Planning
The Tailor Chapters team
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When a service is a few days away, the slideshow is rarely held up by the editing. It is held up by the photographs. They are on someone’s phone, in a box in a loft, in an album nobody has opened since a house move. This is how to gather them quickly, and what to do with the ones that only exist on paper.
Ask three people, not everyone
The instinct is to message the whole family at once. It works less well than it sounds. A group of twenty produces a flood of duplicates and a handful of people who assume someone else has it covered.
Ask three or four relatives directly instead, and pick them for the parts of the life you cannot cover yourself. A sibling has the childhood. A colleague has the working years. A grandchild has the last decade in far better quality than anyone else.
Give each of them the same short brief: five to ten photographs, the ones they would keep if they could only keep a few. A small number asked of the right person beats an open call to a large group.
Ask for the years you are missing
Lay out what you already have by decade before you ask for anything. Gaps become obvious immediately, and they are almost always at the start.
Photographs from before your own memory of the person are the ones the room has never seen. They are also the ones that carry a service, because they show someone the mourners only ever knew later in life. A parent at twenty is a different person to the one being buried, and that gap is exactly what makes the film work.
Photographs that only exist on paper
A great many of the best pictures are prints. Scanning them properly takes equipment and time you do not have this week. Photographing them does not.
Lay the print flat on a table near a window, in daylight, away from direct sun. Hold the phone parallel to the print rather than at an angle, and step back slightly so your own shadow falls outside the frame. Turn the flash off. It reflects off the print surface and blows out the middle of the image.
At the size a screen or a projector shows, a phone photograph of a print is indistinguishable from a scan. It is worth being told plainly, because a lot of families lose an afternoon to a scanner that was never necessary.
Prints behind glass are the exception. Take them out of the frame if you safely can, since glass will reflect the room back at you no matter where you stand.
What to do with the difficult ones
Two categories cause hesitation, and they deserve a decision rather than a delay.
Photographs from the illness. Families often feel they should be included for honesty, then find the room does not want them. A useful test: would the person have chosen this picture of themselves? If not, it does not belong in a film about their life.
Photographs with a person nobody wants to see. Estrangements do not disappear because someone died. If a photograph will change the temperature of the room, leave it out. The slideshow is not the place to settle it.
Sorting, once you have them
Put everything into decades first. Not into good and bad, and not into favourites. Decades.
Sorting by quality first is where afternoons disappear, because every photograph invites a conversation. Sorting by decade is mechanical, it can be done quickly, and it shows you at a glance where you are thin. Once the decades are stacked, keeping the strongest few from each is a much smaller decision.
You will need somewhere between 45 and 75 photographs for a slideshow that runs inside a service. Our page on funeral slideshows sets out how the count follows from the length of the song.
Short videos count too
Most families think in photographs and forget that the last ten years of a life are half filmed. A few seconds of someone talking, laughing, or walking away from the camera does something no still image does: it restores a voice and a way of moving.
Ask for these explicitly when you ask for photographs, because nobody volunteers them. The phrase that works is “any short clips, even a few seconds, even shaky ones”.
Keep them short in the film itself. Five to eight seconds is usually enough, and a clip that runs longer than that tends to pull focus from everything around it. One or two well placed clips will do more than six.
If a clip has sound worth keeping, say so when you send it. Otherwise the music will simply play over it.
Duplicates, and the one thing worth checking
When several people send photographs, the same picture arrives three times at three different sizes. Keep the largest file each time. It is not about quality on screen, where all three will look identical. It is that the largest version usually came from the original device rather than from a messaging app, and it has not been cropped.
Check orientation before you finish. Photographs sent through messaging apps sometimes arrive rotated, and a portrait picture displayed sideways is the kind of thing nobody notices until it is on a wall in front of a hundred people.
A realistic timeline
If the service is in three days, the collection is the only part with a deadline that is not yours to set.
A pattern that works: send the requests on day one and give a named cut off, “anything you have by tomorrow evening”. A deadline that sounds soft produces photographs that arrive after the funeral. People are not being slow, they are grieving and they are guessing at what is useful.
Chase once, gently, on the morning of the cut off. Then work with what you have. A slideshow made from sixty photographs that arrived on time is a better outcome than one that misses the service waiting for a box in someone’s loft.
If you would rather hand it over
Collecting the photographs is the part only the family can do. The rest is not.
Send us what you have gathered, in any order, along with the song. There is no limit on how many you send, and no need to sort them first if you would rather not. The finished video comes back in minutes.
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