Memorial Slideshows and Tributes Editing and Proofreading Services

Ninety photographs are queued up to music, four seconds each, in the order somebody found them in a shoebox: baby photos, a wedding, a work event nobody in the room recognises, more baby photos, a holiday, a photo taken at a party where he is visibly unwell and nobody thought to check before it went in. A slideshow assembled by chronology and convenience is not the same thing as a slideshow that tells anybody watching who this person actually was.

We edit what people write and organise for memorial slideshows and visual tributes — captions and voiceover scripts for funeral or memorial slideshows, the selection and sequencing notes given to whoever builds the presentation, video tribute scripts assembled from family contributions, the words shown on screen between photo sections, memory board and display text for a wake or reception, and the brief given to a videographer or celebrant compiling a tribute film. Our editors work on words that have to survive being read on a screen while people are crying.

The sequencing logic is what decides whether a slideshow tells a story or simply plays photographs in the order they were found, and its failure is chronology mistaken for structure. Birth to death is a timeline, not a shape. We work through these so photographs are grouped by what they show about the person — the people he made laugh, the places he needed to be, the version of him each decade of his family knew — rather than strictly by date, since a thematic grouping lets a slideshow build to something instead of merely proceeding; so every photograph is checked against how the person looked while unwell or in decline, given that images from the last difficult months are rarely what anyone wants remembered first, and that check is done deliberately rather than assumed; so captions add what a photograph cannot show by itself, such as who is in it and why the moment mattered, rather than restating the obvious; so a small number of photographs are given more time than the rest, because ninety images at equal length teaches an audience to stop looking properly by photo twenty; so music is chosen for what it will make people picture rather than for being their favourite song in the abstract, as a favourite song with the wrong tempo can undercut a slideshow's tone entirely; so the sequence ends on an image that lands rather than simply on the last one found; and so somebody who knew the person checks the final draft, since family members compiling this are often too close to notice what is missing. Slideshows built this way are the ones people ask to see again at the next gathering.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including photographs, family circumstances and anything you would rather handle carefully. We are editors rather than videographers, celebrants or grief counsellors, and we offer no view on what should be included or how the person should be remembered. What we can do is help the sequence and the words say who this actually was.