by Angela Mules
Your life story is a unique and valuable gift for family and friends. A collection of memories, experiences, feelings, and life philosophies that have shaped you and how the world sees you. By recording your life story, treasured loved ones benefit in so many exceptional ways.
Some of the benefits in recording your life story:
- Relive your life memories. Recording your journey through life with all the memories, life challenges and triumphs you faced represents an opportunity to gain incredible insight into who you are today and what has shaped you as a person. It helps to better understand your life philosophies, strengths, weaknesses, values, beliefs, and life motivations. In the process you may identify and resolve any issues or traumas you’ve faced.
- Preserve your legacy. Life story recording is a way of leaving a lasting mark and captures your wisdom, knowledge, and values for future generations. Share your life lessons, achievements, failures, hopes, and dreams with your family and friends for an insight to the inner you. Honouring and acknowledging special people in the process also captures significant people in your life.
- Helping others. Historical information can have a positive impact on your loved ones, giving them background and context on certain matters. Family details are captured for later generations to understand where they’ve originated from. You can inspire, motivate, educate, or entertain people with your story, words and memories.
- Express yourself creatively. Recording your life story is a creative process that stimulates imagination to craft a meaningful and engaging narrative. You’re able to choose the format, style, tone, and structure of your story and through video you can express your personality and convey all your memories in your own words. It’s also easy and fun, your family can have involvement in the filming and selection of photos as a collaborative process.
How to Record Your Life Story
There are many ways to record your life story, depending on your preferences, goals, and resources.
Here are some options:
- Record an oral history. An oral history is a spoken record of your life story, usually in the form of an interview or a conversation with someone who asks you questions about your past. A professional can record your story and provide you with the audio recording and a typed transcript. Recording an oral history can help you share your emotions and connect with your memories in a private authentic way.
- Create a video biography. A video biography is a visual record of your life story, usually in the form of a documentary and montage of images. A professional videographer films and creates your video biography usually in cinematic style. A written transcript of the video can also be generated for you and your family to keep. Creating a video biography helps tell your story in a dynamic way, showing emotion and personality that captures the essence of YOU for your family to keep for generations.
Some people choose to have their life story written by a ghost writer. This is a great option but if you’re not sure about the time commitment or associated cost with having your book written here are some of the advantages of having your story filmed:
- The time it takes to film and produce a video is shorter than writing a book;
- The overall cost of having a video produced is generally less than the written form;
- Anything you say during filming can be edited out of the final version;
- Your treasured photos can be embedded at the optimum time in your video when you’re talking about a topic;
- A video captures the essence of you as you’re telling your story and brings out certain emotions that may not always be portrayed in the written form;
- It’s an engaging and fun process you can do with a family member present.
Whatever method you choose, recording your life story can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience that enriches your life and the lives of others around you. Don’t hesitate to start your life story project soon and share your unique and valuable gift with your family and friends.
Life Stories Australia has videographers that are available to discuss the process of filming your life story with you. See the Member page to find a videographer in your Australian state.
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