Modern WordPress Carousel Creation

I want to enrich my WordPress site with a custom-built, visually striking carousel that spotlights historical figures and their achievements. Images will take center stage for the first release, arranged in a smooth, responsive slider with a clean, modern aesthetic. Text captions and, later on, short videos must be easy for me to add through the WordPress back-end without touching code.

You’ll handle everything from design mock-ups to final integration: styling the slider so it blends with my existing theme, adding subtle animations or parallax effects for extra impact, and optimizing load times for both desktop and mobile. A lightweight custom plugin or a well-structured theme component is fine—as long as I can manage slides through the standard media library and reorder them by drag-and-drop.

Deliverables:
• Fully responsive, modern image slider integrated into my current WordPress site
• Admin interface to add/edit images, captions, and future video clips
• Smooth touch/keyboard navigation and lazy-loading for performance
• Cross-browser testing and clear hand-off notes so I can expand the carousel later

If you have experience with JavaScript slider libraries (e.g., Swiper, Slick, GSAP) or crafting bespoke Gutenberg blocks, let me know—those skills will be a plus.