Making Eileen Shea Baltrusaitis’s Tribute Video

My mom died on October 3rd, 2025 at the age of 80. In the weeks that followed, I looked through 6,000+ photos and over 6 hours of home videos to make this tribute. The video made its debut at Eileen’s Celebration of Life on November 1st.

I co-wrote the script with my siblings and my dad and we had an AI voice on elevenlabs.io do the voiceover. I also wrote the prompts for the background music and ambient city street noises, also generated by elevenlabs.io, with some help refining the prompts by Gemini,. 

Many of the photos were in rough shape or were in black and white. I used Nano Banana in Google’s AI Studio to restore and recolor many of the photos, then did touch ups in Photoshop and Lightroom. I had some doubts about whether this felt authentic, but I decided to do it anyway. They look better and tell a better story. Here are some examples.