When you spend thirty plus years interviewing people, you truly understand there are great stories in every family. When a person tells a story that is significant to them, often they create a magical transformation where the listener goes with them to another place and time, seeing the events through the storyteller’s eyes. Making a video of treasured stories of parents and grandparents is now our responsibility. We lucky Baby Boomers and Generation X folks have both spurts of wisdom and the technology to preserve our important family stories and the essence of loved ones as we see them today.
Making a video, (to be played as a DVD) is like giving generations we will never meet a time machine back to our lives today. What would it be worth to you to see your parents as they set out into the world, or in their forties and fifties, vibrant, beautiful, and energized by their life and family? Your children and grandchildren would love to see you talking and laughing and relaying the stories that changed your life path or helped you cope with personal tragedy. The telling of these stories is a way to connect with future generations and capture your essence. Today we can affordably capture the essence of an entire family. It is priceless.
From personal experience I know it can be overwhelming to complete a legacy video on one’s own family. For some reason the complexities of relationships and the sheer abundance of experiences makes it difficult to pick a starting point. Some of the benefits of outside help include objectivity, clarity, and experience coordinating all aspects of a shoot. Professional editing allows applicable pictures of people and things to be added at the ideal moment for added impact. Background music, lighting, multiple angles that flatter and captions that appear as needed add substance.
Recently a friend of mine in her forties attended the funeral of her grandmother, who died at age 95. Afterwards, all her sisters and brothers were sitting around the living room talking and their children were all on the floor listening to them talk about their favorite memories of Nana. Her sister commented, "Wow, it was not long ago when we were sitting on the floor, do you remember?" Do you want the last thing you leave behind to be a memory of how you look in your casket or do you want family members and the next generation to see you in your prime; vibrant and vital? This responsibility to share our history with the children next to come is a gift that will touch lives in ways we know not. It’s time to get it done!
Kimberly Schenk – About the Author:
Kimberly Schenk is the owner of My Story Studios in Boulder, CO. We help people all over the US tell their personal stories with professional, state of the art videos on DVD. Family legacy videos, tributes, biographies, engagement stories, tales of an era, all become family treasures and connect generations in a compelling, true to life, experience. If you liked this article please visit us at: http://www.mystorystudios.com