Friday 20 January 2012

The Ultimate Gift

One of my greatest joys in life is to give my friends and family gifts that are meaningful to them. But, sometimes this can be hard and expensive. The ultimate gift that I have ever given, I have actually done twice, with no re-gifting. This gift is a slideshow of memories and pictures.

The first time I did this was because I blindly volunteered to create a video for my family at my grandparents conjoined 80th birthday party. I volunteered because I thought it was a good way to showcase my skills and talent that I learned with studying at Elon. However, this was a lot more time consuming that I had every thought. My first step was to harass everyone in the family for pictures of their current families and from when they were little. This was very hard and that is why I use the word harass. Once I have compiled all the pictures, I had to figure out an order to put them in the flowed and made sense. So because my family is over 35+ people, I divided it into chronologically and by family. The next thing I had to do was to pick out the right song. I used "Remember me this way" and "We are family." I started with thinking about songs about families, but I also wanted a humorous, upbeat song and songs that related to my grandparents lives. Once I got all the pictures and songs together, I spent a lot of man-hours on making it perfect. It seemed like that last week was dedicated to pure milliseconds of songs to make it transition perfectly. The most satisfying part of the whole gift was not the creating of it, but when I showed it to the entire family. There were laughs, tears and so many congratulations. With all the hard work I put in, I would not have changed it for a second, or millisecond.

I created another slideshow for my group of high school friends when we graduated from college. This was a little more extensive, since we have many, many, many more pictures together. I pretty much did the same thing as I did for my family slideshow by picking tons of pictures, putting them in chronological order and then picking fun and meaningful songs. Some of the songs I choose were "You've got a friend in me" and "I get by with a little help from my friends" and "SexyBack." It was hilarious to see their faces when I gave them the DVDs. They were shocked and in awe of this wonderful creation I made.

Making a slideshow is a cheap and fun way to show your family and friends how much you care about them. It is amazing to see all the wonderful memories that you have created and shared together. I still look at the videos I have created about once a month and am exploding with emotions because of the memories from these pictures.

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