Audio Slideshow or Photofilm?

Hello everyone

I recently completed a little film I've been planning for a while. I've been planning to make this kind of thing for a while, but I never had the right subject matter until recently.

Some places on the web call them Audio Slideshows and others call them Photofilms. When I was at college, back in the time of pre-history, we called them Audio-visual displays. They used slides and projectors and it was all a bit clunky. People actually used to study how to make them. For two years!

I've been intrigued by the idea of these movies for a while now, ever since I first saw examples of them on a cool website called Duck Rabbit. I particularly like the ones called "Fairground Attraction" and "Imber". Check them out.

Anyway, I was invited to take some pictures of a sculptor called David Nash. There was no fee involved and no commission either, but I was hoping there would be the potential to make some kind of feature. The first set of pictures were great, and I realised this would be just the thing for a film, but I needed a proper soundtrack.

I went back to show David the pictures and record his thoughts on a sound recorder as he looked through them. Then I made a few ambient recordings of wood burning and birds singing in the trees and so on.

I came home and edited the sound and pictures down to a manageable 4 minutes. There's a brilliant free sound editing program called Audacity you can download to do this with. I made the actual 'film' using iMovie, only available on the Mac, but I'm sure you could do it just as well with QuickTime or something like that.

I'm still not sure if there are any commercial avenues open with this kind of thing. The BBC uses them on their site, as do The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, all to great effect. Getting paid for them, however, is a different challenge altogether. I was unable to persuade anyone at all to give me any money for my efforts :-(

Let me know what you think....leave comments, click on the 'like' button, knock yourselves out.

Hmm, that's smaller than I would have hoped for, and I can't figure out how to make it bigger. Have a look on my website for a more normally-sized one.....but leave any comments here.

Until the next time!