How we’ve found innovative solutions to some unique issues with our clients’ projects
By Hûw Steer, Family History Films
The ongoing pandemic continues to pose us new challenges. We’ve adapted to continue filming at a distance in order to keep creating our bespoke films - but clients old and new have come to us with brand-new problems that have required brand new solutions. Here’s a look at a few of the innovative solutions we’ve come up with.
Their Story, Their Words
Having already completed a film and a book for one set of clients, and having managed their ever-evolving archive for over a year, we’ve become intimately familiar with the family and their assets. When they came to us with a new project that needed doing now, we were more than ready.
Our client was being honored with a ceremonial garden at her old university, and her family wanted to create something to celebrate her achievements. So we cracked open their family archive and scoured it for old photographs and documents from her time at the university, as well as reviewing the many hours of footage we shot with them for their family history film. We gathered thoughts and praises from all the members of the family - and we even shot a remote interview, filmed in Washington, D.C. and directed from London, with some other family members to round everything off.
Our client’s university in the 1960s
The end result was a short film in our client’s own words - and those of her family - using extracts from interviews old and new to summarise and celebrate her life. The family were delighted - and we delivered the video in time for it to be shown to the public at the unveiling ceremony of the garden.
What do you do with four miles of old film?
Back in January we worked for many days in New York, digitizing thousands of old photos and slides and several miles of 8- and 16mm film for one of our archive projects. But once we’d created the archive, the client thought the film - including some fascinating visions of the past, as far back as the 1930s - deserved more than just being filed away. So we created a supercut, a curation of the very best moments of this fantastic footage. Weddings, graduations, and even births were showcased in this fascinating hour-long film, a history of our client’s family from a deeply personal angle. We’re still putting the finishing touches to this innovative endeavour, but the first versions have us all very excited for the final product.
A frame taken from the four miles of film we digitised
Dealing with distance
Another of our clients commissioned us to interview most of his extended family - and it is a very extended family, with cousins and friends galore - to gather their memories and knowledge of their ancestors and relatives for us to incorporate into a bespoke digital book project. We intended to travel to Detroit and Chicago and film our interviews there - but then the pandemic began. With our crews unable to travel to the US to conduct the interviews in person, and with dozens of interviews to film, we had to get creative. By using videoconferencing software and employing a small army of transcribers, we were able to record the memories and voices of an entire clan of relatives, including some who have sadly passed away since the project began. Their voices, however, are now immortalised in the pages of the book, which will be delivered by Christmas - and in the form of a short documentary film, narrated in their own words.
We’re always looking for opportunities to take new and innovative approaches to our work. If you’ve got a problem that seems unsolvable, then get in touch - we’ll get right on it.
Contact us with your potential projects at paul@myfamilyhistoryfilm.com.