I met with quite a woman to discuss documenting her family’s values and life stories. She spoke so beautifully about what ‘from generation to generation’ means.

She told me that her sharing family’s stories and values is
the most important gift

she will ever give to her children and grandchildren.
She spoke of dedicating her life’s work not only to fostering respect for one another in her family, but also in communities for another’s political, religious and cultural beliefs. She added how this is becoming even more important during these turbulent times, when people seem to spread intolerance or they feel disenfranchised, or worse, they see terrorism as a way out.

She has boxes of VHS and Super 8 tapes and dozens of exquisite scrapbook photo albums. She said they all represent important moments and evoked precious memories of their family’s journey through life. Once we digitize her movies and albums, we’ll be creating a living legacy highlighting the most wonderful values and memories, that she will be giving to one generation and all the generations to come.

She has already become an inspiration and has created quite a lasting memory for me.

During the pandemic I worked with a client who wanted to save and share the many wonderful and poignant moments with her family. She absolutely dedicated herself to giving the photos, videos, video tributes and photo books to her family, with their most precious moments, by Christmas.

We mapped out a plan for her vision and priorities. She wanted everyone in the family to have some of the same photos and videos, but for each of her three children, to have their own specific memories, such as their birthday parties, school plays and sports. We mapped out a structure with four main folders for the photos:  Family, then for one for each of her children. We added folders for each year, and for each month. And a folder for a special trip or occasion, for example,  1999 – June – England

PHOTOS – She grouped her printed photos by year and month, and had them all digitized. She reviewed her digital photos and copied the best into their appropriate folders with the digitized prints.

VIDEOS – She had all her videos transferred into digital files. Then she watched them and made notes of what parts of the video she wanted to save. For example, at 2 min 45 seconds through 5 minutes, add that footage to the family video 1999. We made the same folders for the videos and we sat together to do all the video editing. With her notes, this went very smoothly.

PHOTO BOOKS – She decided to create photo books for just the last 3 years, starting the year her first grandchild was born, then one photo book for each year going forward.

In the end, we produced the photo books and a portable hard drive of memories for her and each of her children. My client said her family was so appreciative and they had so much fun watching the family videos and laughing, and crying, while being reminded of those and other stories together. She said watching the videos and looking at the photos lead the family to really talk about their lives, and then, wanting to know history of those no longer living.

Located at 1515 Hope Street in Stamford, CT, we help families give the gift of a lifetime.

Arline Melzer is a film producer with a passion to help generations preserve and celebrate the times of their lives.