During the process of making a legacy video, one of the most challenging moments is trying to decide what topics to discuss. Whether you’re having a legacy video made for a loved one, or you’re telling your own story - the need is the same - where to start? Unless you want your legacy video to be unorganized, you’ll want to use legacy video strategy.
The goal here is a cohesive legacy video that everyone will love now and appreciate later. Without a bit of thought ahead of time, a legacy video can end up a jumbled mess that’s difficult to watch or enjoy.
In this article we’ll discuss the pros, cons, and helpful tips for selecting what to ask in your legacy video using the following strategies: main focus with subtopics, chronological life story, subject-focused, and family crowdsourcing.
1) Main focus with subtopics
Without a main focus a legacy video can go off the rails if the interview does not go well. A great way to create a cohesive legacy video is zeroing in on a main focus and then branching off from there. This strategy helps keep the interview focused, makes gathering photos easier, and results in a cohesive story that digs deep into the topics you’re most interested in.
Some examples of main focus topics could be: family life, relationships, milestone life events, career + accomplishments, and wisdom.
Once you’ve selected a main focus you can start to dive deep into that specific area with sub-topics. For example, say you select the milestone life event of your wedding day, you could select sub-topics that help tell the full story of the marriage. Sub-topics like first date, the proposal, and the wedding day itself would make for a great story to tell in your legacy video. For inspiration on what to ask about your main focus topics, here’s an article highlighting primary, follow-up, and dig-deep questions for the 5 different main focus topics mentioned above.
Pro Tip: If you decide to select the main topic with subtopics method; Kindred is a great service to consider. When creating a legacy video with Kindred, all you have to do is fill out a questionnaire with your main focus and sub-topics to direct their interviewers; then they’ll handle the interview, recording, and video editing from there.
2) Chronological life story
Another great way to decide what to ask in your legacy video is simply following their life chronologically. This sounds simple, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind when actually executing the interview to make sure your legacy video turns out cohesive.
When narrowing in on questions using the chronological method, keying in on the different stages of life is a great place to start. As your interviewee probably doesn’t remember much of their infancy, toddlerhood, or preschool years; you can pick up at their early school years and go forward from there. As you’re covering an enormous amount of time, we’d recommend focusing on key milestones during the different stages of life or asking general questions and letting the interviewee take their stories where they best see fit.
Pro Tip: The key to interviewing a chronological story is keeping the interviewee on-track. Many times, nervous storytellers will tend to veer off-track and ramble a bit. Don’t feel bad if you need to pause the interview and politely ask for them to stay focused on the question at hand. If you’re nervous about interviewing yourself, a service like Kindred has experienced interviewers ready to help create your legacy video.
3) Subject-focused
A subject-focused strategy turns the attention directly towards the person being interviewed and begs the question: who are they? This strategy requires you to narrow in on a couple of key characteristics about your interview subject, and use those characteristics to focus your questions.
Examples of characteristics that make for great legacy videos are: family status (mother/father/grandmother/grandfather), career title (doctor, military rank, CEO), music aficionado, football superstar, or world traveler to name a few.
Once you’ve selected your main characteristic to focus on, there are a variety of resources to help source interesting and thought-provoking questions to ask during the legacy video interview.
- Legacy video questions for mothers
- Legacy video questions for fathers
- Legacy video questions for grandmothers
- Legacy video questions for grandparents
- Legacy video questions for a career-focused interview
4) Family crowdsourcing
This strategy requires you to take a step back. If you’re creating a legacy video for a family member, that means you most likely have a slew of other family members who would love to be engaged. They’ll want to watch and cherish the legacy video too. So why not include them in the process?
It’s extremely simple to create a Google Form, email/text it to family members, and crowdsource question ideas. Let them know who you’re interviewing and ask them what they’d like to learn or preserve about their life story!
Pro Tip: The tricky part of this strategy is that the feedback may be all over the place… so it’s important that you (the curator) are able to analyze the results and look for general themes to focus on. Remember, we want a cohesive legacy video. The family crowdsourcing strategy is essentially a reverse way of doing the main topic with subtopics strategy - but starting with the questions instead of the topics.
Thank you for reading! If you have any further questions or want help creating your family legacy video, Kindred is here to assist.