Personal Documentary Production Process - Part 1

Most of our productions are broken into chapters. Whether they're numbered or otherwise obvious to a viewer, there are natural breaks in a story that we incorporate into the finished documentary video. Chapters also break larger projects into smaller chunks so that they seem less daunting when we take them on.

It's fitting, then, that I break down the description of the production process down into chapters.

The first chapter begins before cameras ever roll. The fancy term for it is "pre-production" but it's really just homework. And we rely on you to do a lot of it. That's right. You hire us to tell your or your loved ones' life story and the first thing we do is assign you homework.

Actually, it's the second thing we do. First we meet -- either in person or by phone -- to establish the story's timeline. Most of our subjects won't be famous enough to warrant their own wikipedia pages so we can't just go online to research their stories. Besides, this is your story, or that of a loved one, the way you want it told. These early discussions tell us what you want covered in the story so we know what to ask when we get to doing the on-camera interviews.

(In fact, we have some of these conversations before you hire us just so we know what your expectations are. This can eliminate unwelcome surprises later in the process.)

Things we need to know include dates of birth, parents' names and occupations, schools attended, sports played, date of wedding, dates of children's births, time and location of any military service, and other significant milestones of the subject's life.

It's important to note that even a full-length documentary running 40-50 minutes won't detail every moment in the subject's life. You don't have to account for everything you ever did. You're looking for the highlights -- the stories you really want to share.

Then you get the homework, which is finding family photographs and any home videos that show us all of these watershed events. We have access to historical and stock footage that can supplement the material from your family archives and we can use footage from historical events that put your story into the perspective of its times.

As much as I'd be happy to flip through your photo albums, only you know which pictures document significant moments in your or your loved one's life. I also don't know who is who in your family yet. By the end of the production I'll be able to look at a photo, know who's in it and even have a good guess when it was taken but at the beginning, we need your help. You need to organize your photos so that when it's time for us to scan them, we have all the ones we need to tell the story.

For a lot of people, the tough part won't be finding enough pictures. It will be finding too many and having to decide which ones to use. You might have 100 cute baby pictures but there's only so long we can talk about someone's infancy before the story starts dragging. The other limit we have in how many pictures to use is the time it takes to scan them all. Two hundred photos takes about 5 hours to scan. It can take more time than doing the on-camera interviews. As film cameras become more obsolete, more photos will already be in digital form so that helps but for most of our subjects, we'll be digitizing printed photos.

The great thing about going through the old photos is the memories it brings back. If you are not the subject of the story, have them work with you to select the photos. The memory refresher will help put them at ease going into the interview. In fact, we will do part of the interview just going through the stack of photos.

But we'll talk about the interview later. Watch examples of family history stories and other video biographies at personal-documentary.com.