Christmas Card DVD How to mail your family & friends a homemade family DVD at Christmas time by Peter Alvin on October 27, 2006

With the advent of the MiniDV format, inexpensive video editing programs and DVD burners, more and more people will start mailing personal DVDs with their Christmas cards to share their life with distant friends and relatives. A DVD communicates family life and emotion better than a typed annual Christmas letter ever could *and* is also very inexpensive because disc and postage prices are low.

Also, like the annual Christmas letter, Christmas DVD content can be kinda self-absorbed and family narcissistic ("everything you ever wanted to know about our past year and travels--well, actually, didn't want to know...") but on the good site it's also an opporunity to bless people with old memories and to share creative projects.

If nothing else, creating a Christmas DVD is time well spent because it is a scrapbook time capsule of you and your immediate family that can be enjoyed time and time again in future years.

Christmas DVD Content Ideas

• Family Greeting - Introduce the DVD by shooting a "welcome to our DVD" sequence shot by the fireplace or on the living room couch with everyone happy and dressed in holiday finery.
• Slideshows - Choose 40 of your favorite digital stills from thoughout the year to create your own family "yearbook" of the last year. Slide shows are one of your best bets because they are simple to create in most video programs and can be very entertaining to watch with good background music and cool transitions between shots. Tip: caption "who is who" so that people are identified.
• Family Member Interviews - Shoot a two minute interview of each family member about their favorite family times, toys, etc.
• Elder Interviews - Shoot interviews of immediate or extended elder family members: aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. Come up with a list of interesting questions to capture and shaire their rich life so that those memories are not lost forever.
• Recent Everyday Footage - The easiest way to fill up a DVD is to use segments from recent tapes.
• Archival Movies - Sometimes the most emotionally moving content is old footage from 8mm film, VHS, 8mm or Hi-8 tape. Bring to life footage from the 50s and 60s, old wedding ceremonies, etc. If you pay a 3rd party to transfer film to digital make sure the output is a DV tape rather than a DVD so that it's easy to capture into your computer using your video program.
• Archival Photographs - Scan old prints into your computer and create a slide show. Have extremely old photographs restored by a professional.
• Short Movies - Script, shoot, and edit some short comedys or dramas. This can be a lot of work but it is worth it.
• Mock TV Commercial - Similiar to a short movie, shoot a parody of a 30 second TV commercial with yourselves as actors. These can be easily shot and edited in an afternoon because they are so short.
• Music Video - Grab some friend's musical instruments and shoot an ad-hoc short "music video" like on MTV or VH1.
• House Tour - If you've recently moved to a new state, shoot a house and property tour to share your new digs as if your friends were there with you. You could even include a few shots of tourist attractions or landmarks.
• Vacation Piece - Edit your trip to South America down to a palatable 5 minutes of highlights.
• Artwork Gallery - Scan or take close-up (macro) phtotos of your family's best artwork to create an art show segment on the DVD.
• Story Time - Shoot a new segment of a beloved grandparent or aunt reading a short story to the kids.
• Bloopers - If you happen to have captured any shots of funny "drop your mouth open" bloopers, include those. Be mindful of your audience... don't show anything *too* embarrasing.
• Puzzle - Put a clues on the DVD for the audience to solve. By watching the DVD and writing down the answers they unlock a riddle or win a prize.
• Time Capsule - Call out your favorite songs, shows, restaurants from the year for posterity.
• Hollywood Movie Parody - Take a two-minute clip from a movie (video only) and speak new lines of your own script in your own voices (like MXC on the Spike Channel) to make a hilarious clip. Beware of copyright issues, though.
• Still Pictures Parody - Take still pictures and string them together to make a hilarious story (Late Night with Conan O'Brien does this once in a while and it's really funny).

Christmas DVD Best Practices (Do's)

• do use single-layer DVDs because they are very inexpensive or even free after rebates.
• do create a nice festive opening disc menu or one that matches your families' beliefs or interests.
• do put the most best content early on the DVD... don't make your audience groan through 20 minutes of little Johnny's birthday party to get to the good stuff. They will eject the disc before then.
• do highly edit the source footage and only include the best. Condense the content ("sarcastically, how many birthday presents is this kid going to open?!!!")
• do start planning and editing early (before Thanksgiving)
• do burn both -R and +R and test in several players, including mailing some out to some parties ahead of time to see if they play correctly
• do try different burn speeds: 1x, 2x, 4x for reliable mass duplication
• Do break the disc into intuitive chapters to make it easy for your audience to navigate the disc. Very few people will have the interest to watch your entire DVD so slice it up so that folks can see what they have interest in watching
• do ask if all folks have DVD players (we had to duplicate some VHS tapes for my aunts)
• do make notes thoughout the year ("I'd like to put this on the Christmas DVD") and in January immediately start collecting digital photo files
• do weigh envelopes and make sure have proper postage. I found that the envelope + disc liner + dvd still costs only $.37 to mail.
• do "put on your audience hat" and view the completed product as it were your relatives watching it. Are some segments too long and boring? Is all the material appropriate?
• Do also have your spouse or a friend review for appropriateness and entertainment value
• Do partition your DVD into separate sections for different audiences (friends,your family,spouse family) can watch their section in its entirety.
• Do create a 5 second opening "title screen" for each disc chapter show its title, names of people shown, location, and date shot for context
• Do give yourself time to review each version. Label your disks with releaste candidate numbers: candidate1, candidate 2, etc. Like a good English paper your DVD will need a few revisions to polish it. When you finally hit a release candidate (like 5) that is "good enough", then do the mass burning/duplication and send them out.
• Do plan your list of intended recipients (like a wedding) that you will send the disc to. Use this to judge a reasonable "intimacy level" of the disc, that is, how personal you want the disc to be.
• Do (if you have time) add an optional interview commentary track, like Hollywood DVDs, to narrate and give detail to each of your video chapters.
• Do also write your finished product out to MiniDV for high-quality backup.
• Do check postage; don't use staples in envelopes, do check envelop size: square envelopes require additional postage.
• Do by Christmas stamps early as they may sell out.
• Do take a long break after finishing the project! You deserve it.

Christmas DVD Don'ts

• Don't buy DVDs in jewel cases as they are much harder and more expensive to mail. Instead, purchase lined disc sleaves that you can insert into the Christmas card.
• Don't embarrase friends/relatives by putting inappropriate content (unflattering poses showing body weight, sillyness that wasn't intended to be shared with the masses)
• Don't show deeply personal memories on a general disk (delicate family memories sent to peers at work)
• Don't use copywrited music (e.g. a song ripped from a CD).