Spy Party Passports

It completely slipped my mind to do a tutorial on the passports for the Spy Party until someone asked. Sorry!

I took my own passport and opened it and scanned the cover. I placed the scan into a document and copied and pasted so I had two on a sheet to save paper when it came to printing. I made them slightly smaller than a real passport size.

Then I flipped over my passport and scanned the inside page with the picture and details.

I opened the scan in Photoshop.

I made a new layer and then proceeded to draw boxes over the stuff that needed to be erased or changed. So, I boxed out my photo and name, birthdate, etc. I just messed around until I found a color that faded into the background and it was different for most of the boxes since the background gradates. 

Then I saved this as my template. For each person, I created a new identity. I just made up names that were somehow based on something related to spying, like Hunt or Trace and for their first names I picked names of British origin that started with the first letter of their real names. So Gabe became Greyson Hunt. Why? I don't know. Just some rule to follow for consistency. 

I made up birth dates and places. I also changed the coding on the bottom of the passport. It has numbers like your passport number and birthdate embedded in it, and I replaced it mostly with my new made up numbers, but I also just filled in with random numbers.

I printed each identity, no photo, and I also printed some pages with stamps (you can find clip art for free on the internet that looks like passport stamps.) I placed everything into document pages so that I could have doubles printed per page like with the cover.(First, double check that all your dimensions are the same.)

I cut them down to size and stapled each passport together.

On a separate file, I made a box that was the same size as the box for the photo on the passport. This way I could quickly drag the photos to resize them when the time came. You could just change the dimensions a menu if you preferred.

Then when the guests arrived, I had them stand against a blank wall and snapped a picture of them. Once I had them all, Matt started spy training, and I uploaded the photos, used my box to quickly resize them, and printed the pictures to photo paper. I left it like above so I could just cut right on the line.

I cut them out and used a glue stick to attach them to their passports. Once spy training was done, each guest received his or her new identity for the mission.

The kids were all very excited that they were allowed to take home their passports.