on or a small group of persons get them to talk as much as possible about their experiences. The focus is usually on the interviewee’s personal experiences and their thoughts and feelings on these experiences rather than their thoughts in more general issues or things they were not directly involved with. This kind of project is great in helping young people understand what life was really like during a specific period of time and understand how the world has changed.
Youth oral history projects can also help bring different generations together. Your average teen would rarely if ever have a conversation with an elderly person they weren’t related to. In many of the oral histories I’ve viewed, the interviewees seemed to appreciate the chance to tell their stories to the young interviewers. In the following video, Carey Giudici discusses some of the benefits of cross-generational oral history projects:
Here is an interview that is part of the African American Museum of Iowa’s oral history project, Adult Voices, Children’s Eyes. In the first part of the interview, two woman recount their bitter experiences with discrimination and segregation and then, in the second part, explain how society has changed for the better, why they think it’s changed and how this change makes them feel.
The video activities have several benefits:
- They encourage students to reach out to the community and come into contact with people from all walks of life and/or from different generations.
- They help students develop their confidence and communication skills as they approach potential interviewees.
- They let students listen to different views and challange students to review preconceptions.
- They give students the chance to develop their interpersonal skills as they work in groups to plan, prepare, shoot, edit and publicize the video.
- They can give students inspiration for the further development of their own ideas (The activity could be followed up by written work like writing their own answers to their question and posting it on a class bulletin board or using the video of their oral history interviews as part of a larger research project. It could also be followed up by oral work like presenting their video to the class and reflecting on what they learned by doing the project).
The 50People, 1 Question approach also helps students learn how to anaylse and use film techniques. The original 50 People 1 Question videos give students a framework to build on, not just in terms of the overall format, but also in terms of the shooting style. The creators of the original series of videos created them in a specific style. The videos feature:
- Long introductions (the camera just examines some of the interviewees, creating a feeling of suspense)
- A structure in which tends to start with shorter responses and with more insightful and deeper responses appearing later on in the video
- The interviewer never being heard or seen
- People sometimes being interviewed in pairs, so we can sometimes see reactions to comments
- Some interviewees having their footage being intercut with others, often with some link between the interviews in the content or language)
- Use of establishing shots to give the viewer an idea of the general environment
- The use of background music to set a contemplative mood
- The use of shots of interviewees getting into position and of the camera being positioned and being put into focus along with unfocused
shots and shots of people people partly out of the frame. These shots give the video a sort of guerilla filmmaking shooting-on-the-fly feel that contrasts with the professional-quality clear sound (quite difficult to achieve in a street interview) and very still and clear images
- Extensive use of close-ups
- The use of specific camera techniqes like rack focus (i.e., the focus of the camera gradually changes from foreground to background or vice-versa) and shallow depth of field (e.g., the foreground is clear, while the background is blurry).
A much more visual approach was used by BenHaistFilms, who took the general ide