The Making Of

I spent a lot of time working on the slide show for Don & LaDon's 50th anniversary (yes those are their real names). I had tons of material to work with and was hoping to squeeze over 70 years of history into 10 minutes.

The story begins with The wedding photos of their parents. As the song "You're Just To Good To Be True" plays you see a sequence of black and white photos of J's parents up until they met and got married at ages 17 and 20. The next song "50 Years From Now" lyrically fits perfectly with this time in their life when they go through raising 4 daughters and the loss of their 6 week old baby boy.

From there we transition into "Love Like Crazy". I am not a big country fan, but this song has such a good message to it. During this part of the presentation we have the arrival of J and his brother who were born 8 years after their youngest sister. One of my favorite pictures is of LaDon with her daughter with their sons that were born 7 weeks apart.

Then we hear "God Gave Me You" and start to get a closer to current day with pictures of the grandkids and the siblings and spouses raising kids through the years.

My favorite part of the slide show comes when we hear "You're Just To Good To Be True" again and we are back to the old black and white photos of the family on tractors, but then the song switches to the hip hop version and we see the next generation of kids on tractors in color. The legacy theme continues with past and present photos of the family who played football and lastly instruments.

The video closes with "Love Story" and shows a brief montage of portraits of the happy couple throughout the years. I threw this in because "Love Story" is my mother in laws ring tone and I really wanted to end with a recap of 50 years that focused on the two of them.

So that's probably too thorough of a description, but I just wanted to share their story and also what my thinking was with the flow of this project. This was one of the longest slide shows I've ever put together, but I enjoyed doing it. It was like getting a front row seat to the past 50 years of their marriage and makes me really curious about the next 40 years of mine!