After Your Interview
You’ve completed your first Biographfilm interview session and received your download and streaming links. Now what?
First, let me preface everything here with an important reminder: you 100% own this digital movie entirely. Biographfilm does not own your digital film. You do. In legal parlance, this is what is known as a work-for-hire arrangement. What this practically means for you is that you can do whatever you want to do with it. There are no restrictions and no limitations.
Preserving your Biographfilm yourself
Biographfilm does offer services to help you manage and preserve your Biographfilm afterwards — from an all-inclusive, guaranteed solution to an administrative solution that helps you record the locations of your files. Prices vary according to the complexity of solution, as you might imagine. Please contact us for more information.
Having said that, if you want to take your film and manage it fully yourself, here are some best practices I recommend you follow. Generally, the idea is to keep at least three (3) pristine copies of your Biographfilm, two of which are each on separate physical storage devices in your home or office, and the last copy being stored at a separate physical location including on a cloud storage service.
Here are the simple steps:
STORE. Download your Biographfilm movie file immediately to your personal computer.
BACK UP. Make a copy of your Biographfilm movie file onto a separate computer or memory device such as an external hard drive, USB-C thumb drive, or another physical digital storage device.
ARCHIVE. Save a copy of your Biographfilm movie file onto a cloud data storage service.
INSPECT: Check the movie file periodically for any issues of playability, file integrity, or failures (i.e. - set a reminder once or twice a year) and resolve any issues using a redundant copy. Equipment failures do happen, so it’s paramount that you identify whenever it happens so you can rectify the situation and create additional copies to replace any damaged or missing ones.
Now that you’ve stored, backed-up, and archived your Biographfilm, we recommend you share it!
Sharing your Biographfilm
You don’t have to, of course, but we believe your Biographfilm can have powerful impact for you today when others around you are able to have a better understanding of your journey. But again, you are in complete control of your Biographfilm. You should proceed as you see fit!
However, if you want to share your Biographfilm today, there are two recommended ways to share it.
SHARE VIA THE LINK YOU ALREADY HAVE. You have been given a link to your unlisted movie file on Youtube. IMPORTANT: The movie file we upload to Youtube is “unlisted,” meaning that it is not visible to the Youtube viewing public or search engines. The only way you or anyone else can watch your Biographfilm at this Youtube location is by using the URL link we provide you. But please note, anyone with the URL link can watch.
SHARE VIA AN ALTERNATE STREAMING SERVICE. You may want to use a streaming service such as Vimeo to share your Biographfilm in order to set different privacy and download settings. (Youtube, for example, does not allow viewers to download the movie file.) Features and costs will vary.
DO NOT SHARE VIA SENDING THE MOVIE FILE ITSELF. We do not recommend sending the actual movie file to recipients as the files are extremely large (around 20GB). Not only does this make it extremely difficult for viewers to watch your Biographfilm, it also creates copies of your Biographfilm outside of your control.
Make a Legacy Plan
No matter how you choose to store and archive your Biographfilm(s), make sure you create a clear plan that reflects your wishes regarding your Biographfilm in the future. We have a simple Biographfilm Directive and Agreement that you can complete to designate a person or persons as your Biographfilm’s Digital Executor.
Do another!
If you are able to, additional Biographfilms allow you to further show yourself and chronicle your journey over time. Life is about change and seeing the change, hearing what transpires in the chapters that follow only help capture your journey. I won’t belabor the point here, since I do so in many other articles here! But, yes, you should do more than one.
