Legacy Multimedia Blog
Posted on October 28th, 2013
I recently attended my 40th class school reunion out in Southern California. There was a whirlwind of activities, two parties on a Friday night, the real reunion on Saturday night and then a brunch picnic the following Sunday morning. I didn’t attend the brunch, choosing instead to have breakfast with a small group of woman I have known since I was a very young girl. It was a good choice. It allowed us an intimate time to reflect on our lives and the past two days, and I didn’t want to leave.
In the work I do, reunions are a common scenario as people choose life cycle events as a way to honor and celebrate. Whether it be a family reunion, significant anniversary or birthday, memorializing it with a tribute video is one way to celebrate and create something as a memento. So I get to experience a lot of people’s reunions through a professional lens.
For me, I had an unusual school experience. I grew up in the same town in Los Angeles and went to one specific school with the same group of people through 7th grade. In 8th grade, my father got a wild hair up his behind and moved our entire family up to Fairbanks Alaska where he ran an amusement park themed around the Alaska Gold Rush. We lived up there for a little over a year and I didn’t get to be part of my 8th grade school graduation. Then we came back to LA where I went to the local High School with my old group of friends and stayed there for 2 years. Then we moved back east and I attended a different school (that’s a story I’ll save for another time) and graduated with that group.
The important thing to remember here is context of time. Back in those days, there was no internet or social media. When you left somewhere or someone, it was for real. A goodbye was a real goodbye. Not like now where you say goodbye to someone and then see them three hours later on Facebook posting photos of their time with you.
If you left somewhere, you would not see these people for years unless you physically wrote them a letter or called them on the telephone which was a long-distance call and could be quite costly. I obviously lost track of a great many people.
Going back to my hometown, seeing a lot of these people after many, many years was a joyous experience. It was in many ways a coming full-circle for me. To be able to followup with people I had unwillingly lost touch with helped confirm a lot of the things I knew about myself and my life. At one of the Friday evening parties, my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Durocher, was there. We were her first class out of college and she must not have been more than a dozen years older than us at the time. I remember her so well and I remember my own joy and anticipation as the class bought her a puppy, and all the things that went with it, as a parting gift at the end of the school year. She came with photos of the dog, which she kept for 14 years, as well as other photos of the class and all the teachers at the time.
Connecting with so many old friends again, what really struck me was how easily I slid back into talking and being with all the people I was good friends with back then. It felt like the years had never passed. The personalities and energies that had us originally become friends was still there and it was so easy to reconnect without having to catch people up with all the minutia of the years in between. Some of us will be using this as a launching point to continue our friendships into the future, while for others, we may not see each other until the next major reunion.
I find that at social events, I’m either there 100% present, or I am behind the camera trying to document the event. I can never seem to manage doing both successfully. So I ended up the next day with maybe 4 or 5 photos on my iPhone. Photos trickled onto Facebook over the next week or so and a wonderful group photo was taken although I haven’t seen that yet. I wish I had taken more photos because, if you’ve been paying attention in class, the physical memoirs are all we have after our own memories are gone. But I am also aware that this was something much bigger. That I took part in something that wasn’t at all concrete for most people, and what lives in my memory will be something more important that I can share down the road, with my friends and family.
Still… having said that, I’m now thinking of ways to gather up all the photos that were taken that night and create some type of montage! You can take the girl out of the profession, but you can’t take the profession out of the girl.
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Personal History
Posted on September 8th, 2013
Sometimes you see something visual and it just resonates with you on such a deep level that it starts the beginnings of an interest, an obsession, or even a love affair.
I was in the Catherine Couturier Gallery a couple months ago and came across a few pieces by artist Photographer Rachel Phillips, who considers herself a photographer yet uses her photography in such a unique manner via a transfer process that all her art works are one of a kind, completely unique. In her work entitled “Field Notes”, she transfers images to old letters, envelopes and aerograms. They are personal, in that each has a cancelled stamp from somewhere, and the name of who sent it or who it was sent to, some with letters or personal notations. I had expressed some interest to Catherine, the gallery owner, and she said, wait a couple of months, Rachel has a show coming up and was bringing in a lot of new work.
Here is a video of her process:
Well the show’s opening was yesterday evening. Knowing that I wanted to purchase a piece for myself, I went in earlier in the afternoon and with the gallery to myself, I wandered around deciding and then un-deciding many times until I finally picked out two pieces that spoke to me on various levels. I loved the imagery on all of them, but one of the pieces held a personal connection for me in that it was an envelope, obviously fan mail, sent to Norma Talmadge, the silent film actress. The postmark date on one envelope is 3 11 1928. My first son was born on 3 11. The letter was sent to her care of United Artists in Hollywood California, where I grew up. The image is one of a child sleeping in a four poster bed, hunkered down under a duvet. One of the other elements in the piece was an envelope sent to someone in Staten Island New York from France. My family immigrated through Staten Island in the early 1900s. I was born in New York. I grew up in California, well I’m sure you are starting to see the connection to the piece.
Here is the second piece I bought below and it will eventually belong to my new grand-daughter, but for now, I will enjoy it. It’s called Greenwald Girl.
The opening was great and I had the opportunity to meet and chat with Rachel for awhile and she explained how she ‘found’ this medium of expression. I am always excited by that; how people’s inspiration gets set on fire, what starts the process that becomes a project, a career, a life.
This morning, in the afterglow of excitement from purchasing her pieces and meeting her, and loving her show, I went to her website and found this in her Artist Statement:
“So often in our daily lives, our attention is fixed on the future—planning for Tomorrow. And as artists, too, we rush to make new work, to take new pictures, to create, always, something new. But what of the past? Past lives? Past work? Past pictures?”
“The images are printed on old envelopes collected from around the world; artifacts from the last centuries. What did the envelopes contain? Where did they come from? In whose mailbox were they delivered? What stories do they tell?”
The key clicked in the lock. Well of course I love her work. We are committed to the same vision, telling stories that explain the past and honor those who came before us. Like detectives, we work with what we have to tell a story, usually of something that happened a long time ago, that connects to the audience on an emotional level. We are both committed to preserving history.
Rachel’s show will be up until October 19, 2013 so if you’re in Houston, you’ll have plenty of time to stop by and take a look at her work. Let me know if you do, and stop by here and leave a comment letting me know what you thought.
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Posted in Multimedia Storytelling, Photos & Snapshots, Preserving Memories
Posted on August 7th, 2013
I once gave a presentation on photo restoration to a local historical group.. I stood up and said,
“It’s 10 o’clock…. do you know where your photos are?” Everyone gave a chuckle because most were familiar with that old public service announcement that used to play right before the local news. But people also laughed because they thought about their own photos, sitting in shoe boxes, quietly fading into obscurity or sitting on their computer hard-drives with names such as DSC00456.jpg. Easy to find right?
Photography has made such leaps and bounds in the almost 200 years since it was invented. But not all of the technology has been good nor has it been kind to our pasts. Most photo papers from the 60s and 70s are now very faded or all the green has dropped out and the photo looks faded and rusty. In the 90s, a lot of people moved to slides and of course people now have huge boxes with slides mixed up from many years, with no context other than the date stamp of when the slide was developed.
In the early 2000s, with the advent of digital photography, people started to download their digital photos on their computers but most of them had no context for how to organize them and now, in 2013, there are some great books, such as the DAM Book, and self-help websites such as Scan Your Entire Life for people trying to make sense of years of old photos.
I am a big advocate of all of this and have been working on this very thing with my own family for over 10 years now. I’m still not there and have accepted that it’s an organic process. But where I recommend people start is with the oldest first. Your oldest photos are your most fragile and the most easy to slip into obscurity.
Organizing and identifying the images should be your first order of priority. If you still have family members around, show them the images and have them identify who is in the photos and when they might have been taken or at what specific event. You can write lightly in pencil on the back of the original but be careful about putting too much pressure on the pencil as it will cause the front of the paper to crease. NEVER use ballpoint or marker on the back of an original photo. It may bleed through the front, or worse, stick to another photo that is put behind it. I’ve seen some awful messes made by people who thought they were doing well to identify the image. If you don’t want to write on the image, then start a spread sheet and number the image, again lightly with pencil, and then put all the information on the spreadsheet.
After you’ve sorted these, you may want to consider some photo restoration of some of the better shots. Other family members may want a copy and a print that has faded, gone through color changes, has rips or other damage, can easily be restored to better-than-original condition and printed on beautiful paper. This will produce something you will be proud to gift other family members.
There are some experts out there that can restore the original photo, but our recommendation, and practice at Legacy Multimedia, is to create a digital copy, do the photo restoration on the copy, print the new photo and then recommend that you store the original in some type of archival sleeve or envelope. It’s always important to keep the originals of all your media.
These days, with all the amazing software options, you will be pleasantly surprised at how successful and affordable photo restoration can be.
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Photo Restoration, Photos & Snapshots
Posted on June 27th, 2013
Do you drive?
There’s an old joke:
A Texan is talking with an Israeli and comparing the size of Texas to the size of Israel. He says, “when I get in my car, I can drive for hours and not get to the end of my ranch.” The Israeli says, “I had a car like that once too.”
Most of the people I know drive and take their driving for granted. Unless you live in a packed urban area where the cost of keeping a car outweighs the access it will provide, most people have a car, or two, or sometimes three. I think my friend Margie is the only person I know that doesn’t drive. New condos and apartments that are being built in my neighborhood have huge parking structures because nobody will rent unless two spaces come with each apartment. Our culture is fixated on driving. Having a driver’s license is a sign of growing up and a symbol of independence.
My father has been driving since he was 15. At 84, we recently made the decision for him to stop driving. It was a difficult decision and took a long time to reach. His reflexes were not as quick and frankly, it wasn’t that we didn’t trust him, we didn’t trust other younger drivers. The possibility that he and my mom might be seriously hurt while out on a joyride in Los Angeles, a city already known for overcrowded traffic, was a scary proposition. While he understands it intellectually, driving occurs as like ‘phantom limb’ syndrome. He keeps thinking he can just jump in the car to pick something up, until he remembers there’s no car.
One of my recent clients was still driving at the age of 98. In a section of her video, we filmed her driving in her car and telling us how much she enjoyed being in her car. She drove a cherry red newer model cadillac and being in the car with her behind the wheel was a real adventure. Unfortunately she too has stopped driving now after some medical concerns limited her mobility.
My friends and I called my first car the “Flintstone mobile” because there was a huge hole in the floorboard and you could see the road go by underneath you. I loved that car and was sorry to see it go. I can only imagine what that might be like, to have to give up something that we hold as an inalienable right in our culture. Something that most of us could do, and some of us unfortunately do, in our sleep.
What does driving symbolize to you? Have you thought about what your life would be like if you couldn’t drive, or drive as much as you currently do? I’d love to know some of your memories.
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Family Memories, Preserving Memories
Posted on May 30th, 2013
As a preservationist, I am always excited when a big name comes on the bandwagon providing information to consumers about preserving precious family archives. It’s a platform I’ve been preaching and promoting for 10 years now and I still consider it as vitally important now as it was when I first became aware of this.
One this stuff is gone, it’s gone!
The New York Times recently added Bertram Lyons, an archivist at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress in Washington, to answer questions posted by NYTimes readers about preserving family audio.
Here is a link to the Part 1, where he answers questions about preserving audio. Over the next few weeks, Mr. Lyons will answer questions about photos, video, manuscripts and other issues.
Follow this link to read the full article.
There are so many sources of old audio that no longer support current playback technology. It’s so important to have these items transferred correctly and saved before they disintegrate.
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Family Memories, Media Archiving, Preserving Memories
Posted on March 27th, 2013
Have you ever wondered if there are secrets in your family’s past you don’t know about? Even if you have never wondered, what would your reaction be if you found out your family was not who you thought them to be?
The Flat (2011 Documentary by Arnon Goldfinger) examines this premise as the Director, Arnon Goldfinger, and his family begin to clean out the flat in Tel Aviv that belonged to his grandparents Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, both immigrants from Nazi Germany. At first the family sorts through typical bric-a-brac of a home occupied for decades; clothing, books, grandmother’s large collection of gloves and other accessories. They really did not know what they were looking for, just sifting through the remains of a European past. But soon they begin to find letters, magazine clippings and photographs that lead them to uncover a shocking story. Their Jewish grandparents were very close friends with Leopold von Mildenstein, a head SS officer in the Nazi regime and the predecessor of Adolph Eichmann, and his wife. Goldfinger’s grandparents, in fact, took the couple to Palestine in the early 1930s as the officer investigated it as a suitable place to send German Jews.
The documentary follows along as Goldfinger finds and visits different family members, including the daughter of the von Mildensteins, and pieces together this confusing family history that nobody ever talked about and was a mystery to even his own mother, the Tuchler’s daughter. Some of the interviews with her were painfully awkward as a story she had no idea about, continued to unfold.
The film took five years to develop and during production, the crew expanded until the film became a German-Israeli coproduction with a prominent film company coming on board as co-producers. Clearly Goldfinger had no idea what he was taking on when he shared the fact that he was clearing the flat with the first cinematographer, Talya Galon, who lives not far from there. As new details were uncovered, Goldfinger became aware he was documenting something significant, and there are times where the camera just sits, watching him while he processes the deep emotional significance of what he’s just uncovered. I think that watching the people who appear in the film, as they deal with the truth and process their own raw emotions, was one of the best aspects of the film and allowed the audience to connect so well with the story. I found myself thinking, “how would I process that shock, particularly with a camera in front of me?” It was extremely powerful.
The original film was released in July of 2011 to sold out film festival audiences. In September 2011 it was theatrically released and is now considered to the third most viewed Israeli film of 2011. Sweeping over 13 international film awards, The Flat is now considered one of the most important documentaries made in Israel in the last decade.
Here’s a link to the IMDb where you can watch the movie trailer.
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Family Memories, Preserving Memories
Posted on March 15th, 2013
This week an article about the process of immortalizing one’s memories made it to a special Retirement section in the New York Times. My company, Legacy Multimedia, was prominently featured along with other projects and organizations that focus on the preservation of physical mementos and recording of memoirs.
For me, this is incredible validation of the work I do. The excitement I feel working with each new client, discovering who they are, what impact they have made with their lives, and then helping record that in video in a way that entertains and inspires future generations has turned this work into my life passion. To have the New York Times recognize this as a significant contribution to the field of retirement only validates that huge impact I and my colleagues are making in recording personal histories.
I hope everyone can read the article. It may only be a live link for a couple of weeks. After that it will get archived and disappear. Likewise, if you’re not a subscriber of the Times, there is a 10 article per month quota so you if you’ve read your 10, you may not be able to see this without either waiting or subscribing.
The writer, J. Peder Zane, contacted me as he was putting together ideas for this article. He told me he’d selected me because of the quality of not only the video biography samples he saw on my website, but the quality in the website itself. I sent him a copy of the video we created for Ron Henriksen’s mother and he told me his family watched the two hours and found it “riveting!”
I was also pleased to see John Butterfield’s video and the fact that doing a video biography inspired him to go on and self-publish a book for his family with further stories. He obviously gets how important these will be.
Here is the link to the article “Hey, at Least You Can Be Virtually Immortal.” Please let me know if you have difficulty viewing this and as always, I welcome your comments.
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Family Memories, Personal History, Preserving Memories
Posted on February 28th, 2013
I have talked a lot on my blog and on Facebook about how the digital world has changed our relationship and concept of memoir. With each national disaster, we turn to Facebook, Twitter and other online websites to find out what happened, then understand the impact and finally to share our upsets and grief. We mourn publicly in a way we couldn’t have imagined only 10 years ago.
Continue reading this article…..
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Posted in Preserving Memories, Social Media
Posted on January 24th, 2013
Last year we completed an almost 3-hour biography on a 97 year old local woman. It was an incredible project to work on. Not only is she smart and vibrant but she had a lot of energy and we were able to do some remarkable video B-roll. We have shots of her driving her car, talking about her childhood in front of the home she was born in, giving us a tour of the artwork in her church that she and her late husband had commissioned as well as extensive stories and recollections from her 97 years of life. She was a joy to work with and her family was not only supportive but actively involved in the development and production of this project.
One of Betty’s sons hired us to help document his mom’s history. Previously, she had done an enormous amount of genealogical work, creating family history books for each of her three children as well as biographical books on both herself and her late husband using first person reflective. She also had very well organized archives of photographs and other memorabilia, all organized, annotated and preserved in archival albums. It was a delight to work with someone as well organized as this she was. Creating a video was the icing on the cake of an already well-documented family history.
But in addition to the video history this family will now have, her son bought her an experience. Much like a roller coaster ride through one’s life, the process of going through creating a video biography allows the subject to be the star in the front seat on a ride through their own history. It was definitely an experience. From the very beginning, she was very excited and I know it gave her celebrity status in her assisted living home. When we would show up to shoot, other residents would come up to us and ask us how it was going. One of her neighbors stood in the doorway one day while we setup all the cameras, lights and other recording gear and we finally had to ask her to leave so we could close the door to the apartment. Filming in front of the house she was born in gave her the opportunity to meet the current residents who were so generous and fascinated by the project as well. “These people are making a movie about me!” was an often heard exclamation.
I have observed this phenomenon before. I once told a potential customer that the experience was like going to camp. To the children who commission a personal historian to work on developing a family history, they are also buying their parent(s) this experience. I suppose you could send them on a cruise, or have a portrait commissioned. These have predictable outcomes. The process of going through a personal history is unpredictable. The client may think they know all their ‘stories’ but through guided work, other memories and connections appear, making this a completely customized adventure. Clients may, in the process of looking back, transform their view on how they see themselves, their families and their communities.
Of course at some point, the lights and cameras have to be shut down and we go away. But our clients are left with an incredible memory and a film that holds the promise of education and entertainment at any time.
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Family Memories, Personal History
Posted on January 4th, 2013
2013 marks the 10 year anniversary of Legacy Multimedia. It will be later this fall and I will commemorate the decade in a fitting manner…. later.
Right now, with the new year, and this huge blank slate of time before me, I want to focus on my new mantra regarding my own personal history, “get ‘er done!” (Since I live in Texas, I can talk to myself in cowboy language.)
Right about the time that I was starting Legacy Multimedia, I also started the long and complex process of digitizing and organizing my own family and my parents’ vast collection of photographs and film. I think I started with dad’s film, transferring some 5 hours of old 8mm film, shot between the early 1950s through the early 1970s. Then I began to focus on my own boxes of film. When I began shooting some time in the early 1980s, I had a huge VHS recorder, the kind that weighed 10 lbs and you had to rest it on your shoulder in order to shoot. Later I downsized to a smaller 8mm tape camera but between the two of them, I transferred some 10 hours of film. After that I started working on scanning and organizing all my old family photographs, most were in albums. And that was when I got sidetracked with my parents’ collection.
Photos were everywhere, all hard copy photographs and negatives, none of them organized in any meaningful way. All thrown into shoe boxes, cardboard boxes, and other ‘storage’ containers spanning some 50 years. I slowly began the task of sorting these out and putting them into collections, organized either by subject or time frame. Then I scanned most of them. At that point, I started to design several hard-cover photo books so that my family could have access to all the photos without having to further degrade the quality of the originals, which were put into archival storage boxes.
Then I found myself on another track. My father, who was a prominent photographer in the late 1940s to early 1950s, had a resurgence of interest in his work; museums and private collectors began paying attention again. So I began helping him organize his archival collection, building a website, www.martinelkort.com, and eventually, the start of a documentary about his work, which I am in post-production on now. I still have to get it finished but it’s taking shape and I am expecting it to be complete sometime later this year. As my father moves into his 84th year, I still have a lot of things I am doing to support his photography. I have been organizing the digital archives of his photography and I have joined an organization that supports people managing large photographic estates and am learning how to setup his so that when he’s gone, I will be able to continue his photo legacy.
In the last weeks of 2012, I refocused my attention back on my own media. I upgraded hard drives and began the process of moving video files off old and smaller drives to larger and more efficient drives; organizing, key wording and notating as I went. I also reviewed several hours worth of video and got inspired to continue to build family history videos that I started 10 years ago, before I got sidetracked. All of this organization and review has led me to a bigger picture on what I have and what needs to be done. Chances are, I will get sidetracked again, I know that about myself. (Oh look, it’s a butterfly!) But I can see, 10 years down the road, that I have made a huge dent in the work that needed to be done and the task appears much more manageable to me now. I am committed to getting it done!
How about you? I am sure the task looks insurmountable if you haven’t even looked in the closet and appraised the collection of media yet. I help people all the time with this very task, and yet dealing with my own past and piles of media was a daunting process. I know that yours looks similar to you. My advice, break it down into baby steps. Get one thing done at a time. If you want to really be organized, take an inventory of media and write out the process for approaching this. I am happy to help you look at it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you. You can email me questions on this website, tweet them to me @stefanitwyford or post questions on my Facebook fan page www.facebook.com/legacymultimedia. I am happy and excited to help you.
So what’s stopping you this year?
Stefani Twyford is a personal historian and video biographer sharing life stories, connecting generations and preserving legacies. To learn more, visit her web site, find her on Twitter as @stefanitwyford, visit the Legacy Multimedia Facebook Fan Page, or send her an e-mail.
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Posted in Family Memories, Personal History
