Hello!
Our parishes recently held a Canonization Party for Blessed Carlo Acutis and our family helped host it! His canonization got postponed because of the death of Pope Francis but we decided to go ahead with the party. It was so great, I did a post about it here. I designed a slideshow with quotes, photos and information about his life that we had playing throughout the night! I had a lot of fun making it and I’m very happy with how it turned out! I’ll share some more about it below.
What’s something you liked about it (and why)? I loved the satisfaction of good design choices. I didn’t really like having to come up with ideas or how I’d start most of the slides without knowing what to do for it. But it was super satisfying when I’d decide to do a certain design or add some elements that I thought looked really nice. I accomplished this on almost every slide so I love the slideshow as a whole (I didn’t necessarily get this on the ones that are really plain but I still like how they turned out). There’s several individual slides that I really like too, such as the 3rd one about his parents, the 9th one about video games, the 15th one with his quote and more, I just like the designs of them and the elements I added.
I also liked how God brought the information together. There were certain parts of his life that I wanted to talk about and I think I got into them really well, without too many details. It just kind of finished naturally once I had talked about what I wanted to, so that was very satisfying. I’m sure there’s more I don’t know about or that I missed, and maybe I should have added more that I started to see. I’ve since heard more about how he converted his babysitter so I should have added that. But at the time it felt complete, which was nice, things don’t always work out that way for me.
What’s something you disliked about it (and why)? My least favorite part of the process was figuring out all of the technology when we got to the event space. It took us a while to figure out the best projector because they weren’t very bright. We ended up finding a big whiteboard which we propped up on easels, so that helped—but in my opinion, it looked kind of weird. We also went with a different projector at the last minute and I think it was brighter, so that was good. But for some reason it made the screen of my computer different and during the party I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the bar at the bottom of the slideshow with the play button and other settings. That wasn’t great. It was still pretty dim, it looked kind of janky on the tilted whiteboard and it was projecting a few inches onto the wall too.
So I didn’t like the process of figuring out all the settings and technology, it took a while and just isn’t my favorite thing to do. Also, based on the stuff above, I felt like the slideshow didn’t look very nice which was disappointing because of all my work and the fact that I really liked how it turned out. But it wasn’t that bad, it could have been worse.
What was your biggest takeaway or lesson? This was such a great, interesting experience for me. Between finding photos of him, figuring out what to say, checking a few places online so that I was pretty confident it was true (I’m still not 100% confident everything in there is right, it’s hard to know what really happened.), arranging it all visually and adding colors and graphics to make it look nice, then eventually having to connect it to a projector in the actual space, getting it to look good there, having to change some colors of the slides and switching the size of the whole presentation after we had tested it, etc., it was a really good opportunity and experience for me.
Probably my biggest takeaway was growing closer to Blessed Carlo through this project and being reminded of and learning new things about him. Another big takeaway was some of the design choices I made and how to make slides that, I think, look nice. And just the experience of making a slideshow that I’m proud of and like the look of!
What is something you’re curious to learn more about as a result of this experience? We’ve been hearing a lot about Blessed Carlo lately, this week we went to see “Carlo Acutis: Roadmap to Reality” in the theatre, so I’m not sure if it was completely started from this experience but I’d like to learn more about him! He is so fascinating and there’s so many remarkable parts of his life. It was neat to compile a lot of basic information about him into one place. Blessed Carlo is such a huge inspiration to me! I’m looking forward to when he becomes a saint.
Thank you for reading!
If you’d like to check out the slideshow, here it is!
Lucy