A Graduation Slideshow: Celebrate an Important Milestone in Style

A graduation - whether it is from school or preschool - is always a touching moment. Parents are usually so stunned by how the time flew by, that they snap thousands of pictures as if trying to stop this moment. If you are one of those parents who came back home for a graduation with tons of images, you might be posed with a question - what in the world am I supposed to do with them? The answer is simple - turn them into a graduation slideshow.

Don’t quite know what that is? Well, a graduation slideshow is a video comprised of your pictures and sprinkled with effects that commemorates this important milestone of your kid about to enter a new life stage. Surprisingly, graduation slideshows aren’t that hard to put together. In this article, we’ll go over what your slideshow should feature and what it should look like. So without further ado, let’s find a way to capture lighting in a bottle with your little one’s graduation. 

Cull the Graduation Images

Let’s start with the main ingredient of your graduation video, namely the pictures. Since you probably have quite a few, you might be tempted to use them all for your video. This is a rookie mistake that you shouldn’t make. First off, review all the pictures you took and only pick the best. Throw away any image that is flawed - a photobomber in the background, your kid’s mate has his eyes closed, you name it - and only choose those that perfectly capture the moment and where all the kids are smiling or posing. The number of the pictures you choose will always affect the running time of your graduation slideshow. Make sure to cull enough pictures for a 5 to 8 minute slideshow. 

Pick the Perfect Soundtrack

Doesn’t matter if you are making a school or a preschool graduation slideshow - it can certainly use a good tune. A surefire way to please your audience - i.e. your kids - is to use their favorite song for the video. If you want to add your personal touch rather than submit to your kids’ taste, then go with the absolute classics like Closing Time by Semisonic or (Don’t You) Forget About Me by Simple Minds. Want more options to choose from? Then be sure to check out the best graduation songs for slideshows out there to find the perfect jam for your video.

Insert Meaningful Quotes 

While graduation is a fun thing, the aftermath brings somewhat of a stress into a kid’s life. School is over. What comes next in life? Kids feel scared and vulnerable. This is when profound motivational quotes can help lift their spirits. There are myriads of graduation quotes that you can check out to find those that will speak to your graduate. Sprinkle them throughout the whole slideshow for a bigger impact. There is no such thing as too much motivation, right?

Keep Decorations to a Minimum

An opportunity to create a slideshow usually welcomes a flow of creative ideas. Some are welcome, others might be too excessive. When it comes to a graduation slideshow, we suggest you keep creative solutions to a minimum. After all, you are making a video for your kids to remember the fun time by, and not for yourself to showcase your visionary style. So stick to graceful animations and smooth transitions that won’t draw the attention away from the happy faces in the pictures. 

Use the Right Slideshow Maker

While there are certainly numerous slideshow makers out there, in order to make your graduation video you need a tool that would be both intuitive to use and fairly feature-rich. Go with SmartSHOW 3D. This graduation slideshow maker offers you hundreds of themed templates for easy slideshow creation. What’s more, the software also gives you complete freedom to make videos with pictures from scratch. There are 400+ effects that you can easily apply to your pics, as well as a custom animation module where you can animate your images however you please. Besides, if you can’t pick a tune for the slideshow, you can go with a track from the software’s built-in music library. There is even a tool to record and add voice comments to your slideshow in case you have a few behind the scene anecdotes. With SmartSHOW 3D, graduation slideshow creation is easy, fun, and immensely rewarding. 

So since another page of your kid’s life is being turned over, you should definitely celebrate it with a video. Time will pass, but you and your kid will still go back to the graduation video you created to once again remember the good times.