How to make a family history video from your family's stories

To make a family history video, collect the stories first: sit with the oldest people in your family and ask about places, journeys and the day things changed. Then write the best three to six stories as short scenes, about 150 words for each minute, and make them a film. Where there are no photos, animation draws what nobody filmed: in Nima's Long-form Video every relative is drawn once from how they are described, every place is built once, and the narrator reads the family's own words.

Your first trailer is free.

Last updated 4 November 2026

Collect the stories: questions to ask

Record the conversation on your phone and keep their phrasing; the way your grandmother says it is the line to film.

• Where were you born, and what could you see from the window?
• What did your parents do for work?
• Who was the first in the family to leave, and what did they carry?
• How did you meet your husband or wife?
• What did a holiday dinner look like?
• What was the hardest year?
• What did your grandparents tell you about their parents?
• What did the house sound like at night?
• What is something nobody believes about you?
• What do you want the great-grandchildren to know?

Write them as scenes

One story, one scene: a place, a time, the people there and one thing that happens. Keep their own words as the dialogue, and let a narrator join the scenes ("My grandmother was nineteen when she...").

No photos? Draw it

A slideshow needs pictures, and most family history has none before a certain year. Animation draws the village, the ship, the first shop. Describe each relative at the age they are in the story; someone who appears young and old is written as two people ("Rosa at twenty", "Rosa at seventy") so each age is drawn once.

You approve every person and every place before anything is animated, and a note on any picture redraws it.

Step by step

1. Write the stories. 150 to 10,000 words, one scene each.
2. Paste them. Open Long-form Video and paste the text.
3. Pick a look. Detailed claymation, felted wool, comic book ink, acid pencil or cut paper.
4. Approve the family and the places. Each drawn once, kept for the whole film.
5. Pick the voices. Five auditions for each speaking relative.
6. Watch your free trailer. 15 to 20 seconds, animated free.
7. Make the film. Download it, or send it to every cousin with a link.

Where to show it

• A reunion or a big birthday.
• An anniversary, with the story of how they met.
• A celebration of life, where the stories are what people came to hear.
• Relatives far away, with a link.
• The children, who will ask for it again.

What it costs

Films are made on a monthly plan metered in minutes of finished film, with one, two or five rounds of notes on each film. The plans are on the pricing page. Film length follows the text at about 150 words a minute with the narrator on.

A ten-minute family film uses ten minutes of a plan.