Projects That Pay: Personal Histories: Video for Future Generations

Record the stories of a lifetime for a legacy on video.

Graying baby boomers, who once thought of the future as a distant event, are trying to capture some of the past before it's too late. They're asking family questions. Photo albums are coming out of the closet. Interest in genealogy and family trees is blooming. This is partly the result of the popularity of the Internet, which makes it easy to search records of the past and reach out to far-flung family members.

Our resurgent fascination with the past provides an opportunity for videographers. You can offer a much-needed service by videotaping the personal histories of your friends, family or neighbors. Interviews with a personal perspective are riveting. They can also create important source material for local, national, and world history archives.

Everyday Interview Subjects
Prime subjects of personal video interviews are the people that columnist Bob Greene calls the World War II generation. These people saw the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the advent of television, the rise and fall of communism and even the rise and fall of disco. Their personal experiences are meaningful to future generations and your camcorder can preserve them on videotape.

Family members are a good place to start looking for interview candidates. Other good contacts are veterans groups, historical societies, retirement homes, the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), and local organizations, such as Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, or Exchange Club, that have older members who've been active in the community. Some groups might be interested in recording the histories of their prominent members. Families often commission video histories of older relatives. Some individuals even pay for their own interview tapes.

Don't get caught up in big names and big historical events. It's nice to have a survivor of Pearl Harbor or the Holocaust recount his or her memories, but everyday stories contain enough emotion and humor to be interesting on their own. A story about an average experience gives us context for other fascinating moments of history.

I once recorded an interview of a retired police officer who had been an investigator in major drug busts and corruption. The most interesting stories, however, concerned his time walking the beat as a new police officer. When he joined the force in 1949 as the youngest officer in the department, he received his gun, his badge and special training, which consisted of the statement: "Don't arrest anyone and you'll stay out of trouble." That anecdote added color to his history and also hinted at the larger social problem of law enforcement corruption. With the right questions and good listening skills, you can elicit special moments in anyone's personal history.

A Personal Style
PBS recently broadcast a program about Harry S. Truman. Photographs and archival film illustrated the documentary. The most special, the most emotional, the most revealing of the sequences were the personal interviews from those who served him.

Many people think they have nothing to say, but once an interview gets going, memories come flooding back. My wife and I once interviewed a friend who founded a community project called Christmas House. The project provided Christmas gifts for children whose parents couldn't afford family presents. We planned to record her thoughts associated with that project but instead she talked about her childhood, living, riding and shooting on a ranch in California. She talked about her marriage and missionary work in China. She talked about conversations with Madam Chiang Kai-shek. It was fascinating. In amazement she said, "I've told you stories I've never even told my children."

That's the way it is with personal interviews. Stories come out that were half-forgotten. Those are stories that would have been lost forever if they had not been recorded. Videotaped interviews provide a legacy of wisdom and information.

Interviews can be any length; those commonly produced for profit generally take about three hours and result in two full hours of recorded videotape. Three hours usually wears people out, so you wouldn't want to go much beyond that in a single sitting, although you can always set up several shooting sessions.

Simple Equipment Bag
The Truman program on PBS had no fancy special effects. There was only a microphone, lights, the camera and a person telling a story. Recording personal interviews doesn't require much more than that.

Personal interviews can be videotaped easily with a camcorder and some basic questions (see sidebar). If you're taping for a fee, it's a good idea to throw in at least one light and an external microphone for better audio. For more about equipping the video interview, see "The Technical Side of Interviewing" on page 103 of the May 1997 issue.

Making It Pay
Personal-history videos offer several money-making opportunities. You can charge a fee for recording the interview and another fee for editing it. Make extra copies of the master tape for additional family members or to give to libraries or historical societies. Funeral homes that make pre-need arrangements for funeral services could offer personal-history videos as part of their package.

Transcribe a videotaped interview for an additional fee. Stenographers can do this for you, but volunteers are cheaper. Transcriptions let the interviewee quickly review the conversation and cut out any comments that might hurt someone or incur legal problems. Transcribed interviews also make nice keepsake books for family members.

Work gradually into personal interviews by adding them to your current video services or offering them to friends. For a fiftieth wedding anniversary party a friend had us transfer 40 family photographs of his parents and siblings to video and add special effects and music. We then attended the anniversary party and projected the video on a large screen for the guests. We also shot footage of the friends and relatives who attended the party.

Several weeks later we interviewed the parents on video. On the master tape, we combined the original photo production, added a montage of party shots and followed that with the edited personal interview. The length of the final version was just under an hour. The family trusted our judgement on the editing and didn't want to see the video until it was completed.

Everyone loved the portion shown at the party. Brothers and sisters, relatives and friends all came up to us and told us how much they enjoyed the video. The word we received back from the immediate family on the final video was equally glowing. Both parents and children loved the personal stories captured in the interview. And, yes, the children heard stories they had never heard before. Personal interviews can have really happy endings, especially for videographers.

• What stories did your grandparents tell you?
• What was life like for your parents when they were children?
• What was your life like as a child? What's the first thing you can recall?
• What kind of child were you? Did you ever get into trouble? What did you wear? What did you look like? What did you like to do? What was your fondest memory? Your saddest?
• What shaped or influenced you?
• How did you meet your spouse? How old were you? What did you do on dates? How long did you date? When did you know that you were in love? What did you do in the early years of your marriage?
• Where have you lived? What was a typical day like in that place?
• What did you try to teach your children?