10 Tips for Creating a Great Video Montage
To assist in making your presentation the best it can be, we have included 10 tips to follow while preparing your montage.
1. Know Your Audience
Knowing who your intended audience is an obvious, but sometimes overlooked step in the process of developing your montage. For example, if you’re showing your video montage at a reception, you might want to include photos of special friends & relatives that will be attending your event. They will appreciate being a part of the memories.2. Shorter is Sometimes Better
After you’ve determined who your intended audience is, think about how many pictures you’ll want to include in your video montage. You want to be careful not to subject your guests to an extremely long video montage. Some people have elected to develop two video montages - one “personal” video montage that will be given to their parents or kept for themselves, and one “reception” video montage that will be shown during the big event. Jenisys Productions can help you determine the correct length, and pacing of the video montage to keep your audience’s attention.3. Create a Balance
After you have gathered all of the photos you will use, ensure there is balance with the number of photos that you are using for each person. For example if you are making mom’s birthday video and there are 20 pictures of you and only 2 of your sister and none of your brother, someone just might get upset. However if you still want to include all of the pictures for that person, consider doing a picture collage screen (several photos to a page) to reduce the time it takes up in the video.4. Choose Quality Photographs
While recent advances in digital photo restoration have allowed torn and poorly developed photographs to be brought back to life, there is only so much that the software can do. Pictures that look great printed (correct lighting, framing, developed properly) will also look great while scanned. Try to avoid using pictures that are distant and/or out of focus, too many people in the photo, or ones that are extremely dark or grainy.5. Choose a Variety of Photographs
Use of a variety of photographs can keep your audience’s interest. Choose photographs and items that are representative of various events you want to include. Very early black & white photos are fine for the introduction. Try to avoid using similar photographs - for example, two different poses or angles of the same subject. Also try to get a good variety of photos and poses, not ones that are always posed for the camera looking straight into it. Funny shots such as a food fight, making funny faces, doing silly things, and special awards and events also make for an interesting video. And don’t forget about the family pets.6. Landscape pictures show better than Portrait pictures
Given the standard 4:3 dimensions of television monitors, photographs that are in landscape mode (horizontal) as opposed to portrait mode (vertical) show better on the TV screen. While portrait photographs certainly can be used, you should be aware that there will be a black border that appears around the photograph when showing the entire photo as-is. It’s best to use these sparingly throughout the video montage and not clump them all together.7. Group Shots
If you are using group shots in your video montage, indicate who the main subject is in the photo so that we can focus on that person.8. Give some thought to music
Music is essential in setting the tone for the video. Choose music that has meaning to you, music whose lyrics go well with the pictures. Also pay attention to the length of the music you are selecting. If you're only showing 30 pictures in a section, you might not want to choose an 8 minute song – or if so, decide which portion of the song you’d like to use.9. Add short video clips
Do you have any home videos sitting around gathering dust? Think about adding perhaps 10-15 second video clips in the montage. They are a great way to keep the montage lively and hold your audience’s interest.10. Test! Test! Test!
If you’re planning on showing your video montage at an event like a family reunion, setup and test ALL the equipment prior to the big day. Make sure the projector or television, DVD Player or Laptop, and sound are all working. Also make sure you know ahead of time how to control/change the screen size, volume, remote, etc.
