-
OT: Creating Family History Video’s as a Business ? Interviewing Parents/Grandparents, etc
Does anyone have any experience offering the service of interviewing family members like parents and/or grand parents to create a video history for the other family members?
We have a staffer that would be good at this and are considering offering this as a product… if we think we can generate enough business to keep them busy.
Questions…
– What are these services called ?
– How do you advertise and solicit business?
– What standard packages do you offer?
– How do you charge?
– How many projects do you get per month and what size is your market?I would really like to find the web sites for some of these services so we can see how they present themselves and their various options for such a product.
Thanks for any tips or info.
-
3 Replies
-
This is something I’ve done on several occasions
What are these services called ?
I’ve called them Video Biographies in the past.
How do you advertise and solicit business?
For me it has been word of mouth. It has been suggested to me that I hang fliers on bulletin boards in retirement homes, but I haven’t done that.
How many projects do you get per month and what size is your market?
I thoroughly enjoy doing these types of projects, but I couldn’t do more than one a month. The interview itself can take a whole day, and the editing takes forever when you’re starting with 6 to 8 hours of footage. Most projects I do take a couple of weeks, but a video biography can easily take 3 to 4. A lot of effort goes towards getting still photos from the family to add to the video, not to mention license free archive photos and video clips, and period music.
-
have to say that as a business goes, it doesn’t! i’ve had a few clients in the past who’ve attempted it (i did the on line editing – so my part was pretty simple), but they all basically gave the idea up.
as vveg just wrote, it’s time incredibly time consuming, difficult organising peripheral material (i’ve done a few doco’s based on individuals in the past, and these were relatively ‘famous’ people, so there was a great deal of material readily avaiable).
as a commercial venture with just the ‘family’ paying for it, i would think it just too expensive. say a half hour (based on my experiences), you’d have to be charging around 3 > 5k – and that’s for a pretty basic video… most of the ones i’ve worked on were budgeted at around 15 > 25k…
leslie
-
What are some questions that you ask?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up