All Blog Posts Tagged 'Memories' (115)

When I worked on my own autobiography several years ago, I used this technique which I sort of invented ( I say that because I’ve never heard of anyone else using it either in my background as a social worker or speaking with other personal historians). What I would do is to find an old picture of me from a time period that my memories were vague. I would look at the photo and start placing concrete things into my memory.

For instance, there is a photo of me taken on a piano bench…

Because I am in the business of helping people create Legacy video biographies and tribute videos, people often want to share eulogies they have written for others. Yesterday a friend of mine sent me one that she had written for her mother, who passed away earlier this year. It was a three page Word document that had me in tears. Not because of any sadness for this woman’s passing but for the joy of having a daughter who knew her so well that she could so beautifully capture the essence of…

I am sitting here in Houston, waiting for Hurricane Ike to arrive. It’s 9AM and he’s not expected until around midnight but I’m nervous and not quite sure what to do. Arranging things around the house, most of it seems pointless. You never really know what’s going to happen until it happens. Will we flood? Will windows break from flying tree branches or patio furniture? Nobody can say for sure. But we are lucky and out of the way of such disaster that would require evacuating.

Two…

Lately, I keep running into people who say, “I haven’t checked into your blog this week but I’m wondering how things are going with your parents?”

These are questions that make me happy because I’m thrilled to know that people read my blog and feel the desire to catch up with what’s going on. Also, this life stage with my parents seems to resonate with so many of my friends and readers. So many people have dealt with, or are dealing with, this stage in life where you’ve finally gotten…

In January of 2008, Money Magazine wrote an article comparing 6 of the most popular scanning services. They sent 40 prints to the six different companies and rated them on cost, turnaround time and scan quality.

The top rated company was ScanCafe. ScanCafe operates out of Bangalore India so when you send photos to them, they are shipped over to India to be…

It’s been a little over a month since my last blog post where I shared how I was heading out to Los Angeles to help my parents in their transition to an assisted living facility. I’m happy to report that they are settled in and making the adjustment to their new lifestyle. They have their moments of “how did we get here?” but for the most part, they appreciate the regular and delicious meals, the nurse who makes sure they each take their medication on time each day, the plethora of…

A storyboard is an essential tool for laying out a video or film project to communicate the look of a piece, to show how a story or plot unfolds and to organize the sequence of scenes before any time or money has been spent on studio sets, location shoots or special effects. It serves as a roadmap for producers, directors, casts, crews, animators, audio engineers and post-production editors.

First developed by Disney Studios back in the 1930’s for their early animated films and used…

Last week NPR ran a segment on their show, Marketplace, entitled “Coming Soon, The Cash Peters Story” which was a look into the world of video biographies spotlighting one Los Angeles firm, Legacy Flicks, that charges $20,000 to put your name on the marquee for 30 minutes.

The segment was humorous and played upon the egotistical aspect of making a movie about your…

I have been blogging on four years now and I often surprise myself how much I really have to say about this subject of capturing one’s story, one’s history, for posterity. It is something that I have been passionate about since I started Legacy Multimedia in 2003 after seeing just how much film and photos and other bits of our past were floating off into oblivion in garbage dumps, recycle bins, vintage shops and other places where I would continue to find entire abandoned photo albums, cast…

A couple days ago, my friend and client Jay Steinfeld, CEO and founder of Blinds.com posted a “tweet” on Twitter (Jay is @BlindscomCEO) that read: “If you think hiring an expert is expensive, just try an amateur!”

I found myself laughing in that “I get it but it’s really not very funny” way because it’s so true. Just…

As I was waking up this morning, I was aware of a dream that I was having. In the dream, I was sitting at a dining room table with the family of a client that I had done a video biography for. It was obvious that this person had recently passed and we were discussing the biography. A woman seated to my right said, “well that biography was wonderful except for that huge lie that she told about having lived in the palace at Versailles!”

At that point, I woke up and, after having a good…

I was recently telling someone about the work I do and I got some interesting feedback. He said, “you’re an interpreter.”

I have been spending some time with that statement and find it very intriguing. I guess I have always collapsed an interpreter with a translator. But when you look up the definition an interpreter is someone who facilitates communication. From the dictionary… “The interpreter will take in a complex concept from one language, choose the most appropriate vocabulary…

I was at a Bat Mitzvah this past Saturday and the presiding rabbi gave a sermon on the gift of time. He had seen an ad for a famous jewelry company that depicted a graduate in cap and gown, with a new watch on her arm. The caption was, “There Is No Present Like The Time”, which of course, is a twist on the old idiom, “There Is No Time Like The Present” to show that the watch was the gift of time. But the watch is also a metaphor for the larger definition of time. I wish I had the sermon to…

In the news yesterday is a story about a couple who are engaged and planning to wed soon. What makes this story really unusual is that they have the same name, Kelly Hildebrandt, and they met on Facebook.

One night (female) Kelly was bored and typed her name into Facebook to see what came up. Up popped Kelly Hildebrandt but it was a guy and he was in Lubbock Texas. She sent him a note that said “Hi, We had…

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here and while I have been very busy with work and new clients, I have felt a missing of my creativity and inspiration. It occurred to me over the weekend that the source of my ennui was the recent deaths of 4 people I knew within the time-span of two weeks. These were not old people, peers of my parents, who were battling long illnesses and the gentle creep of old age, but my own peers, (give or take a decade) that left suddenly, with little…

These days, many of us take photos with our phones and send them to each other via email or post them online to various photo sharing websites such as Flickr and Twitpic. I’ve also got photos on my Facebook profile and there’s some video clips of me speaking on my website. I don’t have photos of my…

As I write this, I am sitting on a plane returning from a family reunion in California. My cousin celebrated his 70th birthday yesterday and several family members flew in for the occasion. My cousin's grandmother and my grandmother were sisters, so while I see him all the time (since he lives in the same building as my parents), his sisters and their…

I spend a lot of time flying back and forth between Houston and Los Angeles to visit my family. The flight is 3 hours and last year I made a commitment to spend that three hour time period working on sorting, identifying and tagging all of my digital photos. By the time we take off, get our complimentary beverages, prepare for the descent, it probably works out to about 2 hours but that time I have totally dedicated to this task. I decided to focus this time on this…