How To Prepare For A Liberty Heritage Documentary

A Liberty Heritage documentary or family history video is a wonderful way to honor your family members and create a lasting legacy for future generations.

Here are 6 primary steps that you can do in preparation for your Heritage documentary.

6 Steps To Making A Family Heritage Documentary

Step 1: Arrange Selected Family Members To Be Interviewed

It’s up to you how many family members you’d like to interview. The important thing to remember is that elders are here and gone before you know it, so don’t procrastinate. Even if you’re not quite ready for us to begin your documentary, go ahead and sit down with your family members and record their stories. The key thing to remember when interviewing a family member is that you want them to be as comfortable as possible so that their true personality comes out. So choose a location and time where they will be most relaxed. Also, to help trigger their memories, have on hand old memorabilia and photos. Or have them watch old home movies and record them describing what they are seeing and remembering.

Step 2: Gather Photos, Memorabilia and Old Home Movies

 Look for items that were discussed in the interviews that you can overlay on top of what they’re describing.

Items might include old heirloom jewelry, a stack of love letters, a wedding dress, artifacts from wars, children’s clothes, old money, etc.

Step 3: Draft An Outline

You can make your documentary super simple and just play one interview right after the next, overlaying images of what each person is saying. Or you can get fancy and categorize the interviews into subject matters and weave together the interviews based on stories or periods of time. There is a whole art to the storytelling process, we encourage you to discuss the outlining process with one of our Liberty Entertainment Group representatives.

Step 4: Upload or Mail Footage, Photos & Written Interviews To Liberty Entertainment Group

Depending on how much footage you have, your existing flash drive or email messaging may or may not be able to handle all that video data. Please consult with one of our representatives to figure out the best way to get your material to us, if necessary we will create a special cloud account to expidite the process or we can simply have you mail it to us and we will scan/digitize it on our end.   

Step 5: Let Us Assemble Your Documentary

There is no right or wrong way to edit your documentary. But we would like to review with you our basic video editing and layout process to help you get the best possible result.

Step 6: Share Your Liberty Heritage Documentary At The Next Family Gathering 

What a great gift to share Heritage Video at your next family reunion or holiday gathering. Imagine the laughter and tears when family members watch their personal history play out before their eyes. We can either upload the video to cloud storage, burn DVD’s or hook up your computer to a projection screen at your event.

Like to learn more? Contact our friendly staff at Liberty Entertainment Group for pricing and more information.

 Call: Main 213-422-2878 Voice: 323-305-4676 ● E-mail: info@libertyentertainmentgrp.com
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Persuading Elders to Record Their Family History on Video

Many of our elders are hesitant to have the stories of their lives captured on video. Some are fearful of the camera and are intimidated by their perceived notion of the interview experience. Others are simply humble or don’t believe that their stories are worthy of being told. Here are a few ways to approach the more resistant elders of your family, as well as some ideas about how to actually conduct their family history interview.

 The best time to approach resistant parents or elder relatives is during a family gathering, reunion or holiday. When multiple family members share their desire to have their elders’ stories recorded for their grandchildren and future generations to enjoy, the fears that the elders hold can surely be trumped by the love and respect that they now feel.

  Let them know that they are doing you a favor. Preface with, “It’s important to me and the rest of our family to record the stories of your life. Your history is my history, and I really want your grandchildren to know where they came from.”

 Deep down everyone wants someone to care about who they are and the stories that they have to tell, even if they say otherwise. By highlighting your desire to keep the family legacy alive eternally, you can crack through their walls of fear and humility.

Choose a setting that is familiar and comfortable to the elder being interviewed. Their home or the home of their children will create a relaxed atmosphere which will greatly enhance the quality of their storytelling.

To help elders feel more at ease with this experience, get a third party to perform the interview. Many times family baggage and judgment can get in the way of honest disclosure, and an experienced interviewer will create a safe and supportive space for your elders to relay their stories freely.

Hire a professional videographer to record the interview. When you get your elders to agree to the experience of sharing their stories, you want to be sure that the video is produced successfully. Many aspects such as lighting, sound and editing can be overwhelming for a family member or amateur to produce effectively. Also, many times the videographer is also the interviewer, so be sure to have him or her meet the interviewee before the day of the recording to create a comfortable rapport. Don’t hesitate to ask for samples and references to assure that you hire a truly experienced and responsible professional.

Like to learn more? Contact our friendly staff at Liberty Entertainment Group for pricing and more information.

 Call: Main 213-422-2878 Voice: 323-305-4676 ● E-mail: info@libertyentertainmentgrp.com

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Considerations for Your Tribute Video Production

There are only a few great ways to honor a life, celebrate a career, or just say “thank you”. And one of the best is a Liberty Tribute Video®.

Tribute videos are really just another kind of life story video, but are made with an audience in mind wider than just the subject and their family. Often (but not always) the tribute video will be screened at an event coinciding with an anniversary, a birthday, a memorial, or a retirement. So it will be important to tell the story of your subject’s life. But you will need to do it in a way that is informative as well as entertaining and – if you are up for it – humorous.

Liberty Entertainment Group will help to give you some ideas about the kind of material you should think about including in your tribute. And we are going to give you some suggestions for themes that will make the video more interesting, and possibly even funny. And we will talk briefly about pacing…

Elements and Assets

In the tribute video production business we sometimes think of projects in terms of their “elements” – that is, the pictorial, textual, graphical, audio and/or video elements that are going to be included. Each of these elements – once they have been created – will be imported into the project’s video editor as “assets”.

Many of the tribute video elements are obvious: titles, personal photographs, stock images maybe (to illustrate a career step for instance), music, and picture captions.

Some elements are less obvious, but more fun: video stories and testimonials from friends and family (easy to gather these days from the far flung when everyone has a smart phone that is video and audio enabled); voice over or narration telling the story of your subject (also easy to create with an Android or iPhone); or text screens with favorite sayings, inspirational quotes, life steps or other narrative points.

What else? Well, you can think about shooting interview footage of the subject themselves either in a static interview setup or as they go about some task or pastime; hunting out archive footage illustrating a time or a place relevant to the subject; finding archive or stock images that might be brought in to illustrate a point (e.g. the home town, a favorite book or film, a vacation spot etc.) or used for comic effect. Also, sound effects can add depth and texture to an image – or signal a laugh point.

As part of your planning process, think about what there is out there and what can be created that could be used to create this killer tribute. Think also about whether you want a theme, or a running gag.

Who to Include

A career tribute should certainly include business associates – not just people of the same rank but those who may have reported to the subject, and those who might have supervised them (even the boss usually has a board of directors…). For business people, also consider customers and suppliers.

If the subject has a family, by all means include video of the kids and grandkids. (Nothing a grandparent likes more than seeing the little ones being all cute on the big screen.)

But watch the weighting of the family material – while the subject may not have any limits when it comes to the kids (!) don’t bore the rest of your audience.

A Word About Pacing

Liberty Tribute Videos can unfold like the documentary that they are; but tribute videos need to be more fast-paced. Images, which in a video biography might stay on the screen for 10 or more seconds, need to come and go in 3 or 4 seconds. And while you might get away with just two or three elements in a video memoir, in a tribute video it helps to have 6 or 7 different elements and two or three story strands.

Text will need to be bold, and possibly animated; transitions will need to be sharper and the whole project should not be longer than 20 minutes. Actually, something between 10 and 15 minutes will be about the right length. Remember, you want to leave your audience wanting more – not less.

A truly great project will need some planning, and some patience. The use of smart phones can certainly take some cost out of the project, but also consider using a dedicated video camera with external microphones for best production values. Done properly, few gifts are as well appreciated and as widely enjoyed both now and forever as a tribute video.

Contact one of our friendly staff at Liberty Entertainment Group for pricing and more information.

Call:    Main~   213-422-2878     Voice~   323-305-4676

E-mail: info@libertyentertainmentgrp.com