If you’re looking for creative ways to keep your home videos from collecting dust on your camera roll, this blog post is the place for you! All right, now let’s jump into those eight ideas.
1. Acrostic
The first idea, for what to say in your birthday message video is to create an acrostic. Now, an acrostic is a type of poem where the first letter of each line spells out a word. In this case, the word would be your friend’s or family member’s name and for each letter, you could list a characteristic or a phrase that you appreciate or admire about them. So, I might for my husband, Christian, for example, say C is for compassionate, H is for happy and so on, and so forth. Then you can either share those things on screen, write them out on a piece of paper or simply just list them out birthday video.
2. “X things I love about you”
Idea number two is X things I love about you. Now, this is great, if you’re collaborating on a birthday message video for example. I’ve put together compilations of 40 things we love about you and each one is a different person sharing a specific characteristic that they admire about the birthday person. This is a fun opportunity to get a lot of people involved. Also, people have kind of a built-in idea for what to say. So, they don’t feel like they have to try to figure out what to record in their own birthday video message. You could either assign someone a characteristic and ask them to share a memory or a funny story, or you could create a Google doc and in the Google doc, each person who’s participating could put in the personality trait that they’re covering. So, that you don’t get any overlap.
3. Survival Kit
Idea number three is a survival kit for your birthday or next decade. Now. I’ve seen my past clients do really funny takes on this, where maybe for milestone birthdays like 30, 60, 70. You could either take this kind of a thoughtful route or make it just really silly and fun. The things that they might need to survive their forties or survive their seventies.
4. Song Lyrics
Number four is song lyrics. So, what you could do here is take maybe the chorus or part of this person’s favorite song and change some of the lyrics to things, that make you think of your friend or family member. This is also a great way to kind of include some fun memories or maybe some inside jokes into the video by just singing a little song. You definitely don’t need to record the whole song or fill out every single word. I think this idea works best in kind of a little chunk, like maybe a chorus.
5. Haiku
Idea number five is another type of poem called the Haiku. Now a Haiku uses a specific number of syllables for each line. I think it’s five, seven and five. So, it just gives you some structure to create a thoughtful, sweet, or funny message. Alternatively, if you have a group participating, you could ask everyone who turns in their video to end their sentence with a rhyming word. Then they would all go back to back to back and the whole video would kind of become a poem.
6. Memories
Idea number six I’m calling through the years. Now, this is great for milestone birthdays. If you’re having a group of people participate and submit videos, you could assign or have different people speak from different years or different time periods of that person’s life. So, you could have maybe their parents share their favorite memories from years one through 10. Then their friends from high school might share from 10 to 20. Then their college friends would share their best memories from 20 to 30 and so on and so forth. You could break this down into smaller groups if you have a lot of people participating. Like share your favorite memory from 1999 or you could just ask people to speak about a specific decade. You could group all those messages together. So, here are our favorite memories about you from the nineties or our favorite memories about you from the 2010s.
7. Sharing
Idea number seven, for what to say in your birthday message video, is sharing. What you’re most excited to do together when you’re able to see each other next. I can’t wait to eat at our favorite Chinese restaurant or I can’t wait to go see a live musical with you. We all wish that we could be together in person more right now, but one of the fun ways that I’ve coped with things over the last year is definitely doing a lot of daydreaming and imagining of what’s to come. So, share what you hope is coming for your friend or family member in the next year.
8. Movie Star Casting
Idea number eight is the movie star casting. Now I had a client submit a video like this for a recent birthday message montage. I thought it was so clever and creative. Basically, the premise is if you had to cast a movie star or a celebrity to play your friend or loved one is a movie about their life, a biopic then who would you cast and why? Obviously, a lot of these prompts can be taken either in a kind of fun, silly direction, or they can be taken in a more serious, thoughtful direction. It’s all up to you and your relationship with the person that you’re recording the video for. So, I’m really curious to know in the comments, if you had to cast someone as yourself in a biopic or a movie about yourself, who would you choose. Let me know, ’cause I’m really curious.
