Purchase the Shared Visions Golden Publishing Kit using the same link. All of the challenge trainings will go in there to augment publishing resources already there.
Retain me to help you with all of the steps of your Story Productions.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to capture the stories of your loved ones while you still can.
The Family Story Challenge will take you though all of the steps to capture, preserve, and share your family stories.
Let’s do some planning.
Some Family Story Possibilities
There are many ways to approach family story productions.
Do you want to do a deep dive on one family member?
Do you want to feature your immediate family?
Is there an upcoming event, such as a family reunion, wedding, graduation, anniversary, or celebration of life, at which you want to present the story productions?
Or do you simply want to have fun with the stories?
Ways To Share The Family Stories
The easiest way to share for an event like an anniversary or memorial service is a video montage that presents the milestones of a person’s life.
A website or book can be great for longer and more diverse story collections.
Perhaps an audiobook.
A family magazine with each issue featuring one or two family members and stories could work too,
You can do all of the above over time.
The question is, where to start?
Let’s Start Here
A good place to start is to pick one family member and consider what you would want to present at their celebration of life (even if they are not passing any time soon:-)
From there, we can go deeper into their life or include more family members for a book, family magazine, or website. Or all of these.
I will teach you how to do all of these things yourself over the weeks of the challenge.
I have created a small book called The Four Steps to Publishing Family Stories to help with journey. Register and download the book.
One of the easiest story projects you can do yourself or with my help is to create a slide presentation with photos and captions identifying the people and events.
I have created dozens of these presentations for birthday parties, weddings, and memorials.
The most recent was a tribute to Rocket Norton at the recent Rock Beats Cancer benefit concert. The five-minute presentation is mostly photos with some video.
A happier project was to put together family photos for my son’s wedding. He grew up in North Vancouver and his bride grew up in the Maritimes with the wedding and reception in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
The photo slideshow with a music background started with baby photos of each and pictures of activities as they grew up separately (with many interesting parallels).
I included photos of parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins with captions for the names, relationships, and events. It was an excellent way for each family to learn about the other family.
We looped the video on a large TV at an Aunt’s house between the wedding ceremony and the start of the reception. Many people watched and commented on relatives they had not seen recently.
We also projected the video as part of the reception.
We used Google Drive to collect the photos from both families.
I used PhotoShop to crop and restore the photos, though Canva and other photo editors will work for this.
Today, I will use Apple FinalCut Pro to assemble the photos with transitions, captions, and music. Any video editor would work for this.
I can put it together for you. I will need the photos and notes about each photo for the captions sent by email or uploaded to a Google Drive folder.
The finished presentation can be embedded on a web page or played on most modern televisions from a USB Memory Drive.
Memory Refresher for Seniors
A great use of these family presentations is for seniors and others who are experiencing memory loss.
The photos and videos with captions and possibly a voice-over can be a fun way to refresh memories of family members and events.
Digital Photo Frames
There are many ways of presenting these photo presentations, including inexpensive digital photo frames for your loved ones.
You can create folders on Google Drive to start organizing the media for sharing and using for Story Productions
You can name the folders something that makes sense to you.
Here is a sample:
Aunt Martha Miles
Notes
Videos
Early Days
Wedding
Adventures
…
Photos
Category 1
Category 2
Audio Recordings
Document
Story Productions
When you are ready, you can assemble the photos, video, audio, and notes into media for sharing.
I have created presentations in the following forms:
Print Book
eBook
FlipBook
Video clips
Audio
Slide presentations for weddings, anniversaries, and memmorials.
Multimedia Digital Experience Edition
Website
Blog post
Social media posts.
…
Story Production Tools
I use a lot of tools, including PhotoShop (images), FinalCut Pro (video), ClarityScribe (transcription, AI writing), Atticus (writing, print and eBook formatting), Heyzine (flipbooks), Kartra (membership portals, email, video hosting), WordPress (websites), and others to create Multimedia Story Productions.
Greg Dixon Is Available to Help
I am available to help coach you through the collection of the stories and crafting them into story productions.
