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

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Slide Shows. Slide Talks. Slide-Sound Shows.

These phrases strike fear into the hip and trendy.

And why not? Say “slide show” and your brain is filled with Dad’s vacation slides or a grade school filmstrip on how to brush your teeth. Or maybe you envision an old audio-visual presentation you saw when you were a summer intern: “Improving Tolerances in the 303B Die Cut Assembly.”

But some of us know better. We know what slide shows can really be. And the first thing we need to understand is that they’re not slides, and not even powerpoint. They are moving picture presentations, tanks to today’s advanced slideshow making and video editing software.

As a baby-boom-aged audio-visual and video producer, I should know. I started out in “slides.” And the first thing I and my colleagues across the country did was try to turn the slide show into more of a “movie”— a theatrical experience.

This required sophisticated soundtracks, fade and dissolve effects (pairing two  slide projectors and a “dissolve unit”, and synchronization between sound and picture. Soon, the only thing we couldn’t do was talking heads (thankfully)— the rest was simply using the language of film… wide shot, medium shot, close-up, cutaway, rinse and repeat.

Because motion picture film was expensive, and industrial video hadn’t yet been mainstreamed, slide shows became the corporate norm through the mid-eighties.

Across the country and around the world people produced award-winning communications using slides.

Of course, once video became affordable to the corporates, that changed. But often, the video productions that replaced slide shows actually weren’t as good— why work hard when you can feature talking heads?

But people who were in the slide business adapted their hard knocks techniques to video, and produced some pretty incredible stuff. Video cameras weren’t as portable as a Nikon and a cassette tape recorder, but extraordinary soundtracks, awesome editing, and location video made for a very nice mix— a lot better than corporate talking heads.

Often, the best videos featured still photography— company histories, executive biographies, fund raising appeals. Historical materials were usually print, and fund raising can benefit from the unique emotional power a great still image or still image sequence can create.

Today, video is everywhere— affordable, digital, distributable on the web, on DVD, or on an iPod or flash drive. But a great deal of the video that is out there is “out there”— not really communications, but more real-time stupid human tricks or ego-driven monologues. We all want to be the next big thing.

And so, the thought leaders have forgotten slides, photography, still life, and historical documents.

If we need a slideshow type “thing”, we use Powerpoint, a background template, and a bunch of words and some small picture or clip art inserts. That was special 15 years ago; its not so special now.

But if you mix the editing and distribution power of digital video with the emotional language of truly great slide shows, what so you get?

Well, an award-winning PBS series or ten from Ken Burns, as an example.

A stirring tribute to the retiring head of a company.

A love story more compelling than any wedding video.

A family scrapbook with pictures, clippings, old movies, new interviews, and stirring music guaranteed to reap adoration and applause.

The satisfaction of a a job well done, and even, perhaps, a corresponding income as an independent producer.

Whether you use a slide show program, or a video editing program, slide show techniques are alive, and well, and communicating every day. Put them to work for you!

This blog– VideoStory Secrets– is intended to be a free repository of tutorials, lessons, samples, explanations, and other information regarding the art of “Video Storytelling.”

We did have a few entries already uploaded, and propagating nicely, when someone I hit– the wrong button.

Well, you know what havoc that can wreak. But it gave us a chance to enhance a few things, and develop more free offerings, which you’ll see here soon.

In the meantime, I realigned some of the website hosting, moved this from there to here and there, and here we are.

And just in time. Today, we quietly launched the sale of our book, “Tribute Videos for Love & Money”, which is really a book about how to tell a video story, or more bluntly, how to make really good videos.

It uses as it’s main examples “Tribute videos”, videos produced to tell someone’s life story, either for a company or private (personal) function.

It is 120 pages or so, generously illustrated, and is accompanied by tutorials and samples, some ready now, some ready soon.

I hope you’ll consider looking at what the book has to offer and perhaps purchasing a copy for your family video-maker, your company video people, or yourself. There are a lot of good ideas in it, and a pretty good explanation of the philosophies and structures of videomaking we have been using for the past 35 years.Go here: http://www.videostoryschool.com.

Thanks

Brien Lee.