If there’s one thing I love about making my kind of legacy film, it’s providing the family or client with precious details they had no idea about. Through my research, sometimes I come across things that allow me to tell the story from an unexpected angle you don’t see coming. Let me share with you two examples…
Before he became a highly-respected doctor in the field of nuclear medicine, for two years in the late 60s, the client worked at the notorious Leavenworth prison in Kansas. In checking the records of when he was employed there and seeing what was happening in the country at the time, I found out that none other than Johnny Cash played a live concert there for the inmates while the client had been the head of psychiatry at the prison. I found old pictures of Johnny Cash standing defiantly at the steps of Leavenworth and got the music from the actual concert itself. I put these shots and sounds together to make a great lead in to this chapter of his life that nobody in the family knew about that really gave a sense of time and the decades he had passed through.
In another film, the subject was the client’s father, who in the 1960s, landed his dream job at McDonnell Aircraft, before it became McDonnell Douglas. I started doing research to find visuals and discovered that JFK had come to the plant in Missouri, where the client’s father worked, and gave a speech to the employees. The president praised the employees for their dedication to building the aircraft that protected American interests, as well as pioneering the emerging space program. I found the audio of that speech and used it in the film, conveying the national urgency of their work and how important it was. Naturally, the family had no idea about this event and the segment quickly laid out the importance of where he was at this time in his life, which made it all the more surprising when everything went sideways.
Other projects have other discoveries of a different kind. Sometimes the greatest solutions are finding the perfect bits of stock footage. In one film, a California city that was central to the narrative was Capitola. It’s a tiny vacation town kind of place that I’d never heard of until that project. With the resources I had at hand, I was able to find fantastic stock footage of the city, mostly drone shots, that perfectly captured the essence of the town and its shoreline. For all the client knew when they watched the film, they may have thought I shot the footage myself while I was on location, or that I hired someone to do so.
In the same project, when the client requested additional material pertaining to Culver City, California, again, it was stock footage to the rescue.
I had a film segment with the voice over explaining that there was not a single picture of a man’s huge model train set. Stock footage came through again. Viewers have no idea I didn’t shoot it myself and it doesn’t matter because that’s the whole point of stock footage: Someone else has shot it so you don’t have to.
Contact us to see what great details can be found about your family and it’s fascinating story.
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