Over the past year Documentary Filmmaker David Hoffman has been doing an experiment with his home movies. I watched his first movie about his family’s trip to Paris and it inspired me to try the same thing my a family vacation (hope to have the footage posted soon). He recently did another one about his family’s trip to New York, I watched one about their search for toilet paper. This is one of eight documenting their New York trip.
In this video David explains the thinking by this experiment. Instead of having static photos of your family that will have no meaning to your future descendants the idea is to make a home movie in a semi-documentary format so that your descendants can get a real feeling for who you were.
David is a veteran documentary filmmaker with 40 years of experience. He is taking this experience and turning the camera around on himself. These videos are telling a story about him and his family, and what I enjoy about them is how personal they are, you really get a feel for his family, and their dynamics. It’s an interesting concept and I plan to do more of this with my home movies.
So what do you think? Is this something you might try?