Photo Montage Film to tell your Story

Now that my family tree is finished and is part of my montage film, I thought I would look at all the elements that could be included.

The idea is to have everything connected with your life story on one DVD. So here's a spider chart of what could be included in your photo montage film.

Bringing my Family Tree to Life

Carrying on from my first blog where I was struggling to find a site that was easy to use to enter my family tree information, I am pleased to say I have now finished this using a simple powerpoint document.

To bring colour to the chart I added a tree from clip art, to go behind the text boxes, I think it looks good. Now I have the template finished I can use this to add more family members, my brother and sisters and their children and then go back to fill in details about dads brothers and sisters and their families and so on until I have no further data to add - hmmm sounds a long job, perhaps I will do this during the winter months.

Now, as you can see this all looks a very nice, neat and colourful with names and dates in boxes, but what about the photos and the information about where they lived, what they did, where they are buried?

So, I had a think about how to incorporate all the information in one place and I decided to make a film. I converted the powerpoint to a .png file selected the photos and imported these into Adobe Premier Elements to make a short film. Then I narrated my family history.

It was fun and really easy to do and I think it works really well and does bring my family tree to life.

Have a look at my demo (which is a shorten version of the full tree) and let me know what you think.

http://www.beautifulmemories.tv/family-tree-demo.html

Creating my family tree

Welcome to Family History on Film. I am a film maker with Beautiful Memories and capture life stories on film. Many clients include their family tree in their film when talking about their ancestors. I create family trees in powerpoint, inserting them as an image into the film. I show the whole tree and focus on the photo and their position on the family tree when the particular family member is being talked about. It works well but to produce a family tree in this way is fiddly and time consuming.

So last week I set about finding out how to produce a more professional looking family tree using software that captures all the information in one place. Using Google and searched the words 'family tree' and got 74 million + results with sites such as Ancestry.co.uk; myheritage.com; FindMy Past.co.uk; genesreunited.co.uk;

I remembered a cousin had, over the last couple of years, entered most of our family back to c.1700s. I thought this would save me a lot of input time, and so through her pages, I added and updated information for my grandparents/parents and uploaded photos. Fairly easy to do.

Now I just wanted a print out of the family tree showing all information I had entered.

However it was really frustrating because

I could print the page visible on the screen, but not the whole tree.

I could reduce the page, but the text was too small to read.

I could print in sections, but as I moved across the screen I lost some of the details,

I could see the names and dates but not all the additional information, which could only be seen via a drop down box!

I could have a print out of each individual with all the information and their photo, but not as part of the family tree!!

Almost half a day wasted and no print out. I'm going back to powerpoint. Does anyone have any tips or ideas how to create a family tree that can be printed out as a whole tree with all the information and photos included on one sheet?