All Blog Posts Tagged 'Personal' (80)

Recently I was one of three guest speakers on tonight’s GeneaBloggers Radio – Episode 45

The title of the show is “Capturing Family Memories – All Year Round.” 

You can go to my blog to listen to a clip from the show:

http://legacymultimedia.com/about/press/

Scroll down to Televsion and Radio, it is the first…

My father, Martin Elkort, is a collected and noteworthy photographer. His body of work, shot during a period of enormous possibility in our country, evokes feelings of both excitement and nostalgia in those that view and collect his photographs. Since my dad has become collectible, I’ve been to many of his shows and talked to gallery owners and collectors about his work and their own collections. The question always comes up whether I…

I have a new client that I just started working with. One of my customs is to request an invitation to dinner with the family before I start work. This gives me an excellent opportunity to study the social dynamics of each family. I get the opportunity to see them interact with each other in a relaxed atmosphere. I also request to be seated next to the subject(s) so I can see how easy they are to engage in conversation, what their memory is like and other communication traits. This helps me…

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…

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…

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…

This is the second year that Texas Monthly has hosted a short film contest during the annual Austin Film Festival. The contest provides a platform for Texans to share their Texas pride by making a film 10 minutes or less about Texas, your experiences in Texas or other insights into our amazing state. You do not have to be from Texas in order to enter, and you do not have to film this in Texas but it must be about Texas. Pretty simple right?

The deadline for submission is June 1st,…

Late last year I started a family genealogy tree on Geni.com and blogged about what exactly Geni is.

Recently my parents were in town visiting and my dad and I sat down for a couple of hours at Geni.com, armed with an old genealogical tree that I had roughly put together about 20 years ago. My intention was to get the remaining tree fleshed out…

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…

We received an email from a reader suggesting we write an article comparing the cost and time it takes to create your own keepsake video as opposed to hiring us to create a Legacy video for you. We thought this was a great idea.

When you walk into your local computer store, you are met with aisles of the newest technological toys. They are enticing…

I have been watching “In Treatment“, an HBO drama about a psychotherapist, Paul Weston (with award winning performance by Gabriel Byrne). Each episode is a session with one of his patients, including one session with his own therapist, Gina, at the end of the week. The session with Gina covers some of the things that are going on with his patients…

Growing up and living in the United States, I had never heard of Ted Grant or been exposed to his photojournalism, so I was not really sure who this keynote speaker was at the Association of Personal Historians 2010 Conference in Victoria BC earlier this month. For some reason, his name kept conjuring up the news anchor on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. ( Then I found out I had been confusing the editor, Lou Grant and the anchor Ted Knight and created my own…