Go room by room. Start in the master bedroom: open your closets and make a slow pan across your hanging clothes, shoes and other items you store there. While panning the closet contents you can elaborate with details like: “Here are five businesses suits, 12 pairs of pants and 12 blouses – worth about two thousand five hundred dollars”. If you have any expensive or hard to replace items be sure to draw attention to them and record a clear image.
· Open your drawers and lay smaller items like jewelry, watches, and personal items on your bed and photograph those. It is helpful to have your completed inventory list on hand with the detailed information about the items and prices. Ideally, one person should operate the camera while the other reads from the list.
· Don’t forget the garage or the kitchen. Make sure you pull out those treasured tools, pots and pans, holiday decorations, etc., and document them as well.
· If you have outbuildings or have invested in landscaping, make sure it all is on video. Open up the shed and film or photograph anything inside of it.
· There are several technical issues to consider: 1) Make sure there is enough light in the room so all of the items can be seen adequately and you are close enough to the video camera so your voice can be heard, 2) Make sure there is a tape, flash disk or other storage device in the camera, and 3) Remember to start with a fully-charged battery so you won’t have to stop mid way to recharge it.
· Make it fun. Get the kids involved. Turn it into a family project. Make sure they help out when you are in their room shooting video of their furniture, toys, computers, cameras and other possessions. You might say “Santa got this computer last Christmas for Mary. It would probably cost us about $350 to replace it.”
· When you are all done, watch the video yourself to make sure you have not missed anything, that the images are clear, and then MAKE COPIES. Burn a few copies to DVDs or onto removable flash or hard drives, and store them away in your safe deposit box, in a secure drawer at work, and maybe send a copy to a relative. You can also post it to an online data storage site. If you have filled out a written spreadsheet, keep copies offsite along with the video.
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