By Andrea Blau, Rewind Pictures
Creating a photo montage or tribute film for your child’s Bar/Bat Mitzvah is very much a collaborative process between you and the production company. You guard the gold treasure: your child’s photos and home video!
In order for any production company to make a personal, creative and unique photo montage, they rely on you to provide your best of the best materials, those that exemplify your child’s personality, memories and adventures along their journey to their Bar/Bat Mitzvah day.
Here are my 10 tips for creating a creative, personal and unique photo/home video montage:
1. Submit 100-150 photos to your producer for a 5-8 minute montage. Choose a handful of photos from each stage of your child’s life: baby, toddler, early childhood, grade school and recent.
2. If you have recorded your child on home video throughout the years, this is a great opportunity to use some of it! Chances are the format in which you recorded (VHS, DV) is difficult to watch at home. Your production company can transfer your old home video to DVD for easy screening and can use portions of it in your montage. There is nothing like home video to spice up a montage! One of the best parts of using home video is one you have it all organized by chapters on DVD, it is preserved forever and easy to watch at any time.
3. Make sure to choose photos that express your child’s personality. For example, if he/she likes to ride horses make sure to include photos on a horse or if he/she likes to laugh a lot, choose photos that seem to represent this personality trait.
4. Of course, your child is the central focus, but it is also nice to include photos of your child with the special people in his/her life. This is a great way to pay tribute to those that have impacted your child on their journey to Bar/Bat Mitzvah day.
5. If you are pulling photos from a family album, make sure to mark the place where you took the photo out. It will make it much easier when you need to return the photos to their original places!
6. On the back of each photo, write a brief description of the photo and an approximate date the photo was taken.
7. Once you have gathered all of the photos you would like to use, sort them chronologically or according to theme. Possible themes could include sports, family life, the “jokester,” or the “Broadway star.”
8. You can choose to scan your photo selections yourself or hand them over to the professionals to digitally archive them for you. Either way, the photos need to be a high resolution (above 1MB) and touched up for visible scratches, red eye, etc. At the end of the process, you will have a beautiful archive on DVD of your son/daughter’s photos throughout the years digitally archived and safe for years to come in addition to your montage or tribute film.
9. Although the photos of your child in the bathtub nude is cute to you, your son/daughter might not appreciate these types of photos in a montage or film premiering at an event in front of everyone they know! Please use caution and consider your child when choosing the photos.
10. Make this a fun activity! Involve your child and the whole family in choosing the materials for your montage or film. The process of digitizing these materials will not only serve in creating a beautiful film or montage, but also provide you with a digital archive for years to come. Consider it a 2 in 1 deal!
Rewind Pictures produces high quality films, tailor made to your own unique style and story that can be shared at special events and kept as modern day heirlooms.
Click here to see samples of their work.
