Memories: They are worth preserving!
By: Marc Percy
Think back over the course of your life and all the memories you have and how the events of your life have brought you to where you are today. How well do you remember the details of those events? Certainly the more meaningful the event the more you remember, but with the passage of time the details can begin to fade or even be taken from you. With video, you can capture those moments in life so the details are preserved and you can share them with future generations. If you saw the movie 50 First Dates, you saw an extreme example of this, when Adam Sandler’s character made a video of his wife’s life that she played every morning. His wife (Drew Barrymore) had a condition where she forgot what happened everyday and had to be reminded of how she got to where she is, who he was, along with the fact that they had a daughter.
By recording the meaningful events of your life, you provide the perfect way to relive those moments in the future. You will use a variety of devices to film the everyday events of life, from cell phones to small camcorders, but for the more important times, you will want to consider hiring a professional to capture those moments, as they will make sure to capture great video and equally as important, great audio. Before long, you will have a nice collection of video that you may want to put together to form a nice keepsake to remember a particular time period of your life and you may want to consider hiring someone to edit it together for you. At the very least you have captured many moments of your life that can be used to remember you after you are gone.
The events that you decide you want to record are entirely up to you, but here are some ideas and the best way to capture them:
Everyday life/spur of the moment – These unplanned moments are the little things that bring joy to your life, especially when you have children. Always have your cell phone, camera or camcorder close by to capture them. You can immediately share them on Facebook, YouTube or maybe even a family blog, but you will want to keep the original video in a safe place. In the past, everything was recorded to small video tapes, but today more things are stored digitally, so you will want to store them on external hard drives, DVDs and/or by using an online storage site.
Birthdays – There are two ways to record birthdays, either do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you. When you try to do it yourself, it is extremely difficult to get everything that is going on because you are also worried about getting things done (i.e. getting the candles on the cake, cooking food, etc). When you hire someone to film a birthday party, that frees you up to only concentrate on the party and the person the party is for; the professional will handle capturing the moment. Another benefit of hiring someone is it allows you to be in the video as well. That may not be important to you now, but it will be very important to your children as they go to watch this in the years to come.
Weddings – This is probably the most common event to hire a professional to film. Unfortunately, video is usually one of the last things booked for the wedding and usually one of the first to drop off if the budget gets tight. Twenty years from now, all you will have left from your wedding are your photos and video because the flowers, cake, decorations, DJ and the food will all be gone. If you don’t have a video, you will only have slices of time in your photos, but with video you have the sights and sounds of the day. Wedding videos have evolved a long way from 10 years ago and can be mini movies.
Planned Moments – Then there are times when you want to plan to record a particular moment in life, other than the ones mentioned above. Much like you schedule times to get photos taken, video can once again capture the moments that are important to you. At Visually Remember, we offer a product called Living in the Moments which is designed for this purpose. We take it a step further than just doing video, by bringing in a photographer to create a one of a kind keepsake that incorporates both the photos and video from the session.
The last thing that needs to be mentioned is the need to backup the video, photos and other memories that you have. As mentioned above, you can use external hard drives, DVDs or online storage to keep them, but you also need to think about protecting the final product for the future. All media will degrade over time and the wedding that you have filmed and delivered on DVD or even VHS won’t play forever (or players may not be available) and you will need to convert the formats to whatever is common for the day. Even DVDs will need to be rewritten to another DVD over time, as the disc will become unplayable. Of course storing them in a cool place (not in your attic or garage) and keeping them in their cases will prolong the life as much as possible. External hard drives need to be powered up frequently to keep the data fresh. Online storage has the potential to be the best overall solution, but that requires a monthly fee (for a secure site that will manage doing backups for you etc) and a long time to upload the content, especially for video.
I hope you will see the role that video can play in preserving your memories for you and future generations and how professionally produced videos can actually be fun to watch.
For more information, please visit http://www.visuallyremember.com and http://www.livinginthemoments.com. You can reach us at 321-252-8311.
