2018
Your
Celebration
DESTINATION
continued from page 14
part. Start early. You’ll have a very
good head start in this process if
you already have your digital photo
collection organized into albums or
folders on your computer.
For my eldest child’s bar mitzvah,
I had more than 100,000 photos
to choose from. It seemed like an
insurmountable task to narrow that
down to 100-150 photos, but my
strategy worked. I already had the
photos organized into categories
and arranged by month and year. If
I thought a photo qualified for the
montage I copied and pasted it into
a new folder called “Montage.” I then
began to delete photos from that
folder if I felt they were redundant
or didn’t make the final cut.
It’s important to have a good vari-
ety. You want to tell a story with the
montage, showing how your teen
has grown from birth to this big
day. While every experience — from
first steps and potty training to little
league and braces — is important to
your immediate family, remember
that the audience is going to get
restless (and hungry).
If the saying that a picture tells
a thousand words is true, then you
don’t need an abundance of pho-
tos to tell your child’s story. Your
friends and family are also going to
be watching to see if there’s a photo
of them. Therefore, it was a priority
of mine to try to find a photo with
every family member (even the sec-
ond cousin you don’t see very often)
and as many friends as possible. In
the year leading up to the mitzvah,
try to take many group photos of
your teen with their friends.
FRANKLIN ATHLETIC CLUB
EDITING
Our Bar Mitzvah was executed
professionally and with the
utmost attention to detail.
Everybody had a blast!
Which software is best to create a
montage? There are lot of options
out there, and it comes down to
what you’re comfortable using. I
made my son’s bar mitzvah montage
using Corel VideoStudio, but other
popular applications include iMovie,
Adobe Premier Pro, Pinnacle Studio
and Final Cut Pro. The free Windows
Movie Maker (which used to come
with all versions of Windows but has
been discontinued) is a quick and
easy way to produce a montage.
When editing, remember that
it’s not only about the transitions
between photos. The pan and zoom
feature is important to use, espe-
cially in photos with many people.
You’ll want to pan across the photo
and zoom in on faces, otherwise
your guests sitting far from the
- The Weinsteins, Farmington Hills
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contact Crystal at (248) 352-8000, ext. 298
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celebrate! • 2018
jn
screen won’t be able to see who is in
the photo.
Have a roadmap in place before
editing the montage. Most montages
begin with baby photos to show the
journey from babyhood to child-
hood and then to the pre-teen years.
Grouping your photos into themes
will also be helpful in telling the
story ( family, friends, vacations,
sports, camp, school, etc.). Some
montages group several photos into
the same screen, but I’m not a fan
of this because there are too many
photos to focus on and the audience
will give up.
Displaying each photo for 4 sec-
onds is enough time (remember,
150 photos at four seconds each
will come out to 10 minutes exact-
ly). You can either randomize the
transition effects or stick with one
transition. I chose to randomize the
effects, but I kept it to only a hand-
ful. Otherwise, it will distract atten-
tion from your photos.
MUSIC
The choice of songs can help tell the
story of the montage. Let your teen
be part of the process and recom-
mend some of his or her favorite
songs or artists. You want to pay
attention to the lyrics of the songs
to be sure they’re appropriate. Some
songs are used in most montages, so
choose whether you want to go with
the standards or be more creative.
If you want to include some
videos in the montage, keep them
short and sweet. A 10-second clip is
enough. Also, consider saving the
videos for the end when you can
fade out the music. Ultimately, you
want to remember that while this
montage is very special to you, many
of your guests are eager to get to the
party section of the event. Don’t hold
them captive watching your family
memories. Rather, set the tone for
the celebration showing how proud
your family is of your teen and how
their life has been shared with so
many friends and family members.
Finally, be sure to test the mon-
tage ahead of time at the venue to
ensure the video and audio quality is
to your liking. After all the time you
spent producing the montage, you
don’t want to endure any technical
malfunctions. •
Rabbi Jason Miller is a local entrepreneur, edu-
cator and blogger. He is president of Access
Technology in West Bloomfield. Follow him on
Twitter at @RabbiJason.