Keren and Danni are wonderfully adventurous, but I didn't want them agreeing to something that they couldn't understand or conceive of; they were ecstatic with the basic concept of 'Keren & Danni made up of photos of family and friends', but how that related to a real-life image and animation was a bit of a quantum leap (i.e. that's why the path from concept to reality relies on artistic creativity). So I did a very quick test run one afternoon.

I got Keren to send me a photo. Unfortunately the photo of the couple didn't really fit my concept for colourful, so I had to manipulate the colours a little, to get it closer to where I was wanting to head: 

The PhotoMosaic was created with AndreaMosaic Professional, which I was going to use for the actual piece, and for which I purchased a Professional Licence (it's great software, by-the-way, and Andrea offers a free version as well that is very usable).

I'm not sure where I sourced the tile images from now, but this was my first attempt at creating a mosaic image that was adjusted so that the background was subdued colourfully.

I ended up creating two mosaics: one for the background and one for the foreground and cut them together in GIMP.

I obviously needed to experiment more with the process, but the test was sufficient to convince Keren & Danni that the end point would be acceptable, so they gave their ascent to the project and I started coding the web pages that would let their friends and family drop in the thousands of photos that I'd need to make the mosaic work.