Andy Steinhaus, 28
Advanced product specialist, Abbott Laboratories
Andy Steinhaus sits at his Apple Macintosh computer in Evanston, working on a DVD project he intends to unveil at his uncle’s 70th birthday party.
But this DVD is going to be different from what you might expect.
He’s working with photographs–lots of them. In fact, Steinhaus has scanned in more than 300 snapshots from his uncle’s life, with many of them nearly as old as his uncle.
He’s using an Epson Perfection 3170 scanner (about $200 at www.epson.com) and software called Photoshop Elements 2.0, which came with the scanner, to crop and touch up the photos.
Once scanned and edited, Steinhaus turned to Apple’s suite of multimedia applications, collectively called iLife. It ships preinstalled on new Apple computers and costs about $50 at www.apple.com/ilife.
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“I imported the pictures into iPhoto [a photo organizer and viewer], and arranged them in iMovie [Apple’s movie editor],” Steinhaus said.
Why arrange still photographs in a movie editor?
Because Steinhaus is creating a multimedia slide show, complete with DVD menus, a musical soundtrack and audio commentary, to be played at his uncle’s birthday party. Guests will receive a copy to take home.
“I want people to get a feel for how much he has affected their lives,” said Steinhaus. “I want it to be sentimental and funny. I want it to show the times of his life.”
He places transitions between photos and adds panning and zooming effects across the images. This creates a documentary effect, as though a video camera is moving across the photos.
Next, Steinhaus positions the music track–“they’re all old songs from my uncle’s life, either ones I had or found on the Internet”–and adds recorded commentary from family members.
He will create the DVD menus and burn the final disc using another iLife application, iDVD.
The final product will be about 15 minutes long, but for Steinhaus much of the value was in the journey.
“Watching all these pictures of my uncle growing up, of me growing up, how we spent time together, has been really special,” he said. “It really connected me to him.”
And what does Steinhaus hope his audience will get out this project?
“People will be able to take a DVD home with them for their kids and their grandkids, and there will always be a record of this man’s life.”
Then he paused for a moment and added, “I think it’s something we all want to do: leave a record for the next generation.”
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