ANCESTRY TIPS

Rock Out with Your Ancestors

Which animation will you choose from the menu?

I don’t know if my great-grandfather, Peter Smolenyak, will ever forgive me. Several weeks ago, I wrote about using MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia tool to animate him, but now they’ve introduced fresh functionality to customize your animations, and I couldn’t resist playing with it.

MyHeritage’s special animation menu

Immediately drawn to the “special animations” menu, I tried experimenting with my great-grandfather. To give a sense of the kind of results you can expect, this trio of photos shows the original image I uploaded followed by a restored version, and then one that’s been both restored and colorized — all using MyHeritage.

Original, restored, restored and colorized

Using the last of these as my starting point, I jumped into the animation menu. As might be expected, some work better than others depending on the specifics of the original image you start with. For the video up top, I selected “Dance 2,” and since it seemed he needed some music to rock out to, did a little video editing (using PhotoShop) to inject a background beat.

Here are a couple of additional examples to give a flavor of what you can anticipate should you decide to dive in, starting with my great-grandfather sending a kiss.

And much to my relief, agreeing that it was acceptable to him that I animated him. I’d like to think he’s forgiven me.