Oral history goes high tech

Stories for posterity told with multimedia

March 11, 1997
Web posted at: 10:10 p.m. EST

From San Francisco bureau chief Greg Lefevre

SANTA CLARA, California (CNN) -- Eleni Coltos sits in front of a computer, creating a multimedia history that will link her forever to her grandchildren. Pictures scroll by slowly, as her voice plays on the speaker.

"You were a miracle for me because I was present at your birth," she says. "I saw you unwind yourself and enter the morning."

(731K/20 sec. QuickTime movie) - Eleni Coltos' multimedia creation

Coltos has come to the Digital Clubhouse, a network of artists, community groups and high tech companies in Santa Clara, California. Its mission: Help people pass on their cherished stories using multimedia, taking the time-honored art of oral history into a new realm of technology.

Computer novices of all ages start in the workshops with a carton of precious photos, perhaps a few videos and the need to tell and preserve their stories. Joe Lambert is one of the artists at Digital Clubhouse helping them to tell their tales.

View the Vivo movie Digital Clubhouse Download a player Vivo's technical FAQ

"Digital storytelling is simply taking peoples' family stories -- from their photos, from their home video -- and teaching them very quickly how to make short 3- to 5-minute minute video pieces," Lambert says.

More than 2,000 people have developed more than 600 projects since the program started in July 1996. Over a five-day period, participants learn to use the computer, to scan and compose, to create video sequences and clips and to digitize and crop photos. Lambert says the need to communicate helps many get over their fear of computers.

"You can bridge this gap and allow people to take their first big step into this amazing new world of digital media, and they end up as producers instead of consumers of the media," he says.

Clubhouse coordinator Nina Mullen says most of the storytellers are women.

"They're the people in the family who keep the photographs, who keep the family history quite often," she says.

Coltos nearly gave up the second day, frustrated and worried that she had taken on something she couldn't finish. But things got easier on the third day, and, by the end of the week, she was hooked.

"Once you start and do it enough, you begin thinking, 'Oh, this is real. It's easier than you think,'" she says.

Coltos was motivated by her desire to leave behind an image of herself that her grandchildren will be able to view in the future. She wants them to know, when she gets old, "who I was and [that] I was an interesting person."

As the older folks leave legacies for the young, the young are also coming to the clubhouse to create their own stories.

Teenager Matt Pearce chronicles his quest to become an Eagle Scout. With his father by his side, he scans his badges and certificates and adds shots from his camping trips.

Jack Schultz gently arranges photographs of his Aunt Daisy on the cold glass of the digital scanner. During her lifetime, Daisy took in a number of troubled kids, and Schultz brings a reverence to what is ordinarily a very mechanical process.

"This is a tribute to her. I want to do something to memorialize her life," he says. "It was really very, very inspiring."

 

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