Off The Record
Nick Peers reveals how to preserve your family history for future generations by interviewing the people who lived it
Alan Crosby discusses historical Christmas celebrations
Christmas is coming, and hopefully you’ll see some of your older relatives over the festive period. This offers a unique opportunity: the chance to probe their memories for stories about your family history. But how much will you remember later? And what happens when your grandparents and parents are no longer around to tell those stories?
“People always think that there’s more time, but that’s the one thing they don’t necessarily have,” says Gwyn Cole, filmmaker and owner of Family History Films ( familyhistoryfilms.co.uk). “It’s crucial to start talking and getting this stuff down, since there’s no time like the present.”
Oral history has always played a key role in storytelling, and the digital revolution has made it easier than ever to capture those memories to pass on to future generations. The simplest method is through a recorded interview, and your first choice is which medium to use: audio or video? A radio-style audio-only interview is the simpler option and, as Andrew Parsonage of Extraudionary ( extraudionary. co.uk) points out, the absence of a camera makes it a more comfortable experience for older family members.
Or perhaps you watch Who Do You Think You Are? and would like to do so something similar
with your family’s stories, mixing on-camera interviews with old videos and photos for context. It doesn’t have to be complicated, all you really need to do is “set up an iPhone or a DLSR and start talking,” says Cole. “Anyone can do it in their own home.”
Professional Help
If you’re not familiar with the technology or pressed for time, then professional services like those offered by Cole and Parsonage, as well as Barry Wale of Eternity Videos ( eternityvideos. co.uk), may be more appealing. The benefits are clear: all three bring decades of film and radio experience to cover the technical aspects of producing and then editing the interview. This will save you hours, if not days, of time and ensure your project comes to fruition.
You’ll still need to do some background research, but you’ll get high-quality results, thanks to their expertise and professionalgrade recording equipment.
They’ll conduct the interview, using what Parsonage terms his “dispassionate radio sensibility” to put subjects at ease and draw out answers and reflections people might feel uncomfortable expressing to a family member.
There is, of course, a price to pay for these services. Eternity Videos’ charges range from £350 for a one-hour unedited interview through to £1,250 for a 45-minute TV documentary
‘The digital revolution has made it easier than ever to capture memories’
style edit. Extraudionary’s radio programme-style package costs £275 for a two-and-a-half-hour interview, which will be edited down to about an hour. However, if those prices are beyond your budget and you’re happy to put in the time and effort, it’s possible to achieve good results on your own.
Another benefit of going down the DIY route is that you’ll equip yourself with skills you can use to interview other family members in the future.
Your first port of call before embarking on recording should be the Oral History Society’s website ( ohs.org.uk), in particular the ‘Getting Started’ guide in the Advice section. This covers all of the bases, including preparing for the interview, deciding which questions to ask and choosing recording equipment. The OHS also runs a series of day-long courses, including a guide to video interviewing. These cost about £125–135 each for non-members, but you can save up to £40 per course by signing up for a year’s society membership (£32).
If you do decide to take on the project yourself, you’ll need the appropriate equipment.
For a one-off interview your smartphone may prove adequate. “Phones have come a long way,” says Parsonage. “These days the audio quality is good enough that I’ve seen pros use them for capturing short interviews or soundbites.”
“But,” he adds, “if you have ambitions to do a lot of recording, whether it’s family histories or other projects such as podcasts, then I recommend investing in a decent digital recorder.” These come with built-in microphones, and Parsonage recommends the Zoom brand (see the Buyer’s Guide on page 20).
If you plan to record using your smartphone, then an external microphone is a good investment – for audio-only interviews, Shure’s MV5 (£99, bit. ly/shure-mv5) can be paired with your Android phone or iPhone. It comes with its own stand and a built-in headphone jack so you can follow Parsonage’s advice to verify the recorder is capturing your voice and your subject’s clearly: “Always wear headphones/earphones while you’re recording, as this will help you judge microphone position.”
When it comes to shooting video, your phone’s built-in HD camera should be more than adequate, although a 4K camcorder such as Panasonic’s HC-VX980EB-K (£400, bit.ly/ pana-vx980) may prove easier to use. Capturing audio is the tricky thing. In most video interviews, professional film-makers use a boom mic, positioned above the interviewee and out of camera shot, but for DIY productions a clip-on microphone, such as the RØDE smartLav+ ( rode.com/ microphones/smartlav-plus), should suffice. You’ll also need a tripod to mount your smartphone on – make sure it’s about 55 inches in height, like the Tacklife MLT01 (£15.39, bit.ly/tacklife-mlt01).
This needs to be paired with a compatible phone mount such as the H&S adaptor (£5.49, bit.ly/h-and-s-adaptor).
Digital recorders (and camcorders) record directly to their own built-in storage or a microSD card, but you’ll need a suitable app for your smartphone. The built-in camera app may suffice for video interviews, but when it comes to audio-only interviews, ShurePlus MOTIV for both Android and iOS is a good choice and works with all microphones (including your smartphone’s internal mic).
Triggering Memories
Whether you’re conducting the interview yourself or paying someone else to do it, you need to do some background research. It doesn’t matter about the scope of your project, whether you’re trying to record someone’s life story or simply capture some memories relating to a specific photo, event or person.
Cole recommends making a timeline to help you organise your thoughts. “You can’t trigger someone’s memories if you don’t know what the triggers are,” he says. “But you’ll be amazed what people can remember.”
Your research may involve cataloguing documents, certificates and family photos if you’ve not done so already. If you’re chronicling someone’s life story, you may want to develop timelines for other relevant parties, their siblings or parents, for example. From here you can split a person’s life into sections, noting phases of happiness and sadness that you can transition between.
You can then start to construct your interview and develop questions that you’d like to ask. While it’s tempting to produce a precise set of questions, Barry Wale counsels against such an approach. “Treat it like an informal chat,” he says. Wale’s approach is to create a series
‘Don’t use a script. Life stories should be lively and spontaneous’
of bullet points for the areas you wish to cover, using these to provide a gentle steer at key points in the conversation. The OHS agrees: “The best interviews flow naturally and are not rehearsed,” its advice page counsels. “Don’t over-prepare. Don’t use a script. Tape-recorded life stories should be lively, spontaneous and vivid. Allow people to be themselves.”
When it comes to the interview, another advantage of the DIY approach is that you’re not limited by time. If you plan to record someone’s life story, be prepared to interview them over multiple sessions, particularly if they tire easily. Cole’s efforts to record his mother’s story provide an extreme idea of how long the process could take (see the box on page 18). In all likelihood, though, you’ll be able to conduct a smaller-scale interview over just one or two sessions.
Audio interviews are simpler to set up – choose a quiet, comfortable location in a relatively small room to reduce unwanted echoes and eliminate all background noise. Place your microphone or recorder equidistant between you and your subject. Put your headphones on and do some tests to ensure that both of your voices can be heard clearly before pressing record and
starting the interview. Remember that you’ll be editing down later, so your only restriction is how much recording time you have.
If you’re using your smartphone, ShurePlus MOTIV will record in the recommended format: 44.1 KHz, 16-bit WAV in mono. However, it’s an uncompressed format, so you’ll need lots of storage space for each recording – as a rule of thumb, about 320 MB for every 60 minutes. So ensure that your recorder or phone has plenty of free space before you begin.
Video interviews should also be held in a comfortable room. Take some time to prepare the backdrop using your camera or phone’s viewfinder to frame the shot. Eliminate distracting visuals, and make sure that the setting is well lit. Wale recommends setting up the camera so that your subject isn’t looking directly into it – crop into their head and shoulders, and position the frame so that their eyes are about a third of the way down. However, video recordings are much larger than audio files, even though they’re compressed: an hour of 4K will take up 24 GB on an iPhone.
Once you’ve got the raw footage, play it back and transfer it to your computer so that you can edit it down to something you can share with others. The
‘Your only restriction is how much recording time you have’
step-by-step guide on page 19 looks at how you can do this with an audio recording using the free software Audacity, or visit bit.ly/ yt-openshot-tut to watch a tutorial explaining how the video-editing process works in OpenShot. Once complete, burn the finished recording to CD or DVD to preserve it and share it with relatives to ensure your family’s stories are remembered through future generations.