Slide Shows. Genealogists frequently collect old family photographs which can be arranged in any number of ways to tell any number of stories. By building your slide show in your video editing program you can add video clips, narration, background music, wipes and dissolves, color enhancements, pans and zooms, titles and credits, etc. to add vitality to an otherwise potentially boring slide show.

Interview. Why not interview family member(s)? Open with a location shot. Include breakaway shots of yourself listening/agreeing, that you can insert later as needed. Close with a wrap up shot, such as the interviewee waving goodbye or saying something final. 
Try asking the same question a couple of different ways to see if you don't get another take on the story in response. Pause between questions, to facilitate easier editing later. If appropriate to your objective, ask if the interviewee has things or photos you might videotape to include in the video.
Practice not speaking while your interviewee is speaking: stepping on your subject's answer ensures video viewers will not hear what your subject said.

Slide Show with Interview. Merging the first two types might produce a better slide show or a better illustrated interview, or both, even if the two videos were shot years apart.

Interviews Plural. Interview different people on different days, in different places if that's most convenient for them, about a common subject such as a common grandparent, now long since deceased. Then cut and paste in your editing suite so that different interviews compliment one another. This too might be augmented with still photos of the grandparent as appropriate.

Convert home movies to DV. Any number of us have memories locked away where we can't get at them, on 8 or 16 millimeter home movies. Chances are the film is okay, but just try to find a projector to show them. Even if you could, shipping the projector to various family members would be prohibitively expensive.
 
MovieStuff makes great (but not cheap) machines for converting home movies to DV tape.  Forever on DVD and other MovieStuff customers are in the business of doing these conversions for others for just a few dollars.
 
Have a conversion facility convert your home movies to DV tape, then capture the resulting video footage into your video editing program. There you can edit and enhance the movie to your heart's content, deleting bad shots, resequencing others, adding titles and credit that viewers may need to make sense of the DVD you produce.

Tell a Story. Write a narrator's script of the story you want to tell. Record that narration and lay it down on the audio track of your editing program. Now (and only now) go shoot the footage that illustrates your story, and lay that down on the video track over your pre-existing narration. Edit the video to fit the narration. This is the process used to develop the Norfolk Historical Society promo.
 
One word of caution: Finalizing the script is the first step. Develop a shot list, detailing which video is going to go over each sentence. Then you'll know you need 7 seconds of video of the car, and 41 seconds of video of the office (or whatever). A Tip: non-physical subjects, such as love, are tricky to videotape. If the script says "kids have fun" video of anything other than happy children is probably inappropriate.

Birthday Parties/Anniversaries. Whether the birthday boy is 3, 13, 33 or 83, why not shoot the party? Get close-ups of as many guests as possible. Concentrate on reaction shots and key moments like the cake cutting or gift opening. Fill the frame with audio too. That way the final edited version will be self-narrating, saving you an extra editing step. But be sure to get the correct spelling of each guest's name for the list of guests in the credit roll.

Slice of Life non-stories. Genealogists in particular sometimes want to shoot extremely simple videos of something like the ancestral home or an grandparent's tombstone. (You'll find several such community glimpses and cemetery overviews on this web site.) Just go shoot some typical or interesting features, then pull them into your editing program, add titles and credits, and you're done. 
If your intention is to provide other family members with a video they could include in their own genealogy efforts, minimum title and credits may make the more sense. Well-shot, well-edited slice of life videos seldom need narration.

Specific Topics. So Uncle Fred has spent the last 40 years building ships in bottles. Ask him to explain what he does to the camera. Make him and his hobby the star. Be sure to include shots of his "best" examples, and any prizes he may have won. You may be able to supplement your primary footage with shots of topic-specific magazine covers and articles, related how-to books he may have, web sites, etc. 
If not Uncle Fred, how about Aunt Irene, baker of those delicious family favorites?
 

Copyright 2006-2007 John Cardiff