Video Biographies

Creating Video Biographies

With today’s digital technology it’s a lot easier to document our own life and/or the lives of people we care about. So if you have a digital video camera and editing software, you can create a video biography yourself.

Gathering Resources

If you have never seen a family video biography, do a Google search on the topic and you will find samples produced by professional videographers and amateurs. Here’s one YouTube sample, The Turner Family Biography.

Most family videos consist of an interview with one or more individuals about their history of their life. Interviewing at least two people, say a mother and a father, is often more interesting, providing an additional voice and perspective in the video.  Most good family video productions run from 30-90 minutes – the shorter the better – and includes lots of cutaway images and video footage which illustrate the content of the interview.

You will need to collect and scan as many family photos, existing digital images and other artifacts as possible related to your interviewee(s).

Interview Questions & Outline

Next, you will need to come up with a list of 25-50 questions for your interview. Great Life Stories has a good starter list of questions, for the various times and aspects of an individual’s life. They include questions about birth place, school days, employment, hobbies, travel, places of worship, triumphs and tragedies, and words of wisdom.

Next, you will want to have an outline of your video in mind. You don’t have to necessarily start off with the beginning of a person’s life. You can start off with the most important time of a person’s life and then work backwards and then forwards from there.

Interview Setup

The setup for an interview is fairly easy. Select an area with lots of window light, especially if you don’t have lighting equipment to do your interview. Have the interviewee(s) facing the light.

See this Videomaker magazine tutorial for setting up a light system.

Video Camera Setup

You will definitely want to put your video camera on a tripod since your tripod will be stationary throughout most of the interview. About every three or four questions, you should vary the range of your shots from wide, medium to close-up. Experiment also with shooting from slightly different angles.