The holiday season is a great time to celebrate with family and friends. It is also a good time to capture stories at family gatherings.
Some of the people at the table this year may not be able to share their stories next year.
Some will fall ill.
Some will die.
And you may never meet in person again.
You can capture the stories of your loved ones with nothing more than your SmartPhone, which has great photo, video, and audio recording capabilities.
Take Lots of Photos
Family events are a great time to take photos.
You can include the following types of photos:
- Group Photos
- Individual Photos
- Personal Items On Walls
- Photos in Albums
Shoot Video
Your SmartPhone is an amazing good video recorder. The AI built in to the newer phones will optimize the video for the lighting and sound conditions.
Some of the videos you can capture include:
- Fun Family Activities
- Round Table Stories
- Individual Stories (you may need to prompt for specific stories)
Record Audio With The Phone
The Voice Memo or similar app on your SmartPhone is a great way to record stories that can be less intimidating than video.
You can hold the phone or put it on a pillow or cloth between you and the speaker.
Th pillow isolates the phone from table vibrations and also can reduce som of the ambient room noise.
Ask questions and encourage your family members to tell their stories.
Remote Recording with Zoom or StreamYard
You can record remote session applications like Zoom and StreamYard if you are not in the same city.
Questions to Consider
Here are some possible questions to ask:
- The most interesting story that you know about
- A story they want to share
- Romances
- Marriages
- About their career
- Favourite hobby.
- Most interesting experience
- Funniest experience
- Time in the service
- Anything you think they want to talk about
Storing
Photos can be uploaded to sites like Google Photos or Google Drive to collect the photos. videos, audio recordings, notes, and related documents.
This is the most important thing to do as you collect the media.
Organization
You can create folders on Google Drive to start organizing the media for sharing and using for Story Productions
You can name the folders something that makes sense to you.
Here is a sample:
- Aunt Martha Miles
- Notes
- Videos
- Early Days
- Wedding
- Adventures
- …
- Photos
- Category 1
- Category 2
- Audio Recordings
- Document
Story Productions
When you are ready, you can assemble the photos, video, audio, and notes into media for sharing.
I have created presentations in the following forms:
- Print Book
- eBook
- FlipBook
- Video clips
- Audio
- Slide presentations for weddings, anniversaries, and memmorials.
- Multimedia Digital Experience Edition
- Website
- Blog post
- Social media posts.
- …
Story Production Tools
I use a lot of tools, including PhotoShop (images), FinalCut Pro (video), ClarityScribe (transcription, AI writing), Atticus (writing, print and eBook formatting), Heyzine (flipbooks), Kartra (membership portals, email, video hosting), WordPress (websites), and others to create Multimedia Story Productions.
Greg Dixon Is Available to Help
I am available to help coach you through the collection of the stories and crafting them into story productions.
I am working on a book and video training sessions.
Stay Tuned!
