What traditions does your family have for Halloween?  What are you favorite memories of Halloween as a child?  

Here's your 'To Do' list for this week:

1. If you have not yet watched Part 8 of our video series, click here.
2. Figure out which storyboarding technique is best for you and start to storyboard your video.  It may be chronological order but it doesn't have to be.  Plan it at a high level and then plan it piece by piece.  If someone tells a story, think of what pictures or video you may have that relates to that story and plan to use it during the telling.  Remember that you can use a picture or clip more than once.
3. Enjoy your "trick or treaters"!

Part 8 in our video series is about storyboarding.  No, you do not have to be an artist to storyboard.  Click here to watch the video.

Part of the creative process in making a Family History Video is planning the sequence of your clips, stories, and photos.  Most theater movies have a beginning (intro to characters and time), middle (the struggles and conflicts), climax (daring, interesting, exciting solutions) and (hopefully happy) ending.  A Family History Video, however, may be as simple as an introduction to your ancestor(s), where and when they lived and maybe a simple story or two about them that reveals their character or strength – or is simply entertaining.  If your Family History Video is about your genealogy research like Who Do You Think You Are?, it may be as simple as a listing of the tree and the citing of sources so future generations can carry on your research.

Don’t expect it to be a theater production.  It can be if you are so inclined, but you can also get so caught up in creating drama that you don’t capture the reality of your subject.  The goal is to pass on your family history to a generation that has yet to be born. Setting a historic timeframe and relaying the relationship with photos, videos and stories will be as exciting to future generations as you finding that 1860 ship’s log that revealed the relative you were looking for, or that little part of the U.S. 1890 census unburned that showed one of your relatives! Picture a descendant finding a Family History Video that you made.  It doesn’t have to be a theater production to be an exciting find.  It just needs to be real.  What if this technology was available in 1790?  What would it reveal? How would it teach you about how your family made the decision to immigrate or build that east tower or plant beans instead of raising sheep?  Or simply their accents and the words they used to express an idea of their time. Would you enjoy hearing your great-great grandfather's laugh?  Yes, your descendant

Since you have split your interviews into small pieces and you’ve compiled all your media into your video library (not that you can’t add more as you find it), you can sit and look at where it takes you.  As you think about what you have to work with, what strikes you as interesting?  How did you get to that interest?  Were there any turning points that stand out?

Answering those questions will allow you to “see” the video sequence in your mind.  Taking that a bit further in detail is called storyboarding.  Electronically, you can use Microsoft Excel for storyboarding.  It is excellent for compiling each element and then you can cut and paste to move groups of elements around to your liking. But you can use Post-it notes or 3x5 note cards or even your Corel VideoStudio Ultimate.  

We’ve followed the red hair in our subject family.  What do you want to follow and highlight in your Family History Video?  It may even be more than one thing.  

We also steadied some shaky film and that process will steady even old 8mm, mini DV or VHS that have been digitized.

1. Make a pretty, but clean and clear, tree if you haven’t already.
   
2. Watch Part 7 – Your Family History Video  if you haven’t already.
   
3. Make note of where you may want to insert the tree into your video.
   
4. Practice using the painting creator.  
   

Get creative!  Have fun!  Share!

This video shows you:

1. How to stablize shaky film footage
2. Zoom in on an entire clip of video
3. Trace the family tree with a moving line to help your audience follow your stories.

Don't miss it!  Click here to watch.

There are many reasons to follow your family tree.  If you check out the first chapter of the New Testament (you know, that part with all the “begats” that we all tend to skip), you’ll find it establishes the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth - fourteen generations from Abraham to David and fourteen generations from David to Jesus.  Obviously, it was important to trace Christ’s lineage to Abraham and David. 

To the royals of the old world, and for that matter the current world, the family heritage means birthrights. To the rest of us, it may be more curiosity driven to follow our family history.  Many of us can’t get past a few generations before we are unable to trace the heritage path. Of course, that’s one of the great things about genealogy as a hobby! There’s always a challenge to overcome and since it’s family, those challenges are always personal.  When you finally pierce a wall that you’ve been sparring with for a time, you feel a real sense of accomplishment that is made even more sweet when you think you’ve got something real to pass on to the next generation.

For our video subject family, you’ll find part of their story is physical.  Red hair was inherited and passed on to several generations.  Where did it come from?  We are going to follow the tree to find the surprising stories that uncover, not only love and loss, but where the red hair that still runs through their family came from.

We've talked about using your tree as your anchor image but next week we're going to show you how to follow the lines of your tree in animation.  Either way, you'll want a tree and you'll want one that is easy to read, clear, and asthetically pleasing.  This one was made using a scrapbooking software.  There are lots of them out there and they needn't be expensive. (We found this one in a bargain bin for $9.95 with  a $10 mail-in rebate!)

Only 4 photographs were used and one of them was our anchor image (which you're probably familiar with by now.) 

So your "to do" this week is to make a tree and get it scanned so you can use it in your family history video.

Using our anchor photo, today we show you how to pan and zoom.  To watch click here. This brings animation to a still photograph.  It also adds a visual to your family photo to keep your viewers (your future family members) aware of the relationships and people you are covering in your Family History Video.

The image you choose to represent your overall theme to your Family History Video is your anchor photo, or keystone image. You will probably return to the image several times throughout your video.  If you are concentrating on a person, then make it as good a photo as possible of that person. If it is a family unit, expect to go to it each time you talk about one of the people in the family photo.  If it is your research as a whole, your anchor image may be your family tree.

If you are a fan of the television show Who Do You Think You Are, then you’ll recognize that they go to the tree often so the viewer can follow along with the research.  That show is definitely about the research and discovery of genealogy. 

The tree may help you lay out your video into chronological order or show a relationship when a story is being told. 

The tree also substitutes for important ancestors that have no images available.  Just because you have no images of them, doesn’t mean they are not worthy of talking about if they are in your tree.  When no images are available, you’ll want to explain where they fit in your family and maybe show an old census or the passenger list of the ship they traveled on when leaving their home country, or a painting of them, or the city where they were born in on a map, or a likeness of a castle or hut from the era in which they lived.

We will be using a mixture of both photos and lineage charts in our example video. Our anchor will be the photograph of the family unit we shared last week.  The charts will be used from time to time also though so make one for your own use.  We made the above example using PowerPoint but you can use, Keynote, Excel, Numbers, a screenshot of your online research, one made from several tree-maker softwares available, or even a scanned pencil and paper creation. 

If you are having trouble deciding what anchor photo to use or visualizing your Family History Video, take a little time to watch a documentary.  Maybe catch a little of The Roosevelts on PBS or at www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-roosevelts/.  Yes, the story is interesting, but try to look beyond the story and see the pieces of the production. 

• Ken Burns does a great job at making an inert still photo come alive.  
  

• There are plenty of still photos of the Roosevelt family, but in other documentaries, you find the same photos used many times because there simply wasn’t more photos taken of the subject.
  

• Watch for the names and credentials of the people that are interviewed.  
  

• Watch for the mix of narration, interviews and still photos.
  

• Watch for general “era” footage.  The subject of the film may not even be in the footage but it depicts a timeframe of the subject.
  

We’ll be looking at all those elements as we make our own Family History Video and recognizing each element will help you visualize yours.