Video memoir: Our 95 year old Pollyanna

I love receiving letters - especially the old fashioned kind.

Recently, we created a video memoir for Hazel G. She was a delight. Kind, lively, sharp, matter-of-fact, and a total optimist.

So we open the documentary of her life with something she said during the interview. She had said that she was like Pollyanna - in the famous 1913 story. She always believed in looking for the best in a situation - something to be glad about.

In our work we try to discover a defining character- istic of the subject - not to limit them but to alert the audience to a unifying theme in a life. In Hazel's case, she was definitely a "glass half full" kind of person.

Hazel had a store of priceless old family photos, many from her family's early days in the San Joaquin Valley. But some were not in the greatest condition. We spent hours restoring them to their former glory: (See my blog on restoring photographs).

Hazel's grandson Alan wrote me a nice note after we had finished the project:

My grandmother, Hazel, is 95 years old and going strong. We came to realize that she is the only keeper of much of our family history, and the only one who can identify many of the people in our family photos. So we engaged Your Story Here to document her life. I thought I knew my grandmother quite well, but Your Story Here's detailed and thoughtful process brought out the story of her life in a way I hadn't imagined, and which will be a family treasure forever.

I would interject here to say that while I strongly prefer video memoirs, there are lots of different ways to go: Personal History Biography: Audio, Video or Written Memoir?

Through a process of pre-interviewing me and Hazel, and of going through over 100 family photos, Jane was able to build a basic outline of Hazel's life to guide her through the actual video interview. Because she was so well prepared, she was able to ask the right questions throughout the taping to bring out layers and textures from Hazel's life story instead of just a telling of events.

As for our family photographs, Your Story Here not only scanned them all in and edited them into the video at all the right points, but they also used technology to clean up the cracks and discolorations so the pictures actually look better in the video than when you look at them directly. In addition, they added historical photographs depicting events Hazel was describing but of which we have no pictures of our own. For example, Hazel described the tent city her parents lived in after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and as she describes it we see on screen pictures of an actual tent city from that event.

It is certainly true that family history memoirs have changed over the years - it has only been in the last three to five years that there has even been a "video memoir" option available to people.

Jane was even able to record Hazel's answering machine message, which she hasn't changed in 20 years, and include it playing over the closing credits. A great touch!

The final product flows very smoothly from Hazel's earliest memories through her current perspectives on a long life and the world today. It is the story of her life, fit deftly into the context of the times in which she has lived. I can see now that any attempt to do this on my own would have come up woefully short. Your Story Here produce a professional documentary of a quality that an amateur cannot match.

Of course Hazel will pass one day, but our family has such joy in knowing that we have preserved her voice, her smile, and her stories on video. We have them to enjoy and to share with our kids and their kids. That is truly priceless.

The Video Memoir is a great option for recording important stories as Alan was kind enough to attest. But whatever kind of memoir you choose, the most important thing is saving the story. There are a lot of Pollyannas out there but none of them (or us) are getting any younger!