A yearly retrospective

Once upon a time I was browsing videos on vimeo and came across an interview someone had filmed with their granny. Needless to say, after 30 seconds I was bored stiff, but it got me thinking. Of my Grandparents I have one Grandmother and one Grandfather still alive, one from each side, both over 75 years old. As far as I'm concerned, they have both always been 'old person' age and I have no idea of how they would be in their teens, mid twenties, late fourties, etc.

If video technology were as available then (say 1955) as it is now there would be no excuse for there not to be at least some footage of them doing their thing. Indeed, there is now no excuse not to document the present!

With this in mind I began to consider ways to best capture in video format each of my Grandparents frozen in their current state of being. A short interview seemed sensible but I was struggling for ways to avoid a full on autobiography told in their own words, you know how grandparents like to go on. A specific brief topic was needed, either something significant in their lives (would most likely be something from twenty or more years ago), or just something recent.

Recounting an event or series of events that had occurred over the last year seemed like a good idea as it could potentially be quite brief and would be relevant to the time the video was made. It would represent each Grandparent at that moment (or that year).

Unfortunately both of these Grandparents of mine live very far away and I see each of them rarely. Still, the idea of capturing a moment remained poignant, so I instead turned to my immediate family.



What began as a warm up interview turned into a small project in itself of which I am very glad to have undertaken. I asked each of my three immediate family members to bring their 2008 diary, planner, or what ever they had that would help them remember what they got up to that year. Then we each wizzed through our diaries, jotting down in bullet point form any things of significance that we had done that year. These things included moving house, getting fired, being on the TV, finishing a degree, jogging a record needle at a club, etc. Between the four of us there were quite a range of things, not just events that happened but also outcomes of events, lessons learned and hopes for the future.

I was filming the interviews with two Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55EBpoint and shoot cameras that appear to (most of the time) have a fifteen minute maximum in video mode, whether there is a two or four gig card installed. So each person would sit in the hot seat and have fifteen minutes to get through their piece of paper. It proved more than enough time and I think quite nice to have a time limit. Though I knew next to nothing about how to light an interview I had a try. I had three identical cheapo desk lamps which I placed either side of the interviewee, just a little in front and the third went behind the chair facing up with a red Quality Street wrapper over it. To try and make the two lights shining at the subject act as a key and fill (strong light and softer light that eases off shadows, I think) I hung tissue paper over them both and moved them closer or further away to control their relative brightness and resulting shadows.

For sound recording I used a single Rode NT5 condenser microphone placed at about waist level. This proved quite acceptable and the moving around of the interviewee didn't seem to matter.

Just like the interview with the Granny that I mentioned above; if anyone else watched even just thirty seconds of any of these four interviews they would be very bored. Yet we are all really pleased that we made them. I edited them around March (just to get rid of bits of shuffling around, sipping water, etc) and in just that short space of time I had forgotten a lot of the stuff I had recounted and it felt like I had found some long lost archive. So whether we choose to watch our interviews back this Christmas or in five, ten or twenty years time, we are bound to be super glad we filmed them and recorded, not just the events we all took part in in 2008, but our mannerisms, hair-cuts, vocabulary and all sorts.