Legacy Video Lounge Podcast

Steve Pender - Personal Historian & Video Biographer
Legacy Video Lounge Podcast

The Legacy Video Lounge Podcast celebrates the art and science of capturing, preserving, celebrating, and sharing personal history on video. The podcast host is personal historian and video biographer Steve Pender, president of Family Legacy Video, Inc. (https://www.familylegacyvideo.com) During your visits to the Legacy Video Lounge, you'll hear Steve share his passion for legacy videos. He'll also offer tips on hiring and working with professional video biographers, hints for do-it-yourselfers, and much more!

  1. 02/27/2018

    Legacy Video Lounge Podcast – LVL 20: Life story legacies: True stories about sharing values & preserving wealth

    The oldest members of the Baby Boom generation have started to retire. Because of that, the United States is now in the midst of the biggest transfer of wealth from one generation to another that the country has ever seen. But according to Barclays Wealth Insights, history has shown that 70% of family wealth fails to transfer to the third generation. One of the main causes of this failure is not preparing your heirs to appreciate and properly manage your estate; to be aware of the history behind it and to share in a family vision that will shape their stewardship of your family wealth moving forward. In this episode, podcast host, personal historian, video biographer, and Family Legacy Video, Inc. president Steve Pender is joined by personal historian and author Stephanie Kadel Taras, Ph.D. They share some real life examples of how their high net worth clients used life story legacies, in both video and print formats, as communication tools to pass along their values and visions surrounding family wealth to the next generations of their families. Stephanie is an author and personal historian. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She started her company, TimePieces Personal Biographies, in the year 2000. Stephanie works with clients who want to tell their own stories, hire a writer to work with family members, or document their organization’s history. Her 2013 memoir and social history of West Virginia, titled Mountain Girls, won a West Virginia Writers Book Award. Her 2008 history of Eckerd College won an Independent Publisher Book Award.

    24 min
  2. 02/10/2018

    Legacy Video Lounge Podcast – LVL 19: Four Quick Tips for Do-It-Yourselfers

    In this episode, video biographer and Family Legacy Video, Inc. president Steve Pender offers some tips for folks who prefer to record their own family storytellers as opposed to hiring a professional video biography company like Family Legacy Video – perhaps because they can’t afford to hire a pro or maybe because they just prefer to do it themselves. Tip #1: Steady as she goes. • Mount your cell phone, DSLR, or video camera on a tripod. A shaky shot will distract viewers. • Use a video tripod if possible. • But – you can get away with using a camera designed for still cameras if you don’t move the camera. Tip #2: Walk to the light! • Use proper lighting to create a pleasing and flattering image. • Google “Three Point Lighting” to learn more about it. Tip #3: Shot composition: Stay close. • Legacy videos are very intimate productions. If you frame your shot too wide, that intimacy is diminished. • Try to go not much wider than someone’s waist. • Vary the shot from waist high, to chest high, to shoulder high. • Don’t go super close. That can be off-putting. Tip #4: Use an external microphone. • Don’t rely on your camera’s built-in microphone. • Use a lapel mic. A consumer quality microphone is not expensive to purchase. • A lapel mic will give you good sound, and sound quality won’t change if you move the camera closer or farther away.

    12 min
  3. 01/31/2018

    Legacy Video Lounge Podcast – LVL 18: The Cost of Legacy Videos

    In this episode, video biographer and Family Legacy Video, Inc. president Steve Pender tackles the topic of pricing professional legacy videos. LET'S PUT THINGS IN CONTEXT Hour-long documentaries produced for outlets like the National Geographic and Discovery channels have budgets ranging from $125,000 on up. A single segment on 60 Minutes can cost $200,000. Family Legacy Video's personal video biographies rival those network productions in quality and usually run longer than an hour - sometimes much longer. So even if a legacy video clocks in at $40,000, that's a pretty good deal compared to what those broadcast and cable productions cost. Not everybody can afford these prices, of course. But for those who can, it's a great, great value. SO WHAT AM I PAYING FOR? Producers with years of expertise organizing and planning video biography projects. Skilled interviewers and seasoned and creative video editors. Experienced camera operators and lighting directors, audio technicians, and makeup artists devoted to making you look and sound your very best on screen. Family Legacy Video crew members are talented professionals who need to be compensated accordingly. So people are on thing - gear is another. Professional cameras, lenses, lighting and audio equipment in our experienced hands yields fantastic results - but cost much more than consumer gear to purchase and maintain. And then there's travel. While Family Legacy Video is based in Tucson, a large chunk of our productions are shot outside Arizona. I've traveled to the east and west coasts, points between, even points beyond, like Hawaii. Travel incurs expenses like airfare, car rental, hotel rooms, meals, etc. It's only fair to include these costs on top of the production expense - if not, Family Legacy Video could easily lose tons of money on each video. And yet, a lot of prospective clients seem to think this is somehow unfair, or they just want to save money by trying to find someone local to them, or they just don't like the idea of paying for someone else's travel expenses, as if our crew is taking a vacation at the client's expense. Just to be clear, we travel as economically as possible, meaning we squeeze into coach airplane seats, we stay in moderately-priced hotels, and we don't raid the mini-bars. Finally, custom legacy videos are time-consuming efforts that can easily run into the hundreds of hours. WRAPPING UP It would be great if everyone could afford Family Legacy Video's service - but the company needs to price productions at a level that compensates it fairly and allows it to stay in business. Whether you can afford to hire Family Legacy Video or you opt to go it yourself as a do-it-yourselfer, the key is not to wait - get started on your video biography now!

    24 min
4.7
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

The Legacy Video Lounge Podcast celebrates the art and science of capturing, preserving, celebrating, and sharing personal history on video. The podcast host is personal historian and video biographer Steve Pender, president of Family Legacy Video, Inc. (https://www.familylegacyvideo.com) During your visits to the Legacy Video Lounge, you'll hear Steve share his passion for legacy videos. He'll also offer tips on hiring and working with professional video biographers, hints for do-it-yourselfers, and much more!

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