Perhaps the hardest thing to grasp about our business is this:

What is a personalized documentary?

This is the most basic question about what we do.  Yet it is often the hardest question to answer.  Maybe that is because a personalized documentary can be so many different things.

It’s a lively, interesting movie about a true story.

It’s a real documentary about YOU (or your family, or friends, or an event, or anything you want it to be about.)

It has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It tells a story.

Your own historical archives are the raw materials for the movie: photographs, home movies, videos, recordings, documents, mementos, genealogical records, or whatever may be in your closet.

It’s not a wedding video, although a wedding video could be part of it.
It’s not a vacation video, or a baby video, or the recitation of a family tree.  But it could include any of those things.

It could be about a family.  It could be about one person’s life.  Or about another group of people: co-workers in a company, classmates, roommates, a sports team, a musical group.

It is a documentary.  But not about the subjects we normally see: public issues, famous people, the things you find in school textbooks.  It could touch upon historical events but it is always focused on the ordinary lives of people.

Just as people are infinitely different, so are the documentaries that we make. You can see some samples on our website.

Esteemed Readers:

Welcome to the first entry of the newly created Found Time blog.

In our 5 plus years of making documentaries for clients and helping them preserve and present their families’ histories and stories, we’ve accumulated a multitude of ideas and learned many lessons, which we’ve always wanted to share with a larger audience.

While our website, found-time.com, provides basic information about who we are and what we do, we felt the need for a more fluid online venue. Hence our first blog. Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s the ideal way for us to express our ideas in a diverse and timely manner while supplying you with links to other blogs, sites, and articles that we believe will be useful in helping you explore your memories and stories.

As our blog grows, we welcome and encourage comments about your own experiences and ideas concerning the process of documenting personal, family, and group history.

Marina & Stephen, Found Time Productions