A single DVD can contain the full archive and a slide show too. The no-bells-and-whistles approach to mak- ing copies is to insert a blank DVD into your computer and
The frame above shows the interactive interface of iDVD. Carolina divided the stills she had scanned into short slide shows and edited them to show her at different ages, plus shots of Argentina. The video is the final item in the list. Note that iDVD can hold ninety-eight hundred images in one or more slide shows.
hit the Burn Disk button. But here is a second approach: the interactive–let’s-celebrate-this-family one. To create an inter- active and professional-looking digital album, Carolina used Apple’s iDVD software. This lets you add movies and create slides shows directly in the program. With a Mac you can use iPhoto to assemble images and then import them directly into iDVD. Chapter 6 has information on making DVDs on PCs.
GALLERY
Step 5. Share. The last step is to package your new family photo archive in an attractive way. If you simply grab a marker and scribble something on the DVD surface, this project you’ve completed will quickly get lost. In Chapter 6 you can see how Carolina made a label for her DVD and set it in a slick jewel case. Grateful relatives can now add your archive to their DVD collection.
Carolina’s movie—a montage of mother and daughter—is one hour and forty-five minutes long. There is a well- matched music track. The transitions are fade-outs and fade-ins, and there is some in-frame movement to smooth out the flow. A QuickTime version of the piece can be seen at the Mediapedia companion site, mediapedia.net.
When you archive old photos, you can do lots
more than simply repair and copy them. Carolina combined color correction with the elimination of the unknown male figure (top left and right). This fo- cused the image on mother and young Carolina. In the second set, Carolina emphasized the subjects by taking color out of the surrounding background (bottom left). The movie Carolina made for her mother is completely black and white (bottom right), which creates intimacy and the ambience of a bygone era.
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CHAPTER 7: PROJECT IDEAS [ 247 ]