Christmas Family Slideshow Video - 2014

It's that time of the year again when I'm posting our Christmas slideshow. The Christmas pictorial as well as the making of this slideshow has become our cherished Christmas Tradition. In an article I wrote, "Christmas Past and Present", I detailed the inspiration for starting and preserving this tradition as well as the lessons learned on how to make it work.

If you want to learn more about this cherished Christmas tradition of ours, as well as tips and techniques, be sure to read the article "Christmas Past and Present" and all its links.


This Year's 2014 Theme

It seems we're running out of ideas for the Christmas Pictorial theme. A uniform outfit color for a theme is nice, but it's getting difficult to have all 6 family members to dress in the same color. We've done white, yellow, blue, red and green. Those are pretty much the Christmas colors.

Well, I noticed that family members always have the earth colors. So I suggested gray. There's always the gray sweatshirt, blouse and, of course, the ubiquitous gray T-shirts. And so, gray it is!


Christmas Slideshow Music Theme

Even before I started working with this year's Christmas family slideshow, I've already decided on the music theme. No, it's not going to be a lengthy piece with the holiday drama. It's going to be short, quick and memorable.

The music theme I've selected is Keith Kenniff's piece called "Years". This is the theme used by Facebook's A Lookback videos. Because it is very short (a little over a minute), there was simply no room for other intervening "mood" slides like Christmas icons and scenes. Neither is there room anymore for the usual birthday slides of the year that I sequenced towards the end of the video.


New Slide Transition Effect

You'd think its easy with a shorter slideshow because the music clip was short? Not exactly. This year, I incorporated a new slide transition effect called 'morphing' and it turned out really good. For the morphing transitions, I made 3 sequences: 2011-2012, 2012-2013 and 2013-2014.

I found it difficult to duplicate the other Facebook style of slide transitions, but I did my best.



Wait for the video to end. You'll see and hear a nice Christmas and Happy New Year touch. Enjoy!