Memorial Slideshows and Tributes Editing and Proofreading Services

Ninety photographs sit in a folder on a laptop, set to four seconds each, which comes to six minutes of screen time. They are in the order they came out of the shoebox: baby pictures, a wedding, an office party nobody in the family recognizes, more baby pictures, a beach, and a photograph from last February that his sister has already asked twice to have taken out. The service is on Saturday morning. His daughter has written captions for eleven of the ninety and nothing at all for the rest.

The documents we edit for Memorial Slideshows and Tributes

Captions and the voiceover script that carries them are what families send us, usually four or five days before a service. Sequencing notes for whoever assembles the presentation arrive with them. So do video tribute scripts drawn together from contributions by several relatives, the words shown on screen between sections, memory board and display text for a reception, and the brief given to a videographer or celebrant putting a tribute film together. Our editors work on words that have to be read on a screen by people who are crying.

What the editing involves

Which photographs go in and which stay out is the family's decision, and we do not make it. What we work on is the order and the words. Strict date order tends to produce six pictures from the same 1994 fishing trip in a row and then a gap of nine years, because photographs were never taken at an even rate. Grouping by what a picture shows gives a run of people he made laugh, a run of the places he had to be every week, and a run of the version of him each part of the family knew. The captions can then carry the family from one group to the next.

A caption reading "Dad, 1987" tells a room of sixty people almost nothing, and a good number of them never met the cousins standing beside him. "Dad at the Nowaks' kitchen table in 1987, the summer he taught Julia to drive the truck" names who is in the picture and why the moment is in the sequence. Names are worth spelling out in full the first time each person appears. Where a caption says 1987 and the eulogy says 1988, we mark the pair and ask which is right rather than choosing for you.

Photographs pulled at a family review have a way of coming back. We keep the list of what was withdrawn and check the closing sequence against that list, so the picture his sister asked about twice does not appear in the last 40 seconds of the film. The same list catches a caption left behind after its photograph was removed. A running order with timings attached also shows where six minutes of images sits against a song that runs 3:40.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including photographs, family circumstances, and anything you would rather handle carefully. We are editors, not videographers, celebrants, or grief counselors, and we offer no opinion on what should be included or how anyone should be remembered. What we can do is make the captions say who is in the picture and why that moment mattered.