Slideshows, Slide-Sound Shows… Side Show? No……

Not only has the world of video become more affordable, so has the world of still photography. Now that it is all digital, we’ve said goodbye to slide projectors, Polaroid instant film cameras, and even double prints at the FotoMat.

But what have we gained? Incredible quality digital cameras, minaturized storage, on-line albums and presentations, high-quality photo printing at home, and digital picture frames and keychains– to name just a few. Kodak no longer makes or processes most films, but does make and sell photo paper, digital cameras, printers, etc. Polaroid just announced a minature printer you can take with you– to print out pictures from your phone’s camera.

But what’s really been interesting to me is the resurgence of the “slide show”. People want to package their pictures in a linear sequence, so they can tell a story. There are software packages to help, and on-line services that will allow you to quickly cobble together a sequence, store it for free, and share it with your friends. In fact, there seems to be a real interest in bridging the gap between slide shows and videos, creating timed shows with soundtracks– videostories, but with an emphasis on stills.

This is where I came in– oh, thirty—- well, many years ago.

The slide-sound show is a very powerful, immediate, and maleable medium. It’s what I began my career in; it’s what I spend 15 years doing; and only affordable (in relative terms) corporate video tools allowed me to progress beyond it many years ago.

But I never left what I learned behind. I was involved with a company called TVL that made a powertful video-based presentation machine back in the days of the 286 and 386, and way before powerful video cards were invented. You had to know how to make slide shows in order to make a slide sound show with it that would approximante the power of a video– so we trained people how to do that. I’m proud to say we spun off many a successful freelancer from those efforts, and even created something of a slide-sound resurgence.

Even after computers and video processing cards became powerful and allowed more people to crteate presentations and video, the creative lessons I learned in making slide shows stood me well, whether I was making web video, meeting videos, videotapes, Flash loops, DVD‘s, or even Powerpoints.

That’s why I’ve started a site and blog called Slide-Sound. I’m very excited about it because it seems there is a lot of interest in slide shows, especially thse with soundtracks (Google adwords tells me so.)

Please check it out, and if you like it, subscribe. I promise it will be meaningful no matter what your mode of audio-visual communication

Brien Lee