Over a couple of decades the distilled wisdom of my family’s experience of hosting Christmas for our relatives has been collected in a notebook that has become known as The Christmas Book.

It contains pearls of wisdom like: “Light the kettle BBQ at 8.15am for turkey to start cooking at 9.00am, for 1.00pm lunch” (yes, we usually have a monster turkey (boned and rolled and stuffed with a few boned and rolled chickens, and the thing takes at least three hours to roast!).

Or: “Prepare glazed sweet potato ahead of time. Reheat early Christmas day, then wrap in beach towels and put in bed under covers to keep warm until lunch is ready to serve” (yes this really works – with sweet potato and other things – and it helps a lot to relieve congestion and gridlock when you only have one oven to work with!).

The point is that it never hurts to have a reminder when we are doing things that – while significant – we don’t do regularly enough to have a clear memory of all the pitfalls and potential problems.

For me with TtM&D, making a “How To” video is similar. Shooting video is easy. Shooting very good video that clearly tells the story is a much more complex problem. There’s a reason after all why professional production crews have lots of people, each with their own job to attend to. Just because you are only one person filming something doesn’t diminish the complexity of the task, it just means that it’s all on you to get right!

To that end I am going to write and publish Howtos for the things that I do to create material for TtM&D and post them (see the Resources menu), who knows, they might be useful for you as well, either directly, or as a starting point for your own memory aids.

On the list so far:

• Making video
• Sound recording with video
• Making 3D models
• Audio recording