How We Did It

To create our family history documentary video “In Search Of Grandma”, we began by researching our family history. Taking the stories we already knew, we backtracked via ancestry.com and other archival sources as far back as the 1790’s.  This led to some interesting discoveries about my family’s ancestors, as well as contacts all over the world with distant relatives we had never met before.

Then my brother, sister, mother and I videotaped many hours of discussions of our family history before two cameras. One of them was used for wide shots of the four of us. The other was for close-ups of us individually.

In the studio I wove our on-camera discussions together with our family photographs, documents, tied together with some narration, mixed together with appropriate music tracks to create a definitive family history documentary video. We focused especially on my Grandmother and her role in making our family what it is today.

During this time, I upgraded my studio’s facilities for this project, using the video editing program Final Cut on my upgraded iMac to accommodate the complexities of documentary filmmaking. 

Creating “In Search Of Grandma” took three months of intensive editing. Every week I burned a DVD copy of what was completed up till then to view on a large screen television with top of the line surround sound to view critically to see what changes I needed to make. As the project got closer to completion, we planned to premiere “In Search Of Grandma” in front of the entire family, including relatives from all over the world, at my mother’s 90^th birthday party.

Next: The Premiere of “In Search Of Grandma”