In this paper, we discuss the theoretical, sociolinguistic, methodological and technical objectives and issues of the French Creagest Project (2007-2012) in setting up, documenting and annotating a large corpus of adult and child French Sign Language (LSF) and of natural gestural language. In section 2., we address theoretical and practical issues, emphasizing the outstanding features of the Creagest Project. In section 3., we discuss methodological issues for data collection. Finally, in section 4., we cover technical aspects of LSF video data editing and corpus annotation, in the perspective of setting up a corpus-based formalized description of LSF.