Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [81]
Video is fantastic, but shooting it can take you out of an event, and it can be very time-consuming to edit. The good news is that editing has gotten much easier, thanks to programs like Microsoft’s Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie. Both are free applications that allow you to create very professional looking movies by just dragging and dropping photographs, video, music, and voice-overs.
Whenever you can afford the time to do a really complete video shoot and production, go for it. For the rest of the time, develop the discipline of shooting video cliplets of about ten seconds each. Then create stories of no more than ten minutes. These boundaries will not only keep the story more interesting for viewers, but will provide realistic targets so that you will actually create more video stories.
Another great way to tell a story is in a scrapbook. Gather photos along with images of stuff you have digitized (tickets, dried flowers, recipes, and so on) and add captions to tell your story. There are a host of Web sites that provide electronic layouts, instructions, and even classes on how to create your e-memory in the form of a scrapbook.
Time lines are wonderful for visualizing a series of events. I can see from research projects, including MyLifeBits, that some incredibly compelling time line software will be coming to market in the coming years. The present offerings aren’t too bad either. Try out www.smartdraw.com, www.timelinemaker.com, and other time line applications on the Web.
As you think about leaving your stories to future generations, don’t forget the digital equivalent of cemeteries and libraries. For a fee, Web sites like www.legacy.com and www.forevernetwork. com offer to store letters, essays, photos, videos, and stories to pass on to future generations. I like the way famento.com hosts a person or family’s content, because the format is a compelling timeline of photos and videos.
Everyone has an urge to tell his stories. Go ahead and tell yours; it isn’t about being perfect.
STEP III: USE ALL THAT INFORMATION
You will need to organize your e-memories to get the most out of them. It turns out that the bigger the collection, the more care you need to take in how it is organized. People have learned that the way you organized a single bookshelf wasn’t adequate for organizing a whole roomful of bookshelves. And the approach to a roomful of books was not enough to manage the Library of Congress. Amazing as it sounds, your e-memory will be more akin to the Library of Congress than anyone’s personal library. You will be dealing with vast quantities of information.
Of course, you won’t have a paid staff to take care of your e-memories like the Library of Congress does, so something has to be done to reduce the workload. Thankfully, computers are our servants. If you make sure they have good data to start with, then they can do all kinds of automatic classification and lookup. This is why I stressed having the time set correctly for your photos and adding geolocation. With those values set, the computer can sort all your photos by time and space, letting you query by place names, or loading all photos taken during a certain event. Likewise, if you perform character recognition on your scanned paper, then you can search for text in the paper.
Born-digital items tend to have information like this that is useful for organizing your collection. For instance, Web pages have the URL they came from and the date you visited them. E-mails have the address of the sender, the subject, and the date. Digital music has the name of the song, the artist, the album, and more.
Unfortunately, there is still some work for you to do organizing your e-memories. For example, if you simply scan a picture and say nothing about it, all the machine knows is that it has an image scanned on a certain date. It is up to you to add the information to make that picture useful. Also, it can be very worthwhile for you to label bills that you