Krazy Kitty: Wallwork Family Photos

My Dad recently had a really strong desire to assemble a slideshow for his father. As my Dad is blind, the fulfillment of this desire was placed on the shoulders of my sister and I. At first we complained a little, saying there were other things we would rather be doing, but it became kind of fun in the end. There were many steps to be taken to get this project off the ground.

Step One: Gathering Photos
We knew that our Grandpa had been scanning the old photo albums and storing the photos on his home computer. In order to gain access to these, Kristi and I geared up in our very best ninja costumes and waited for the dead of night. We scaled the side of our grandparent's home and dropped in to their computer room from the ceiling. We had underestimated the security of their home and Kristi almost lost an arm to a laser beam. Luckily, I was able to disarm the lasers pretty easily. (Never buy your laser beam security system from WalMart!) After that, it was a simple hack into their mainframe to gain access to the precious pictures. We made our quick escape back up through the ceiling and drove back to home base.

Step Two: Inserting Photos into Slideshow
There was a MASSIVE amount of photos! Some so old and yellowed that we couldn't even tell who was in the photo. I was given the task of putting the pictures into the slideshow and going through and getting rid of the photos that were duplicates or too difficult to see. This was a daunting task as there were over 1700 photos! Me, being the supremely lazy person that I am, or as I like to call it, "efficient," just clicked through the photos quickly checking for duplicates. Surprisingly, my foolproof method missed a few of copycats. Looks like I will have to go back and do battle with the duplicates once more!

Step Three: Picking the Soundtrack
I didn't have much to do with portion. (Thank goodness!) I merely showed Kristi how to work the program and let her loose! Usually I would love to be the one choosing the songs but with that many pictures the slideshow came out to be almost 2 hours!! That requires quite a few songs! No way I could handle that pressure, especially with my Dad breathing down my neck. (The breath is one thing but his impatience is another!) Kudos to Kristi for pulling it off... or almost. She came so close but miscalculated the length of the presentation and the music cut off about a minute before the end. OOPS!

Step Four: Burning to a DVD
I first had to render the slideshow file to an .avi file. This was extremely simple and just done with the click of a button. Unfortunately it took forever for the slideshow to render. Then I simply brought the .avi file to my Mom and she cast some magic spells over it and BOOM! we had a DVD version of the slideshow!

Step Five: Presenting the Slideshow
We were all exchanging gifts at my aunt Amy's house. My Dad kept saying, "Where is Grandpa?" "Is he in the room?" Like I said earlier, my Dad is blind, so he was unable to see that his father was just a couple chairs away from him. He had my uncle Dave put the DVD in the projector and the familiar slideshow began to play. Everyone loved it! It was so fun learning more about my family's past through the old photos. We mentioned in the beginning that the slideshow was almost 2 hours long and that everyone may not want to watch the whole thing... but we did.

Step Six: Further Editing
Everyone wants a copy of the slideshow! Before we burn more copies though, I think I will go through and remove the duplicate slides. That should also solve the music issue!

This was a great project and it came at the right time of year, when all the family is together and we can all enjoy it. It has helped me feel closer to my family and brought back many fond memories. Below are some of the pictures found in the slideshow!