How to Make a Father's Day Video for Your Dad

A personal video set to music is a fantastic gift to give for Father's Day. I made one for my Dad, and you can do it, too.

The first thing you need to do is gather together all of your old family photos. I was fortunate. My Mom had already put ours on CD. However, if you don't already have yours in one place yet, you'll need to scan them into the computer. If you don't have a scanner, I recommend that you get one. Nowadays good scanners are available for $150 and less, and they are well worth the price.

After you've got your scanned images in the computer, you'll need to sort them to figure out which are the best ones. I created a folder called Dad Slideshow in the My Pictures folder. I copied all the pictures I thought might be usable from the CD into this folder so that I could edit them and rename them if I needed to.

The main thing you need to consider when you're making a video for Father's Day is to ensure that you're creating video art that will be visually satisfying and emotionally real. Never create sappy or sentimental video art. Instead, make sure that your video has content which is pertinent to your subject matter. In this case, you'll want to think about your Dad. When selecting the photographs for your video slideshow, or video clips for your video, you'll want to make sure that the images are somehow exceptional. They should represent important moments in time, either for your father alone or for you together. Again, don't think that you have to be restricted to current imagery. Be sure to utilize images from his youth and childhood as well.

Then think about what your father likes. If he's a golf fan and loves to fish, then you'll probably want to include some images of him engaging in these activities. Then also make sure that the pictures reflect his personality. For example, if he's a very happy person and one picture shows him being rather dour, you'd probably want to leave it out. However if he's an introspective person, and you have an errant picture where he looks like the life of the party, it's okay to think twice before including it. There may be other pictures that describe him better.

The next important task is to consider your relationship with him. Find pictures of the two of you together, the more the better. Again, try to find the really exceptional images. Trust your instincts. You'll know them when you see them.

If your family was a shutter-happy as mine was, you'll probably have hundreds of pictures to choose from. The next step is to pick the best ones, and this can only be done by a process of elimination.

As you go through the pictures, make a note of the ones that are the best so that you can get back to them later.

I have a tutorial on Associated Content which deals with how to use Paint Shop Pro to edit your photos for the web. The instructions in that tutorial apply here as much as anywhere. Long story short, you're going to need to crop, rotate, and resize your images, as well as deal with problems such as yellowing, graininess, and damage to the photos using the tools in Paint Shop Pro. Yellowing is the primary problem I had with my old photos, and I dealt with it easily by selecting Adjust > Hue and Saturation > Hue/Saturation/Lightness from the menu. In this menu you'll need to select Factory Defaults to set the levels back to zero. Then select Yellows from the drop down list, and reduced the saturation. You can also increase the saturation on Cyans and Blues. In some cases you may also have to reduce the Reds, since these can appear to be increased comparatively in old photographs.

The Adjust > Add/Remove Noise > Despeckle command doesn't help much much with mottled images, so use the Clone tool to remove lint and damaged areas from the photos.

Another tool I have found very useful was Adjust > Add/Remove Noise > Edge Preserving Smooth. When I used this tool to correct several pictures which were severely unclear and grainy and mottled, it had the additional beneficial effect of giving the photos a somewhat painterly look. I was pleasantly surprised.

Be sure to name your images appropriately so that you can find them easily. I named mine dad1.jpg, dad2.jpg, and so on.

Once you've edited your images, you'll want to import them into Windows Movie Maker or another video editing program. Please view my Windows Movie Maker tutorial for instructions on the technical aspects of creating a video from a slideshow in this program.

It's best to add your images before adding the music. You can create your own music in a software program like Noteworthy Composer, or you can download music off the web. It's best to get music that's in the public domain, especially if you're planning to place the video in a public forum. Finding public domain music keeps you creative, as most of it is not what you might ordinarily pick. Don't pick music because you think it's pretty. Instead try to pick music that you know your father specifically likes, or which expresses his personality. When I did my search on public domain music, I got very lucky and happened across an mp3 of "Doo Wacka Doo" by Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. I chose it because my Dad has a peculiar tendency to say "Doo Wacka Doo" spontaneously and for no apparent reason. It was uproariously funny to see the video of my Dad as a young man passing by just as these three words were being sung. It made me feel like he was in the room.

If you would like to add commentary, place it outside of the piece, for example in a caption or in an email message explaining how the video was made, or what your inspiration was.

After creating your rough draft, you'll need to go in and make some edits. There are purely technical aspects to be dealt with here. For example, your song may be longer than your video, or vice versa. You can make edits to get them both the same length. Usually it's only possible to edit the video when you're dealing with a single song file, so you may have to make some decisions and lose a couple of pictures if the video segment is too long for the song, or you may instead decide to make your clips shorter so that they all fit in. My Windows Movie Maker Tutorial gives detailed instructions on how to accomplish this.

Also, you can make your video look very professional in Windows Movie Maker by adding titles and credits. There are even different animations you can apply to the text. View my tutorial to see how to personalize your captions and credits.

There are effects available in Windows Movie Maker. The effects have questionable value, and some of them are to be avoided. If you really want to add any effects other than fade out, or fade in, black and white or sepia toning you're better off going back to the drawing board and making manual edits in Paint Shop Pro or other image editing software to get just the image quality you want.

Also, the transitions in Windows Movie Maker are generally very tacky and so far I have only found the fade transition to be of any use. I strongly recommend that you do not add these other effects to your video.

When you feel that your video is finished, watch it several times. This is an important step to knowing whether or not it is finished. When you view your video, you may notice that some things are not quite right, or to your liking. You may notice technical problems. These will need to be corrected before you save the project to a movie file.

After you've saved your finished video to a movie file, preview it in a larger screen program like Windows Media Player. There's a very good chance you will see some more problems that need correcting. If you do, just go back to Windows Movie Maker, or your image editing program, and fix the problems. I noticed a few problems with my Father's Day video when I previewed it that I had missed in the smaller viewing pane in Windows Movie Maker. For example, there were a few white spots that hadn't been readily apparent, and a couple other things didn't look as good in a large window as they had in a small one.

Once your video has gone through the final polish stage, you're ready to present it to your Dad. Now the only question is whether you want to email him the file, upload to a site and send a link, or make a more personal presentation by taking the disc to him to view together. It's entirely up to you. Whatever you do, your personal video is a gift which will be sure to please.