Multimedia Stories
I come from a family where already my grandfather filmed the family but also the daily life in city. That is why I have footage of my father when he was three years old.
My father went the extra mile. My childhood has been extensively filmed and photographed. At that time, we often disliked the hot lamps pointed at you, but later you turn out to have a large archive of your own life.
My father was chairperson of the ‘Historical Images of Nijmegen’ foundation for decades and has thus built up the film archive of my hometown Nijmegen. Making the film archive accessible was a task that my father also took privately. He digitized my grandfather’s and his own 8mm films first on video and then on DVD.
After the death of my beloved and of my parents, I realized how much archival material I had collected of my adult life; travel diaries, letters, postcards and emails and lots and lots of photos. In addition, there were my parents’ diaries, the balance books from my grandfather’s shop and so much more. True to family tradition, I in turn digitized it.
In the meantime, I noticed that the pioneer of this field, the Washington Post, no longer sends journalists out to just write about the events that took place but to make stories that were illustrated with films, photos, and documents, because the digital newspaper gave the opportunity. They called them Multimedia Stories. That technique gave me the opportunity to create interesting stories of my life and that of my family. And in such a way that it is also interesting for outside the family to read.
