Your life story video leaves your wisdom behind

A Cornell University professor says that even though your parents might need help operating the remote controls to their televisions, they have expertise to share with you.

"They know how to live through hard times," Karl Pillemer told PBS's Newshour. He gleaned this insight from interviews with elderly Americans for his new book "30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans."

Pillemer's interview on PBS includes excerpts of conversations he recorded with some of his subjects.



This is just another example of the gospel we try to preach: EVERYONE has experiences, memories and wisdom worth recording for their children and grandchildren. We can do productions ranging from simple interviews to full-scale documentary productions.

Please watch examples of our work, and contact us about how we can create a video biography that will preserve their life story for generations to come.

Your History is American History

You may not have ancestors who fought in the Civil War like this Florida man, but our country's history is little more than the collective history of its individuals.

Your story -- and that of your parents -- is worth documenting and saving so that your future generations will have first-hand accounts of their history.

Robert De Niro's Regret

Even someone who tells people's stories for a living sometimes needs the importance of life stories pointed out to them.

Esquire magazine writer Cal Fussman, interviewing Robert De Niro, asked the actor if he had any regrets. De Niro said that he wished he had made a film about his family. But it was too late.

"When a parent dies," De Niro said, "it's the end."

Fussman wrote:

He told me he'd always wanted to chronicle his family history through his mother. He sensed a part of her wanted to do it, too, and he offered to send over some people to record it. But she was a little antsy, so he backed off. Not long afterward, she died. And what he wanted to preserve for his children was gone.

When I walked away from that lunch I knew exactly what I had to do. My own parents were about to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, and my brother and I were throwing a party for them. We'd booked a banquet room in a hotel and invited family and friends. We figured we'd have good food, dancing, and some speeches. But now there was something else.

I got a tripod, mounted an ordinary video camera on it, and set it before my parents. I asked them about their marriage, their lives, and what they'd learned along the way.

I went out and filmed family talking about them. I filmed their friends. Then I got a college student to weave the best footage together and insert old photos. My brother jumped in to help edit.

We made a movie.

We broke this forty-five minute film into seven segments and showed it on a big screen at the party. It brought forth laughs. It brought forth tears. My parents called it the best night of their lives. I don't know if their great-grandchildren will ever meet them. But they will have that film.

At the end of the credits there was a thank you to Robert De Niro. It never would have happened without him.

It can be easy to overlook the stories that are right in front of you, or to think that no one would find them interesting, or to intend to do it "someday" only to see, as Robert De Niro did, that someday may be too late.

I've learned this too. I wanted to tell the story of my aunt and uncle. Thanks to my maternal grandfather's need to keep up with the Joneses, he owned a color motion picture camera and there are color films of both my mother and her older brother dating back to the mid 1940s.

My aunt was born in Germany as World War II began. Though she was young, she remembered the German surrender. The occupying Americans "were like saviors," she said. No wonder she later married an American.

Their story had great potential and the project sat on my "to do" list. Then I got an e-mail from a cousin. My uncle had died. I knew his health was poor but I thought I had more time. He was only 68. There's always tomorrow. Until there isn't.

Whether you do it yourself with a home video camera, as Cal Fussman did, or you hire us to do it, don't wait to tell your family's story. I can't promise that your parents will call the day they see their life story on video the best one of their lives. But I can guarantee that if their great-grandchildren never meet them in person, they will know them. They will have that film.

This clip from my own parents' life story video includes some of that old home film footage I mentioned above. Watch more examples of our work at Personal-Documentary.com.

Video Biography Viewers Should Not Feel a Pebble in Their Shoes

Editing video is not finished when you've put the audio and video together. "Rough cut" is a great term for it because there are usually some jagged edges that need smoothing after the first edit. Just like a pebble in your shoe, you might not notice it first, and, once you do realize it's there, it might not bother you that much. But walk a mile and that pebble will be the only thing you can think about.

Real editing is walking miles in your viewers' shoes. You watch the piece over and over until you find all the pebbles and get rid of them.

And then you do it again.

Something less obvious will pop up when you watch again with fresh eyes. You fix that. Repeat as necessary. Then you know you're giving someone a documentary video that they can watch over and over and never notice any flaws because they will not watch it as often, or as carefully, as you did before you let them see it.



This is a re-edit of the documentary video I did about my own parents, adding music and other production elements not featured in the original. The interviews were done in 2004 in standard definition, which is why they don't fill the screen. The photographs are much higher resolution than hi-def video so the majority of the video will adapt well to Blu-Ray, even with some old SD video included.

How Historical Footage Adds to Personal Video Biographies

If you have visited this blog before, or our website, then you know that we integrate footage from historical events to put the subject's story into the context of his or her times.

Thanks to sites like the Internet Archive, more and more material is available online. Much of it is in the public domain and free for us to use in our productions.

Here is an example I recently ran across. It was a speech President Richard Nixon made from the Oval Office April 30, 1973 about "what has come to be known as the Watergate affair."



Anyone who was above childhood age at that time will probably have some memory about Watergate. It was certainly the signature event in the mid-1070s in the United States and may shed some light on the culture of that time in a video biography subject's life.

It's great for children and grandchildren to see how their relative's life coincided with events they might have seen only in history books or on television somewhere. Including it in a life story video demonstrates to those descendants the history through which the subject lived.

From a pure production standpoint, it adds another visual element that enlivens the story as it enriches the audience.

Of course, to use historical footage, you have to know history as well as where to look for clips that fit in with the subject's life story. Examples of our work should show that we know how to weave a historical perspective into a personal documentary that will help future viewers see the subject's time in history and, perhaps, his or her part in it.

Family Documentary Chapter Video

This chapter of a video biography required editing around the fact that no photos of this couple together exist until after they've been married for more than a year. Ordinarily, we don't include mentions of prior boyfriends but, as you will see, this unique circumstance warranted an exception.



The interviews don't fill the screen because they were shot in 2004 on standard definition equipment. We are updating this story to high-def, which is widescreen rather than the 4:3 aspect ratio that most standard def used to be.

Photos are scanned at a resolution much higher than even high-definition video so we have no trouble filling the frame with them from that standpoint. Some portraits would include only the eyes and nose of the subject if we had them fill the frame horizontally. That's why you see black bars on the sides of some of the photos.

Family Documentary Video Chapter

Here is a chapter from a video biography with interviews, photographs, historical footage and narration used to fashion a family documentary story. This one features footage from a color motion picture camera owned by the subject's father in the 1940s.