Immortality at Last! Professionally Produced Family Documentaries Come of Age
buy generic Lurasidone Immortality at Last! Professionally Produced Family Documentaries Come of Age
Immortality at last! The professionally produced family documentary comes of age.
Commissioning a set of formal portraits in sombrely framed oils was once the fashionable way for well-to-do families to leave images of themselves for posterity. But today’s cash-rich, time-poor masters of the universe have found a new and creative way to preserve their family history.
Welcome to the age of the professionally produced family documentary, where budgets almost rival broadcast TV productions. Well-heeled City slickers, corporate bigwigs, lawyers, doctors and the like are spending as much as 60,000 dollars on having experienced TV crews shoot biographical documentaries about their own family, for private viewing.
These productions are being made by one of the leading production company’s in the field, “Times of your Life Media” and put together with all the skill, resources and production values of professionally produced documentary television. Crews are sent worldwide to do location shoots that many independent TV companies simply couldn’t afford. Hundreds of hours are sometimes spent assembling historical sequences from old family films, videos and collections of photographs.
And many TV professionals, depressed by the onslaught of reality and tabloid celebrity television that relies on the exploitation of cheap and plentiful media graduates, are actively choosing to make movies for private individuals because they see them as one of the last refuges of serious, story-telling documentary film-making.
Styling itself as a “Family Media Company”, a two-year-old film company, “Times of Your Life Media”, located in the Washington DC suburb of Reston Virginia is the brand leader in this emerging sector of the television documentary industry. With a turnover of close to a million dollars last year, and a staff of 14 editors, camera people and directors, “Times of your Life Media has all the amenities and buzz of a fully fledged TV production house, even though none of its work will ever be seen on television.
Yet while TV professionals increasingly complain about broadcasters caring little about documentary quality, people commissioning private family films seem genuinely appreciative of their work.
“Even somebody who was not a family member wouldn’t be bored watching the film we had made about my grand father,’ says Tommy Link, a Fort Lauderdale business owner, dispelling in a sentence, perhaps, most people’s visceral fear of being subjected to friends home movies and videos.
Links 45-minute film cost around 22,000 dollars and required a Times of Your Life crew to travel to New York City and Chicago. The film was helped by its subject matter “Thomas Link who has led a life more fruitful as documentary fodder than most of us enjoy. He was a business man and inventor who designed and built the Link Trainer which was used to train aviators during the Second World War.
But now Link and his wife, Clarise, who also works for a government agency, are having a second movie made, at a cost of around 5,000 dollars currently in post-production, about their children. The director came for a whole day and was very comfortable with the kids, says Link. “He was really in tune with families just like us. It’s not intrusive, as if you’ve let someone into a very intimate part of your life.”
“He went with the children from one of their activities to the next” a Saturday afternoon soccer game, dressing up as pirates and charging through the kitchen and so on. He fitted into their routine of being noisy and childlike and spoke with them while capturing the moments on high definition cameras. He’d ask things like, ‘Who’s your best friend?’, ‘What’s your favorite food?’ What’s it like being at school?’, ‘What’s the nicest thing you’ve ever done?’ It was really a lot of fun, and the kids enjoyed the entire shoot.
Heather and David Thomas both working professionals in Fairfax Virginia have had a Times of Your Life Media production made costing around 25,000 dollars made.
One was about Thomas’s family, and was shot as a 50th birthday present for him over six days on location in and around Northern Virginia. ‘Within three weeks, the guys put together a movie of his life. “It was amazing”, says Thomas. “It was especially great because following the filming one of our great aunts who was featured in the production passed away. “It was a fantastic experience for my family to have this production with my father. It meant so much to us to capture him as he was, and I really couldn’t put a price on the results. My parents are now busy showing the movie to all their friends and they’re really not a home movies type of crowd.”
Shooting family documentary footage is only a part of the new personal family documentary business. Most of what “Times of your Life Media” does is painstakingly constructing watchable productions from dusty boxes shoe full of random home videos, ancient reels of film home movies and thousands of unsorted family photos.
Robert Clay, say’s that he dumped, 20 years worth of photos and video on the Times of your Life’s doorstep. The material, which included over100 hours of video and some 12,000 still photos of his children, filled a van that arrived to pick it up from the family home near Warrenton Virginia.
Six months and 45,000 dollars later, the Thomas family movie is nearing completion. So far it spans six DVDs of 50 minutes each. “The first two DVDs have been delivered and the children are glued to them,” says Clay. “They just keep watching them again and again, beginning to end, and then putting on the next one. The editor did a great job of selecting the best material. We would never, ever, have looked at the original material. Even for those of us in it, it wasn’t really watchable before, and it was completely un-catalogued.
It does cost a lot of money, but when people see the finished product; they realize just how much you’re getting for that. If I could put a dollar into this and a dollar into my pension, I’m pretty sure this is better value. The Clays are planning to keep on filming and snapping and to go back to Times of your Life every few years to update their production.
I gave Times of Your Life my family beach vacation videos spanning 15 years. It was a huge collection of photos, videos of various formats and super 8 film after six weeks, I received a superbly edited 60-minute montage of film and contemporary music that has been shown even to non-family members, who if they were bored by it were polite enough not to say so. Some even went as far as to say that the production was genuinely interesting and evocative.
What was remarkable about their work was how the editor, Joey Thomas, somehow made sense of all the fuzzy relatives and toddling infants and got the archive into a sensible chronological order. “Its detective work,” explains Thomas, the 46 year old owner of Times of Your Life Media. “With the videos and film, there were no labeling clues as to what was what and it wasn’t in any particular order. So what you’re looking for are visual clues. The only narrative you have with this kind of montage work is the chronology. You’re working out which holiday was which, which Christmas, even counting the candles on birthday cakes.”
For Thomas, family movies are the future for his film-making career. Tommy Link, a film- school graduate, has a hard news cameraman background in Washington DC, but says: “I find this work really stimulating. It’s actually film-making at its most personal and emotional. We get stories from the people that lived them, and there’s nothing more fascinating to me than that.”
Thomas explains that the company’s success is based on a demographic change in middle-class society. ‘I started this because I had kids in my forties, and I realized that by the time my kids were in their twenties my dad would probably not be with us any more and they’d never get to know each other. I wanted something that my son, when he’s in his thirties, would have to realize what a great guy his grandfather was. And then I also wanted something for my dad to have, so he could know how cool his grandchildren are. Also, my family is really spread out and getting people together has just become impossible. I was aware that while I had these strong family ties, there was little chance that my three kids would spend much time with their cousins or get to know one another.
Thomas goes on to explain: “A good percentage of our customers are in a similar boat in that their parents or sister or brother are in California or over seas and they never really see each other. When I was a kid, my great fear was family reunions, because I didn’t know who anybody was. But when my kids meet their family in Miami, they know them all from watching the DVD.’
That’s all very well, but isn’t it all a bit, well, un-American, to spend large sums of money on vanity video productions?
“I certainly needed convincing that it wasn’t going to be something incredibly tacky that only rich investment bankers would do,” says Tom Link. “But you could see from looking at the films they’d done of other families that they really capture the essence of the families and the children. And with us, they got it right.”
“My friends were perfectly comfortable with the idea, but I have to say I mentioned it with embarrassment because they were initially like me. But then my friends came round to the idea that it could be a nice way of capturing the family in a way that most of us are pretty incompetent at. You know, all those terrible home-video soundtracks you get with the kids saying, “Mummy can I stop doing this yet?”
‘But now my friends have realized that this isn’t something brash or showy. Quite a few of them are now considering doing the same.’
www.timesofyourlifemedia.com. Montage documentaries of archive material typically cost between 2,000 dollars and 5,000 dollars. Full biographical films cost from 5,000 dollars to 80,000 dollars and up, depending on the breath and scope of the project.