Video Biography: Incorporating Images

A slight change of pace this week as I answer the DIY question: What are the best ways of incorporating photographs into a video biography or a family history video?

The choices for using images in a video memoir can be broken down into "in camera" incorporation and incorporation during the editing process.

If you are just getting started in video editing, then you may prefer to incorporate during filming ("in camera"). Otherwise you can wait till you edit. And for the advanced biographer, you can do both.

In camera incorporation

Incorporating old photographs or documents using your video camera is the simplest way of capturing and displaying images that are associated with your subject. If you don't plan to edit the video tape at all (or if you don't know how to) then you can just roll right through the interview with you or the subject showing the images at the appropriate time.

Now, there are a number of ways of including images in your video biography as you go along. Here are some ideas.

Have the subject hold them up: You film the subject talking and at the appropriate time you hand them an image and they hold it in front of their chest or just to the side and they talk about it. When they are finished they hand it back. In my experience, it works best for the interviewer to feed the photographs to the subject.

You can rely on the subject to choose photos as they go, but you are likely to get a lot of sorting and shuffling on film that you will have to edit out later. If you do want to leave the choice to the subject, try filming your subject across a table and have the images laid out in front of them in small batches.

Film the subject turning the pages of the album: Sometimes the photos are not loose but are in an album. Shooting the subject over their shoulder as they look at the album can be a good look and makes a nice variation from the straight interview set up.

Filming the subject turning the pages of a book works especially well if you have an old period album or if there are handwritten descriptions. Take care with albums which have the plastic protection - reflections can destroy the shot.

Shoot the images on a computer screen: These days, more and more people are posting their images to a blog, Flickr, Ancestry.com or some other image hosting site. If that's the case, then you should be able to film the images directly off the computer monitor. You can even have your subject scrolling through the images, or you may even choose to set up the computer monitor in the background with an appropriately chosen image.

A word of warning though: If your video camera frame rate and your computer monitor frame/refresh rate are out of kilter then you may get ruinous flicker or black bars on your video picture.

It works best if your camera is set at 30 frames per second (which in North America it should be) and the frame rate or the refresh rate is some multiple of that - say 60 fps or 60 or 90 Hz. Best advice is to experiment shooting the screen and play with the computer monitor refresh or frame rate settings only if you have to.

Film a picture in close up: Most people have heard of the "Ken Burns Effect" on a picture. It's where you get up really close on an image and move across its inner most details giving the viewer the feeling of actually being in the picture. (Ken Burns used this technique to sublime effect in his documentary on the Civil War.)

You can get this effect while editing - but Ken Burns got it with his camera. And you can too. Just make sure you have enough light, avoid light reflections, set your camera on a tripod, zoom in and pan gently across.

Image incorporation during editing

This can be more involved than incorporating images in the camera, but you are likely to get a higher quality result. You will not have any camera shake for one thing; for another you can take the opportunity to retouch or restore the images; and finally, you can get in really close to reveal details that may have been hidden for decades.

First you need to scan your images in. You need to take care to use the proper scanner settings: Scanning photos? Use these scanner settings.

Next, take the time to explore your options to restore the images to their former glory: Professional retouching & restoration of digital photographs.

Then, with the image safely digitized, you can import it into your editing project and splice it into the interview material. If you are planning to use the "Ken Burns Effect" make sure that you move from the less important detail of the picture and land on its most significant part. And don't forget to include captions on the image.

Green screen: A hybrid method for incorporating images into your video biography is to film your subject against an evenly lit, plain colored backdrop (green is best, since that color does not appear in human skin). Then, during editing, you create a mask covering the (green) background and replace it with a digitized image. (It's a technique often used in news programs.) In a video memoir, the effect can be stunning, if somewhat unnatural.

How long should you leave an image on screen? That will depend on a number of factors such as how long the final video biography will be, how interesting the images is, what condition the image is in (less time if it is damaged or out of focus), how large and detailed it is, and how many other images you have to include. You may display it for as little as 6 seconds or you may leave a good image on for up to 30 seconds.

Now, if you have read this far and you would like to see a combination of these methods used in the one family history video, here is the opening sequence to a video memoir which I made earlier this year called "Living in History":



And if you need professional help with your video biography - by all means give me a call!