anyone making memorial montages?

williamconifer wrote on 8/28/2003, 1:36 PM
Greetings.

I use Vegas 4 to make video montages for my customers. I was wondering if any of you have had experiance making funeral/memorial montages that would be shown at a wake or funerial home.

Questions I have: 1) how long is long enough for such a video? ie. how many photos to use. 2) What kind of music fits best? obvioiusly you want to avoid it becoming too much of a "downer" 3) What kind of title pages do you use? "In Memorium" is an obvious one but what else is considered tasteful? 4) What kind of turn around time is expected? Obviously collecting the photos is time consuming.

Thanks
jack

Comments

jetdv wrote on 8/28/2003, 1:56 PM
We do this for one funeral home. I reality, it is a pain because of the time constraint (pick up the pics one afternoon and deliver the next morning - hope you didn't have anything planned that evening) Pure working turnaround time is in the neighborhood of 5 hours for us. (Scan, build program, render, place on timeline multiple times, print to tape, properly label and box - we give a printed box with the person's picture on it)

We limit it to 30 pictures. Initially we were using 10 seconds. They complained that was too FAST. We did the next several at 13 and they STILL complained it was too fast. We did the last one at 18.

One thing we do is add movement to each picture. after upping it to 18 seconds, the movement stops before the time is up allowing a lingering look at the photo.

For the music, pick something upbeat but subdued. It's a tough combination. We found one the funeral home liked and use it on ALL of them.

We have an opening title that is simply the persons name and birth and death years.

John Smith

1923 - 2003

We end the video with the funeral home's name. The final video is about 8 minutes long. We then duplicate this on the timeline (after rendering) until we exceed 1 hour. This is the tape the funeral home uses to play at the visitation. Each hour the tape must be rewound and restarted.

If additional copies are requested by the family, they get the 8 minute version.
DataMeister wrote on 8/28/2003, 2:05 PM
I've only done one of these types of videos. And it included video and still photos. The video was just recent home video in different situations. The still photos were basicly from birth to before death with about 30 or so between.

As far as the music was concerned, the family said that the guy had one favorite song which stuck out to them as his favorite so I used portions of that song at the begining during the video segments. For the photos I had one of the music ministers at my church play and sing a song which seemed appropriate.

I wasn't able to obtain copyright permission for this project before it was presented because the music companies are slow in this reguard and I only had about 2 days to complete it. About three weeks later they gave me the ok to make up to five copies without charge. This was fine since the family members were the only ones that wanted a copy.

However a couple of months later people started coming up and asking if they could get copies of that video from the guys wedding. I decided it would be better to turn them down rather than try and go through the copyright procedure again.

The title I used for this project was two separate lines of text moving toward the screen and blurring out as they approched. They simply said...

Guys name

A Tribute


It was definitley a hectic project with the total length ending up 11:45 minutes/seconds. I think that length was ok because of the amount of video, but if it were just still photos, I would try and keep it around five minutes or less depening on the song. Photos montages in general usually last between 4 and 8 seconds per photo without becoming boring and that will depend on the speed of the music also. If it's slow music and lots of detail you can draw things out longer.

The post before mine says they use 18 seconds per photo. In the project I created it was for showing during the actual funeral service where everyones attention was focused on the screen. 18 seconds would have been too long. However, I can see that if it was a background type of video in the visitation period you would definitely need a longer time frame to allow people to be distracted and then refocus on the video.

Basicly you would treat this kind of project that same way you would any other project by first determining what kind of emotion you want to inspire in the viewer. Then from there you decide how to best acomplish that goal. The client usually has some idea what they want. You just have to generalize it in your comunications with them in order to get it out of them.

JBJones
williamconifer wrote on 8/28/2003, 2:26 PM
Thanks for the info. What you described was pretty much what I expected. Can I ask roughly what you charge the funeral home for this?

Do you put your production company name on the video or packaging at all? Or is it totally branded for the funeral home?

I'm thinking of only building/selling DVD's since the DVD player will take care of repeating the video. I also want to sell dupes either at the service or use my web store to sell dupes to relatives who couldn't make it to the service. As far as I can tell the dupes are where you really make the money.

Thanks again for all your valuable contributions.
jack
johnmeyer wrote on 8/28/2003, 2:29 PM
I just did a similar project, but for a wedding. You can view it here (if you have Real Player):

Wedding Tribute

Scanning the photos and transferring the film (using my Workprinter) took lots of time. The production itself wasn't hard, although if I did a lot of this, I'd invest in Excalibur to speed some of the repetitive tasks.

As for music, what is "appropriate" is going to depend a lot on the client. My dad (who is 83) says that when he goes, he wants everyone to sit around drinking martinis and listening to Glenn Miller. I would suggest avoiding Chopin's Sonata number two in B-flat minor third movement (the one they played as Kennedy's body rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue for the last time).

As usual, jetdv has it right. Follow his advice.
jetdv wrote on 8/28/2003, 11:30 PM
We put our company name on the packaging. Our normal charge is $100 per video + $20 per additional copy. We give a slight discount to the funeral home from these prices.