I made a movie, or rather, I asked picasa to make me a movie out of an album of tagged photos. It’s based on photos of a friend in different situations, so the transition to pan and zoom to face works quite nicely. Thanks picasa.
Playback in picasa doesn’t allow looping the movie, unfortunately. It also gets the cpu and the fans going high blast (on a “mature” MacBook Pro). So I tried playback in VLC as well as Quicktime Player. Both allow looping, but VLC also tended to bump up cpu usage (and fan noise). Quicktime, not all that surprisingly, was quietest of the three. Guess it makes sense, as QT is an apple product and .mov a QT format.
So for this birthday party I’ll be setting up the movie to loop the movie full screen using Quicktime Player. Nice gift, if I do say so myself. 
