Here are a few of our recent projects...

Confidentiality prevents me from sharing with you the actual "end-products" which I have produced for my clients. However, you may find the following descriptions helpful in understanding the work of My Personal Biographer.


1. Client #1 had some 8mm films (silent movies) of his children growing up. I had them digitized at a service bureau, then edited and burned them to a DVD. I screened them for his (now grown-up) children, and recorded their excited commentary. I then re-built the video and DVD, using this narration as an audio track. The result was a priceless, insightful piece of family history.


2. Client #2 had thousands of color slides, taken by his father more than a half-century earlier. Together, we reviewed the collection, and scanned 200 of the best ones. These I sequenced with Mac software... added zoom and pan effects... added some popular music from the era... and produced a digital movie. I burned this to a DVD, printed the discs, and made copies for his brother and sister. Now they can all enjoy the memories on their own television sets.


3. Remember vinyl? Client #3 had a collection of 45-rpm records from the 1950s and '60s, but she hadn't heard the music in a very long time. I digitized her recordings, removing hiss and popping noises, and burned them to audio CDs. Then I transferred the music to an Apple iPod -- and now, she can listen to them any time, and anywhere, she wants.


4. Scrapbooks preserve the past, but they do not always age well. Client #4 had inherited his grandparents' century-old collection of photos, newspaper clippings, and letters, and he was anxious to preserve them.

I scanned the entire scrapbook, page by page, and carefully edited every image. I removed stains, repaired tears, straightened lines of text, brightened and sharpened colors. I designed a page layout for a new version of the book. Most importantly, I added captions to tell the family's story.

When the layout was complete, I transmitted the electronic page layouts to a publisher, over the internet. Two weeks later, we had the finished product in our hands: a 200-page, illustrated book -- produced in a private printing of just five copies. The precious scrapbook is no longer "one-of-a-kind", but has been handed down to children and grandchildren.




5. I was with Client #5 one day, watching one of his "home videos", and I was asking him questions like: "When did you live in that house?" and "Who are those people?" He knew the answers, of course -- but what good would that be, I asked him, "...fifty years from now, when your grandchildren are watching it, and wondering where they came from"?

And so, I came up with a new idea.

I set up a video camera in his TV room, so that it was pointed at him while he sat watching the TV screen. I played one of his videos on the screen, and at the same time, I videotaped him -- and recorded his voice -- as he watched the movie. This way, I captured a live Audio/Video commentary by my client, as he saw his own film playing on the TV screen.

Once I had his commentary on DV tape, I could work with it in my Mac. I superimposed it on top of the original video, and re-burned the final DVD. The result was a fascinating "picture-in-a-picture" effect which provides two features that were missing from the original film-to-DVD conversion -- a detailed narration, plus live footage of my client, watching and narrating his own movie.





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