How to make a then-and-now video from decades-old company photos
Upload the old photographs and give Vizard Agent your website. It reads your current brand colours, typography and media from the live site, maps each archival photo before using it, and builds split screens that set the old equipment beside what you sell today.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Say what the comparison is. Vizard Agent needs to know which era each photograph belongs to and what it should be set against, because the difference between a slideshow and a then-and-now film is entirely in those pairings. Say the years too, because "thirty-five years later" is the whole hook.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
The whole form is a comparison, and it only lands when both halves are specific. Vizard Agent takes the present-day half from the live website, maps each old photo before designing anything, and cuts on the narration's words rather than on a fixed interval. In the session behind this article it:
- Looked at all four photographs, researched the company and the old equipment brands, and downloaded the originals at full size.
- Read the current website, pulled its images and brand identity, downloaded the present-day photos and the site's hero video, and mapped the site's drone footage shot by shot.
- Built a coordinate map of each old photo and reviewed all four, so the pans and crops were placed on what was actually in the frame.
- Wrote a layout library and segment renderers, rendered all fifteen scenes and reviewed them together on a contact sheet.
- Recorded the narration in a warm, older male voice, extracted its word timings and placed each scene change against them, for about 51.5 seconds at 1080x1920.
- Handled the corrections (a bigger logo, a resized headline, one brand name removed) as re-renders rather than a rebuild.
When does this not work well?
The form depends on archival material that is often in poor condition, and on claims about a company's past that had better be accurate. Vizard Agent will tell you what it cannot read in a photograph instead of inventing a plausible substitute. Very low-resolution scans get worse when enlarged, and a thin website leaves the modern half short.
Common questions
How many old photos do I need? Four is enough for a minute. Vizard Agent builds pans and split screens from each one rather than showing it flat.
Where does the modern footage come from? Your website, usually. Vizard Agent pulls current photos and any hero video already published there.
Will it invent history? No. Vizard Agent works from your photographs, your website and published sources, and reports what it could not establish.