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Creating Great Birthday Party Videos

By Colton Wright, Digz-it.com

My son recently had his third birthday party and it was mayhem. There were kids all over place doing all sorts of funny things with parents following them around trying to prevent next catastrophe. Believe it or not, this environment makes for a fantastic video. The key is to plan a little before heading into chaos.

Sequence of Activities First think in general terms about sequence of events that go into a party. At first, all you may envision are children running around and best strategy is to sit back, and tape events as they occur from a safe, comfortable distance. After all, how can you possibly control how your video will turn out with certain anarchy that will ensue? Well, answer is to pick your spots. The ‘spots’ I’m talking about are those more creative moments you don’t want to miss.

Preparty •The birthday wish list •Sending invitations •Buying cake •Decorating •Creating goodie bags

Party Time •Friends arrive with presents •Everyone gets comfortable •Entertainment arrives •Lots of laughing, singing, dancing, kazooing (is that a word?). •Let games begin •The Birthday Procession •Now real mess: cake and ice cream •Finally, presents •The goodie bags and farewell

Perspective To really make a great birthday video, be creative and think about world through a child’s eyes for a moment. Kids get excited for a reason. They have all their friends over, most rules go out door, and there are games, cake, ice cream, and presents; what else could make a child more excited? On top of this, your child is right in middle of it all, loosing their breath trying to keep track of who’s doing what, where, how and why. The goal is to capture that excitement, and it doesn’t mean standing in corner, towering 6 feet over scene panning back and forth with a wide angle lens filming. You’re going to have to do some extreme filming for a few minutes and get down in action.

Walk Through Now let’s get creative. What I would like to do is walk through party and give you some examples of creative camera work that will make your videos more exciting to film, edit and share. I don’t expect you to use all of these ideas in one video, but using just a few will improve your storytelling dramatically.

Preparty taping Taping all preparty items will probably only take less than 10 minutes in total but this video will come in handy when editing. These moments are difficult to plan, so an idea is to keep your video camera fully charged and in an easy to reach spot. This way when discussion of what they want for their birthday comes up, you’ll be able to capture moment quickly.

The preparty video you tape will be good flashback material. For example, as you tape your child opening their favorite present, you may want to include a brief flashback to when they initially told you what they wanted and how bad they wanted it. Flashbacks can also be used to show before and after shots of cake or your home before and after destruction.

The Party One of best techniques to make your final video more interesting is to create a few scenes where viewer experiences party from child’s perspective. These are commonly called point of view shots. This involves getting down to their level, literally.

Friends arrive with presents This is a great opportunity for capturing some interesting conversations between children as they arrive. Try to get your son or daughter to greet first few arrivals. Kneel down and tape over their shoulder so that person they are speaking to takes up maybe 2/3 of frame. For effect, it should be filmed from height of kids. For a more dramatic, meeting of minds, effect, move camera around so that it is looking slightly up at two as they talk. Or, start over shoulder of one of subjects and move around to shoulder of other.

In my recent article “Kids Just Wanna Have Fun” I offered some ideas to keep your fun hungry kids happy. But, duhhhhh. . .I forgot FREE FUN STUFF! Well ya’ know that’s most important stuff. I don’t know where my mind was that day! So, now that I’ve seen error of my ways, Let me share some more great activities we sometimes forget about as we get older. These timeless activities have been around for ages. Things that we enjoyed as kids are still fun for kids today. Even in an electronic society!

If you have kids, most likely you have a box of crayons somewhere. I hate to admit it but I still love to color! Come on, give it a try no matter how old you are. I have found that it is contagious. Even if your kids think they are "too old" for coloring, you will be surprised how quickly they join in when they see you enjoying it! Go ahead, it works every time.

 Silly putty is another fun activity that we tend to think we're "too old" for. But older you get more creative ideas you have and more silly fun you can have. So come on, get your creative juices flowing.

Hey ladies, and maybe some of you gents too, do you remember paper dolls? I had almost forgotten they existed until one Christmas I came across a paper doll kit in a craft store. Suddenly, I remembered hours and hours of fun I had playing with these simple toys. And, they are so much easier to dress than Barbie. Sorry, Barbie.

There are literally thousands of craft ideas that can keep you busy for hours or days. Crafts come in all different levels of difficulty. So find one that suits everyone in family and work on it together. Hmmmm, could this mean more conversation time! Take advantage of these fun times together. Get to know your kids better.

You can always choose a variety of different level crafts to suit everyone and work on different crafts all at once. Either way, you're accomplishing several things at once…...

Children learn through creating.

You'll be keeping that FUN meter up, keeping them from getting bored.

You'll be saving money on outings by finding creative ways to have fun at home.