Resurrecting the Covingtons

Earlier this week I posted on social media an animated video of my paternal great-great grandparents using as its basis two 165-year-old photographs.

Today’s AI video features great-grandparents from my mother’s side — Richard Anderson Covington and Nancy Margaret Hunley Covington. Born in North Carolina, Richard and Nancy left for Missouri shortly after the end of the Civil War and were married in 1872.

The couple posed for a photograph with the first four of their five children around 1884. I’m confident the date is correct within a year either way because their youngest, Judy and Ruffin, who look to be about four and two, were born in 1880 and 1882 respectively, and the family’s fifth child, who isn’t pictured, wasn’t born until 1886.  

The children in the photograph are (from left) Lucy Dillard, Sally Elizabeth, Charles Ruffin, and, leaning on her father’s leg, Judy Walker, my grandmother.

How did I create a video from a 150 year-old photo? 

I conceived and “directed” the video, but the heavy lifting was done by Google Gemini.

I started by uploading the original photo .… 

… and asked Gemini to sharpen and colorize it in colors that were popular in the 1880s.

I then instructed AI to use it as the basis for a 10-second video. Here are my instructions:

Create a realistic 10-second historical video using this photo as the starting frame. The scene is set in an 1880s indoor parlor with natural window light. From 0 to 5 seconds, the family (parents and four children) are gathered and posing, looking toward an unseen camera. The parents sit calmly with serious expressions, while the four children naturally and subtly fidget (blinking, small head turns, shifting weight). The camera slowly and very gently zooms in on them. At 6 seconds, the off-screen photographer's voice is heard saying, "OK, everyone!". Immediately after he says this, the camera flash goes off, illuminating the parlor with a bright white magnesium flash powder explosion, overexposing the screen for 1 second. From 7 to 10 seconds, the flash fades away cleanly, revealing a perfectly still, vintage high-contrast black-and-white version of the family photo, which holds completely motionless until the end of the clip.

As devout Baptists, the Covingtons believed in the Resurrection. While they could never have envisioned the technology of the 21st century, I like to think they would be pleased knowing that, 142 years after they gathered in their parlor wearing their Sunday best, one of their descendants would find a way to resurrect that sweet moment.