My family Tribute videos-- individual biographies, commemorations, celebrations, memorials-- began when I was 19 years old. My father was turning 50 and there was to be a surprise party. I decided to create a slide show. I know, I said "videos" and we'll get there.
In 1969, video was simply inaccessible to the average human being except for what came on your television screen from ABC, CBS or NBC. And film? the cost was simply out of sight. So slide show it was, but done in a way that would mimic film and video.
How do still images mimic film or video? Well, the trick starts not with the pictures but with the sound. A slide show can be many things-- pictures accompanying a speech, an endless loop of images with a song played endlessly behind them, or something more. (By the way, this holds true for today's PowerPoint type presentations as well. Not all media represent progress.)
The technological leap was to insure that the pictures were always synced exactly to the soundtrack. This meant a "sync box"-- a simple gadget that was used with the tape recorder hosting your soundtrack to create and play back beep tones that indicated when a slide should change. This beep tone was silent and sent a signal to the Kodak Carousel projector to advance to the next slide. It was rudimentary, but it worked.
A slide tray holds eighty slides, so I knew the maximum pictures I could use (I probably ended up with about 50-- too few, by my current standards. And without any means to manipulate the pictures, what I was left with was pretty much a chronological history of my father's life to date.
But I did have sound. A stereo reel-to-reel tape recorder and a splicing block. I could string songs and effects together, change the tempo, splice in old family recordings (brief moments), and generally provide all the life the slides alone could not provide.
The results were a focused, group experience (just like going to the movies), a teary-eyed audience, an appreciative father (and his mother, and the rest of his family), and a bee in my bonnet. Could this be the start of something bigger? Applause will have that effect on you.
The next year in school, I partnered up with various photographers to shoot pictures on campus, the end result of which would be a school banquet "year-in-review" slide show. We had two added weapons this time. We used two slide projectors couple together by a "dissolver" which let pictures fade into each other, one after the other, adding to the perception that what the audience was seeing was a "film". And because we were shooting our own stuff, we starting shooting stills in the language of film-- sequential zooms, and long shots, close-ups, cutaways-- the basics of telling a "movie story."
Two years later, one of those photographers and I started a business- straight out of college. We expanded our audience into documentaries and corporate stories, and did quite well- still using slides-- until video finally became affordable for production some ten years later.
And we weren't the only ones-- hundreds of companies popped up across the country doing the same thing. Be we had our special weapons-- the language of film, cinema-like soundtracks, and strong documentary and scriptwriting techniques.
Today, you can still tell great stories through the use of stills, mixing in video whenever you'd like. Using PowerPoint, a video editing program, a slide show program, or even some available on line resources, you can do the same thing we did-- but with better tools and less expense.
Heck, these days you don;t even need slide film!
Brien Lee is President and Creative Director of Brien Lee Videostory, Inc., a New Jersey based communications and video production consultancy. An award winning writer-director, Brien has produced sales meetings, videos, web video, direct mail CD's and DVD's, and specialized in the creation of video-based websites that sell and inform his customers audiences. He has been in the communications business for more than 30 years, and has worked with companies like Walgreens, AT&T, Johnson Controls, Mercury marine, the Diocese of Metuchen, New Jersey, and others. He offers training and consultation to corporate and individual producers and communicators. His website can be found at http://www.brienlee.com/
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