Choosing photos for a memorial film

A memorial film, sometimes called a photo tribute or slideshow, is the part of a service where people stop listening and start looking. It is often what guests talk about afterwards at the wake. It is also the job that lands on one person, with a shoebox of prints, four phones full of pictures and three days to go. This guide is for that person.

Start with the length, not the photos

Before you open a single album, find out how long the film can be. Ask the funeral director or celebrant how much time is set aside for it. In most services it runs for one piece of music, sometimes two.

Then work backwards. Each photograph needs to be on screen long enough for people to find the face and take it in, which is usually five to seven seconds. So:

• One song of about three and a half minutes holds roughly thirty to forty photographs.
• Two songs hold roughly 60 to 80.

That number will feel far too small. It is the right size. A film that runs long loses the room, and a photograph shown for two seconds might as well not be there. There is more on timing music in the guide to planning music for a funeral service.

Gathering from everyone

The best photographs are rarely in one house. They are on a cousin’s phone, in a workmate’s desk, in an album at the bowls club.

• Ask early and set a deadline. A message such as “We are putting together photos of Dad for Friday. Could you send your favourite three or four by Tuesday night?” works better than an open request.
• Ask for a small number. If you ask for “any photos”, you will get two hundred from one person and none from the rest.
• Give people one place to send them. Photos scattered across text messages, email and social media are slow to collect and often arrive shrunk. A shared folder or a single upload link is easier for everyone.
• Ask for the original file. Screenshots and pictures saved from social media are much lower in quality and can look soft on a large screen.
• Ask across the whole life. Tell people you are short on particular years. “Does anyone have anything from the Kalgoorlie days?” gets results.

Old prints, slides and albums

You do not need a scanner, though a flatbed scanner gives the best result if someone in the family has one. A phone will do, if you take some care:

• Take the print out of the frame or plastic sleeve if you safely can. Glass and plastic reflect.
• Lay it flat near a window in daylight, out of direct sun. Turn off the flash.
• Hold the phone square above it, not at an angle, and fill the frame.
• Check for your own shadow and for glare before you move on.
• If a photo is stuck to an album page, leave it there and photograph the page. Old albums tear prints.

Write down, or say into a voice memo, who is in each old photograph while someone who knows is still in the room. That information is easily lost.

How to choose

Lay everything out, on a table or in one folder, and go through it in three passes.

First pass: remove

Take out anything that is badly blurred, too dark to read, or where the person is hard to find. Take out near duplicates and keep the best one.

Second pass: cover the life

Check you have something from each stage. A rough list:

• Childhood and family of origin
• Young adulthood, work, service or study
• Partner and wedding, if there was one
• Children and the busy middle years
• Friends, clubs, teams, the things they did for fun
• Places that mattered: the house, the farm, the beach, the shed
• Grandchildren and later life
• A recent photograph that looks the way people remember them

Third pass: choose for character

Now look for the pictures that show who they were, not only what happened. The formal portraits are useful, but the ones that get a reaction are usually unposed: laughing with a mouth full of cake, asleep in a chair with the dog, bent over an engine.

Some things to weigh up:

• Close beats wide. A face that fills the frame reads from the back of the chapel. A group of forty at a reunion does not.
• Mix the company. Include photos of them alone, with their partner, with each branch of the family and with friends.
• Be fair. People notice who is missing. Try to have every child and grandchild appear at least once, and roughly evenly.
• Include what they loved. A photograph of the garden, the boat or the dog without the person in it can be a welcome pause.
• Think before using hospital photos. Pictures from the last weeks can be precious to close family and confronting to everyone else. Most families leave them out of the film and keep them privately.
• Check with anyone who might mind. A former partner, or someone caught in an unflattering moment, may not want to be on a screen in front of a full room.

Putting them in order

Chronological order is the easiest to follow and the most forgiving. Start with the baby photo, end near the present.

If you want a little more shape:

1. Open with one strong, recent, recognisable portrait, so everyone knows whose story this is.
2. Go back to the beginning and move forward through the years.
3. Group a few photographs by theme where it suits, such as three fishing photos together.
4. Slow down towards the end.
5. Finish on a picture that feels like them at their best. Many families end with the person smiling, or walking away down a beach or a paddock.

Avoid putting the saddest photograph last. People will carry the final image out of the room.

Technical things worth checking

• Shape. Screens are wide. Upright phone photos will show with blank space at each side, which is fine. Do not stretch them to fit.
• Cropping. Make sure nobody’s head is cut off when a tall photo is trimmed to a wide frame.
• Motion. A slow, gentle movement across each photo is enough. Spinning and flipping effects pull attention away from the face.
• Captions. Use few, and keep them to names, places and years. Set them large.
• Video clips. One or two short clips with their voice or laugh can be the most affecting part. Keep each to a few seconds and check the sound level.
• File and playback. Ask the venue what they need: usually a common video file on a USB stick, sometimes a link. Take two copies.
• Test it in the room. If you can, play it on the actual screen beforehand. Colours, sound and the edges of the picture all behave differently on a chapel system.

If the film will be shared online afterwards, be aware that commercial music under a film can need permission that a venue’s licence does not cover. Ask your funeral director.

When you cannot agree

Families argue about photographs because the photographs matter. It helps to name one person to make the final call, to agree on the number before choosing, and to remember that the film is not the only place for pictures. A photo board at the wake or a memorial page can hold everything that did not fit.

If collecting pictures from a wide family is the hard part, Tribute Studios lets guests add photographs through one link and prepares the film from the ones you choose. You can see how it works.