How to Make a Video Montage for any Occasion with a Video Gift Maker
Have you wanted to create a video gift for someone in your life? This year was my father-in-law’s 80th birthday, and since they were in the process of decluttering their home, we didn’t want to gift him any objects.
Since a big family reunion was out of the question with people still worried about traveling, a video gift along with a surprise visit from us seemed like the perfect gift idea that he would appreciate.
We took a 14 hour road trip to surprise him, and arrived the night before his birthday! He was definitely surprised!
For those of you who have created a video before, you know that it can be quite a bit of work! As the birthday was getting closer and life kept us busy, I was starting to get worried because I had not started making the video yet. I still needed to collect photos and videos from family members around the world to make this happen too!
I nagged at my husband to collect photos from his family members from Korea and around the U.S. He sent out a message, but only managed to gather a few. I had a feeling I would have to pull photos from everyone’s Facebook pages to find everything I would need to create a substantial enough video. Panic started to set in as I was running out of time…
Luckily, just before I started getting too stressed about the time, I discovered a video creation tool called VidDay. VidDay is an online website where you can collect photos and videos to create as a video gift. Here’s the website:
You can send a link to everyone you want to contribute to the video. They can record a video message directly from their phone and upload it using the link.
Seriously, this was a golden find. I thought it was the most brilliant idea for a website. This video gift platform took the pressure off of me to become a master video editor (which I wasn’t), and also took off my plate the work of looking for the perfect music, creating transitions, and figuring out how to collect the video footage from people. Seriously, what a great idea. It saved me!
Not only that, it’s so affordable! At the time of writing this post, the prices are:
Creating the Video Project
To create the video, all I had to do was create the video project, find a picture of my father-in-law, upload it as the profile photo, select a theme (I chose Collage), select the music (I used Big Dreams), and voila… the email message to collect photos were ready to go.
In just a few minutes, I was sending out emails, text messages, Facebook messages, and group chat messages with the link to the video project asking everyone to upload a video greeting.
After a few days, I checked online to see that no one had submitted anything. Off went another round of reminders, and soon thereafter I was seeing new media being uploaded every day.
At first, everyone just submitted a quick birthday greeting, but it made the video too short. We explained to them that we wanted this to be an entire slideshow video and asked them to upload photos and videos of themselves and photos of my father-in-law (if they had any). It took a reminder to get people to upload, but once they did, that’s where the video really started to take shape!
Uploading Photos and Videos
We uploaded our video greeting too, and dug around for old photos and videos to upload. I was relieved that everyone would be uploading on their own and other than a quick reminder, I didn’t have to manage receiving all these video files.
After some digging around for the right photos, editing some, and scanning some old photos using a cool photos scanning app (PhotoScan by Google Photos) from our phone, we ended up with quite a robust set of photos and videos to create a nice birthday present.
These scanned photos ended up looking great in the video!
I set the deadline to be 4 days before the actual deadline as I knew I’d need some time to rearrange photos and preview the video and finally export it to view. Those two steps take some time, so I wanted to give myself some ample time. It’s a good thing, because people missed the deadline and there were photos coming in last minute.
Editing the Video
Despite the last minute uploads (including my own), I was able to organize the photos and videos in an order that flowed well from oldest to most recent, and then with all the birthday messages. It took a while as our video ended up being 30 minutes, but it was time well spent because my editing time had been cut down so much because of this website.
All I had to do was drag and drop things in the right order and make sure I didn’t duplicate any uploads. It all ended up getting finished last minute. It took our video about an hour to preview and then another hour to render after I approved the preview since it was a long video. Definitely make sure you leave enough time for that.
Sharing the Video
Once it was done, all I had to do with share the link! We had a zoom call with the entire family to “celebrate” my father-in-law’s 80th birthday together, and after that, I sent out the link so that everyone could watch on their own.
We projected the video onto the TV using Apple TV so that all of us could watch together.
It was a hit! Everyone smiled, laughed, and enjoyed watching it and seeing themselves in the video too! Then we celebrated with a little cake.
VidDay Gives Back
One thing I also love about VidDay is their mission to make a billion people smile! We sure experienced lots of smiles when we played our VidDay video!
VidDay also plants a tree for every video purchased, and get well videos are free! You can even nominate a hero that deserves a free video tribute. I love how this company really cares about people, and I know this because I spoke with Denis, the founder of the company directly!
I really enjoyed hearing about how he came up with the idea of creating this company during his travels. He was originally in training to be a firefighter, and then ended up leaving that direction to pursue creating this company! I love a good entrepreneur story, and his story was very inspiring. I love how he created a company that makes millions of people smile!
Not only does this company plant or tree for every video created, they also help give back to communities in need.
Next time you want to create a video gift, consider using VidDay to create your video. It’s an easy way to collect photos and videos from everyone that can easily be shared.
I know we’ll use it again after experiencing how easy it was and how great the video turned out.
One of the things I really loved about how the video turned out was the Collage theme I chose. It layered the images in the background while still being able to show a horizontal or vertical image in front. This was especially nice for the vertical photos or videos.
If you have a special gift you want to create that’s coming up soon, click here to create your first project. It costs nothing to start the project. You pay when you’re finished.
I know our older parents’ generation may not be so expressive when it comes to showing how much they enjoy a gift, but I know that my in-laws were quite happy with the effort put in to create a family gift that everyone could enjoy. We received feedback from other relatives that they thought it was such a great gift and the video turned out very nicely!
One of our relatives even told us how it made them think about their own relationship with their parents and decided to start looking through and collecting old photos too. I’m all for building positive family relationships and memories.
I think the person who was most excited while watching the video was our son! Kids are so expressive! See our Instagram post to see our excited reaction from our son when he saw pictures and videos of himself!
Click here to see our Instagram videos.
Although this was not the ideal birthday celebration, as in Korean culture, we typically throw a big 80th birthday bash with 100+ people coming to celebrate at a big banquet hall, but given the circumstances, watching this video as a family was a great way to spend the day! The family reunion will have to wait until things open up again in Korea.
Even though we were not able to see everyone together right now, it was so nice to see everyone virtually and through the video to celebrate! 🎉 I’m hoping we can plan a follow-up trip to get the entire family together at a later date!
Have you ever created a video gift before? Any future special occasions you have coming up that could use a nice video gift? I know we will be creating one for Father’s Day which is right around the corner!
Create A Birthday Video today at Vidday.com!Pin it for later!
