Open Forum

I work at a historic site that has been preserved due to a single event of national significance more than 150 years ago, and we have a lot of first-person accounts from people who witnessed President Lincoln's assassination. We are contemplating filming them performed by interpreters, for use potentially in exhibits and on our website. Has anyone else done this (or something similar) and used them effectively? I would love to hear about others' experiences.

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Sarah Jencks
Director of Education and Interpretation
Ford's Theatre Society
Washington DC
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Hi Sarah,

Bringing historic first person stories to life through audio recording can be really useful. We've done it a number of times, primarily for use in audio tours.

We hired voice actors to record several different speeches, diary entries, and letters in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, for example, to illuminate the significance of the objects on display in the New York & The Nation exhibition that inaugurated their new ground floor gallery. We also used voice actors to record writings from similar documents from Robert E. Lee's family at Stratford Hall. In this instance the individuals became the hosts guiding visitors through this historic home while telling juicy stories about other family members. Audio recordings will probably be more adaptable to a variety of uses than shooting video, but if you have a specific use case in mind then it makes good sense to do it.

Beyond video we're exploring using holograms of historic characters for Augmented Reality applications. There's a range of technologies for doing this that vary in cost.

------------------------------
[Robin White] [Owen]
[Principal]
[www.mediacombo.net]
[robin@mediacombo.net]
[646-472-5145]
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 08-03-2021 12:15 PM
From: Sarah Jencks
Subject: Filming first-person accounts

I work at a historic site that has been preserved due to a single event of national significance more than 150 years ago, and we have a lot of first-person accounts from people who witnessed President Lincoln's assassination. We are contemplating filming them performed by interpreters, for use potentially in exhibits and on our website. Has anyone else done this (or something similar) and used them effectively? I would love to hear about others' experiences.

------------------------------
Sarah Jencks
Director of Education and Interpretation
Ford's Theatre Society
Washington DC
------------------------------

Another option might be to have the descendants of the people who wrote the accounts read them.   This was very effectively done by the Vail Preservation Society in their Voices of Vail film.    It not only allowed the descendants to talk about what their grandparents had witnessed but also made it more relevant to the current community.

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Janice Klein


Tempe AZ
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-05-2021 12:35 PM
From: Robin Owen
Subject: Filming first-person accounts

Hi Sarah,

Bringing historic first person stories to life through audio recording can be really useful. We've done it a number of times, primarily for use in audio tours.

We hired voice actors to record several different speeches, diary entries, and letters in the collection of the New-York Historical Society, for example, to illuminate the significance of the objects on display in the New York & The Nation exhibition that inaugurated their new ground floor gallery. We also used voice actors to record writings from similar documents from Robert E. Lee's family at Stratford Hall. In this instance the individuals became the hosts guiding visitors through this historic home while telling juicy stories about other family members. Audio recordings will probably be more adaptable to a variety of uses than shooting video, but if you have a specific use case in mind then it makes good sense to do it.

Beyond video we're exploring using holograms of historic characters for Augmented Reality applications. There's a range of technologies for doing this that vary in cost.

------------------------------
[Robin White] [Owen]
[Principal]
[www.mediacombo.net]
[robin@mediacombo.net]
[646-472-5145]

Original Message:
Sent: 08-03-2021 12:15 PM
From: Sarah Jencks
Subject: Filming first-person accounts

I work at a historic site that has been preserved due to a single event of national significance more than 150 years ago, and we have a lot of first-person accounts from people who witnessed President Lincoln's assassination. We are contemplating filming them performed by interpreters, for use potentially in exhibits and on our website. Has anyone else done this (or something similar) and used them effectively? I would love to hear about others' experiences.

------------------------------
Sarah Jencks
Director of Education and Interpretation
Ford's Theatre Society
Washington DC
------------------------------

Hello Sarah,

We are presently in active production of immersive media experiences for the NPS' Fort Point Historic Site. The script content drew on Fort Point's historical records as well as additional primary and secondary sources to flesh out the lives of our Civil War-era characters. To cast our actors we used word-of-mouth and Backstage.com , which you may find useful. All of the actors were shot in front of a green screen, which enabled us to "place" them in the fort by way of projection-mapping. Seeing the characters projected on the 170+ year old brick and mortar walls is uncanny! 

Alan 

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R. Alan Hoff
Executive Director
Monadnock Media, Inc.
Hatfield MA
------------------------------

Original Message:
Sent: 08-03-2021 12:15 PM
From: Sarah Jencks
Subject: Filming first-person accounts

I work at a historic site that has been preserved due to a single event of national significance more than 150 years ago, and we have a lot of first-person accounts from people who witnessed President Lincoln's assassination. We are contemplating filming them performed by interpreters, for use potentially in exhibits and on our website. Has anyone else done this (or something similar) and used them effectively? I would love to hear about others' experiences.

------------------------------
Sarah Jencks
Director of Education and Interpretation
Ford's Theatre Society
Washington DC
------------------------------