Another wonderful testimonial.

A recent client, Angela Hallier of Phoenix, Arizona, just sent me a wonderful testimonial. Thanks, Angela!

Here’s what she wrote:

I bought a Family Legacy Video® for my father for Christmas. We did not know what to expect but Steve and his crew were professional from beginning to end. From the preinterview to production, it was seamless and my father felt very comfortable – and he was impressed with the detail and attention given in advance to the areas he would cover in his interview and the actual production of the video. We gathered as a family to watch his video “premiere” – we felt like we were watching a ready-for-TV documentary. The tears and laughter we had as a family watching my father’s video were priceless – not to mention the importance to our family of preserving my father’s memories and stories for generations to come. We cannot thank Steve enough – this was the best investment I have ever made!

Working with your video biographer: Travel.

In many ways, technology has certainly shrunk our world. All you have to do these days to get in touch with someone on the other side of the globe is dial a phone or log on to the Web; within seconds you can be chatting, either by voice or text. It’s easy as pie. But let’s say, after doing some research, you find that the video biographer you want to hire is located in another part of the country, like Tucson, Arizona? How easy will it be to work with someone who may be hundreds or thousands of miles away?

The short answer is that a long distance relationship with a video biographer can work quite well. In fact, I’ve worked with clients from coast to coast and points in-between. But there are some things to consider when looking for a professional outside your local area.

COST
Might as well deal with this issue first. Not a week goes by that I don’t get a call from a prospective client asking me if I can travel to their location outside Arizona. When I say yes, the next question is usually, “Does travel add to the cost?” Quite honestly, it does. A video biographer living and working in your area doesn’t have to bear the expenses that come with airfare, hotel rooms and rental cars. Your local pro also won’t need to spend an extra day’s worth of time traveling to your location and back home. In all fairness, it’s only right to reimburse the video biographer you hire for travel expenses. Personally, I don’t “mark up” travel – I just pass along the actual costs to the client. I can either add the costs to the agreed-upon budget or subtract them from the budget. Let’s say I have a budget of $20,000 and travel expenses of $2,000. To be able to devote all of the $20,000 to the video, I would add the $2,000. The client would then pay a total of $22,000. If the client can’t go as high as $22,000, I can subtract travel expenses, leaving $18,000 to devote to the actual video production.

COMMUNICATION
Staying in contact during the course of production is crucial. You’re likely to have lots of questions about the process and your video biographer will also need information from you. Some people prefer chatting face-to-face or just feel more secure dealing with someone local. However, a professional video biographer, working long distance, can consult with you and conduct preinterviews over the phone just as effectively as in person. One word of caution: You and your video biographer SHOULD NOT rely entirely upon e-mail. E-mails can sometimes be cryptic and incomplete; they also don’t convey emotion well. When I want to send a reminder or ask for a small bit of information, e-mail is fine. For anything more than that, I prefer to pick up the phone and call.

KEEPSAKES
If you do choose to work long distance, you’ll need to decide how to best get your family photos and other mementos into your video biographer’s hands for scanning and shooting. If you’re comfortable shipping your items make sure you wrap them well and cushion them to guard against damage. Clients have been shipping me photos, singly and in albums, for years. Nothing has ever been lost. The only damage in all these years resulted when a client sent a glass-covered photo that wasn’t properly protected, resulting in some breakage. While shipping long distance has worked fine, I understand that some families may be uncomfortable with the thought of packing up their old photos and trusting them to FedEx. That’s why I always ask my long distance clients if they have any photos or other items that they aren’t comfortable shipping – or that wouldn’t be practical to send to me. Knowing that, I can build in some extra time before or after the interview taping to scan or shoot the keepsakes on location.

Working with your video biographer: Visuals.

The foundation of a successful video biography is a well-researched, conducted and recorded interview. But just as important as what the storyteller says during his or her interview is what viewers see. Many times it’s just fine to have the storyteller on screen. Other times, the interview can be wonderfully enhanced by visuals that illustrate the incidents, people and places being described.

What do I mean by visuals? Photos, certainly. But visuals can also include family movies, newspaper and magazine clippings, yearbooks, wedding invitations, journal entries and memorabilia like medals, awards and trophies, etc. Knowing what kinds of visuals can best enhance a storyteller’s legacy video is one of the strengths a professional video biographer brings to the table.

When I first sign a client, we talk in a general way about the kinds of visuals that may be available within the family. Then, after I learn more about the storyteller during the preinterview process, I’ll send the client a specific “wish list” of all the visuals I think will help contribute to the video. After the on-camera interview, I often follow up with a final list, based on other stories that surfaced during the videotaping. These lists guide my clients during their searches for the perfect images to include in their legacy videos – and will often give them ideas for items they might never have considered. After all, as a professional visual storyteller I’m used to thinking visually – and I use this experience to help direct and inspire my clients as they search through their family archives.

Knowing how to use these visuals effectively is another strength a professional video biographer brings to a legacy video project. But that’s another story. Before you can use those visuals, however, you have to find them. And before you can find them, you have to know what to look for. A professional video biographer is just the one to guide you on “the hunt.”

Two more veterans’ stories preserved.

I recently interviewed two Korean-era vets for my Rotary club’s veterans project. This’ll make 9 interviews so far, with the first 7 being WWII vets. Hope to have these latest two up on the web and off to the Library of Congress by the end of the summer. If you’d like, check out what my club is doing for our vets at the Catalina Rotary Veterans Project site.

Another award-winning video biography!

I’m excited to be able to add another trophy to Family Legacy Video’s trophy case! It’s an Award of Distinction from the 2013 Communicator Awards. The honor came in the History/Biography category for the video biography entitled Isabelle Smith Lamb: Getting Down to Business. This four-part legacy video series featured the life story of Isabelle Lamb of Hoquiam, Washington and Tucson. You can view a clip from Isabelle’s custom video biography here.

The Communicator Awards is the leading international awards program honoring creative excellence for communications professionals. The international video competition attracted over 6,000 entries this year. The Communicator Awards are judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA), a 600+ member organization of leading professionals from various disciplines of the visual arts dedicated to embracing progress and the evolving nature of traditional and interactive media.

Video biography brings comfort after the loss of a loved one.

It happens every time I give a presentation about video biographies and Family Legacy Video: folks come up to me afterwards to say what a great service I perform and how they wish they’d created legacy videos for their parents or grandparents before it was too late. My heart always goes out to them, because I know how I would have felt if I hadn’t preserved my grandmother’s stories on video. Now that Gram is gone, I don’t think I could forgive myself if I’d let the opportunity pass. I recently received an e-mail from a Family Legacy Video client describing how thankful she was for a video biography she hired Family Legacy Video to create four years ago. I think her note provides an object lesson on the value of legacy videos:

Dear Steve, I hope you are doing well. I wanted to write to thank you and tell you how grateful I am we did a legacy video of my mom and her sister four years ago. Recently, I gave birth to our second daughter, Phoebe. A week later, my mom died unexpectedly in her sleep. Fortunately she was with us that week and spent some time holding Phoebe, but obviously Phoebe will never get to know her. A few days after it happened I remembered we had made the video and I felt a sense of relief. At least, I realized, she will have the chance to get to know her grandmother and hear her stories when we watch her video. I haven’t been able to look at it yet since she died because it’s still just too raw, but I hope to soon. I look forward to remembering her full of life and joy, as she was when she was alive. Thank you so much for the service you offer and for encouraging me to do this. I am so so grateful.

I urge you to take a cue from the letter above. Preserve your storyteller’s remembrances while there’s still time. And remember, Family Legacy Video is here to help.

The preinterview – a key step in preparing for a video biography interview.

One of the keys to a successful video biography interview lies in preparation – doing your homework, if you will. And one of the best ways to ready yourself, and your storyteller, for that all-important on-camera interview is to start your prep work with a preinterview. What’s a preinterview? As the name implies, it’s the interview before the interview. In other words, an interview you conduct with your storyteller before the actual shoot-day.

A preinterview takes the form of a casual conversation between you and the storyteller. It’s a opportunity for the two of you to meet and to build a rapport that will help your storyteller feel comfortable on camera. Very importantly, the preinterview gives you the chance to hear your storyteller’s life stories and to use the information you learn to construct questions that will elicit those stories on camera.

A preinterview is also a great time to explore – if an interesting memory surfaces during your conversation, feel free to ask about it and see where it takes your storyteller. You could dig up some very interesting remembrances that will surprise and delight your storytellers and their families.

In addition to helping you prepare questions, you’ll walk into the videotaping session knowing your storyteller’s background. If the storyteller gives you an incomplete answer while the camera is rolling, you’ll know it – and you’ll be able to ask a follow-up question to help fill in the rest of the picture.

The process is simple. Just schedule a time that’s convenient for your and your storyteller (you may or may not need multiple sessions). Come prepared with a pen and lots of paper for note-taking. If you don’t want to rely entirely on written notes, a small audio recorder is a great backup that will help you review the session at a later date. Then, start asking questions – and don’t forget to take notes!

In addition to helping you collect the background information you need to conduct a successful interview, a preinterview often helps “jump start” a storyteller’s thought processes. He or she will often remember additional stories in the time between the preinterview and the taping.

So do your homework and conduct a preinterview as you prepare for your next video biography interview. You’ll be glad you did.

Get your holiday gift certificate today!

Now that the holiday season is here, there’s not enough time to start and finish a video biography project in time Christmas or Hanukkah. But don’t despair! If you’d like to give a legacy video as a gift this year, you can do so with a Family Legacy Video gift certificate. If you book a project before the holidays, we’ll create a certificate announcing your gift and containing a personal message from you. We can either print the certificate and snail mail it to you or e-mail you a high resolution PDF that you can print. So don’t wait – contact Family Legacy Video and arrange for your gift certificate now!

The pros & cons of two different interview techniques.

If you’ve watched your fair share of documentaries, you’ve seen interview subjects presented in a variety of ways. Sometimes the storytellers speak directly to the camera. Other times they look left or right towards an unseen interviewer. Is one technique better than the other? And how do you choose?

The answer to the first question is “no.” Each technique is valid. Your decision on how to have your storyteller relate (or not relate) to the camera will be based on both stylistic and practical considerations.

The “facing the off-camera” interviewer look is a classic. It puts the viewer in the role of a third-party observer, kind of like watching someone through the one-way mirrors used in focus groups and police interrogation rooms. It’s comfortable – the storyteller is responding and relating to an unseen interviewer and you get to enjoy the conversation as well. By contrast, the “direct address” technique, where the storyteller faces the camera, breaks that one-way mirror. This style gives the impression that the storyteller is speaking directly to you, the viewer. This is a more forceful, “baring of the soul” style of interview.

Aside from these differences in style, there are some practical points to consider. The “off-camera” technique is generally easier to stage and shoot (more on that later). It’s also a technique that allows you as the interviewer to directly relate to, and engage, your storyteller. This one-to-one rapport is a vital component of a successful interview. By contrast, if you choose the “direct address” technique, your storyteller will need to speak to the camera. This is something that many folks, probably most of the people you’ll interview for video biographies, are not comfortable doing. It can also be confusing for the storytellers – where do they focus their attention? They’ll need to listen to you as you ask the question, and then remember to deliver their answer to the cold, glass eye of the camera.

There are devices designed to make this form of “direct address” interview easier on the storyteller. One takes the form of a modified teleprompter. A monitor mounted in front of the camera lens shows an image of the interviewer, but doesn’t block the image of the storyteller from being recorded. Google “interrotron” for information on one such device. As mentioned earlier, however, this adds a level of complexity (and expense) to your shoot that makes it a little more difficult than the “off-camera” technique – because you’ll need to buy or rent and set up extra gear.

Which style should you adopt? For most of your video biographies, the “off-camera” technique will probably work best. If you’re creating an ethical will, where the client wants to deliver personal messages “one-on-one” to relatives and friends, and is comfortable speaking to the camera, the “direct address” technique may be the ticket.

Use childhood memories to paint a picture of times gone by.

Horse-drawn wagons clip-clopping down city streets, frosty deliveries from the ice man, candy store bins filled with penny candy, the challenges of cooking on a coal-fired kitchen stove, getting from place to place by trolley – these sights, sounds and activities, once so common to daily life, have long faded away. But they live on in the memories of many of the storytellers recording legacy videos today – and you can use these memories, enhanced with archival photos and films, sound effects and music, to paint a vivid picture of life in days past.

Case in point: I recently finished the video biography of a wonderful lady who was born in Queens, New York, in 1916. Knowing that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren would love to learn what her world was like when she was a youngster, I made sure to ask her lots of questions about her neighborhood and her way of life in the early 1900s. She recalled a time when three sticks of gum cost a penny, sanitation men called ash-haulers came to take away the ash generated by coal and wood-fired stoves and hand-cranking was the only way to start the few automobiles around. Some research turned up archival photos to help illustrate her descriptions. Combined with period music, these elements combined to create a vivid picture of the world that existed during her childhood.

As the opening chapter of her legacy video, the segment provides her family with a very fun and fascinating glimpse into the past. But it also helps put the storyteller’s life in context. None of us live on a blank canvas. We are all products of certain when’s and where’s that influence and inform our lives. Painting in those “background elements” helps flesh out a life story, giving viewers greater insight into the storyteller’s motivations and life choices.

So don’t forget to pay attention to context. It’ll help you craft a much more complete picture of that important storyteller in your family.