
Learn to capture life stories with a smartphone, turning memories into legacy videos through creativity, authenticity, and style, while honoring trust and preserving meaning for families.
Paul Jenkins introduces a course on honoring memories by recording life moments with a smartphone. Capture memories, laughter, and wisdom to build a lasting cultural repository for future generations.
Learn to recognize and listen for stories during interviews, spotting clues in fragments and asking questions ahead of time to uncover rich memories for legacy videos.
Preserve stories to define identity and legacy through interviews, capturing authentic memories for legacy videos with smartphone videography.
Learn to spark memory and bring out personal stories by using available resources, from friends and family to photos, audio, video, and documents, to preserve memories effectively.
develop a compelling interview story by gathering insights from friends and family and collecting meaningful photographs, letters, and articles to support the story discovery process.
Explore two essential components of telling a life story on film: a face-to-face interview that builds authenticity and a thoughtful editing process that artfully compiles clips, photographs, and music.
Prepare for face-to-face interviews with a categorized library of about 200 questions, including factual warm-up prompts and thoughtful topics on self, family, and origins, downloadable from student resources.
Explore capture techniques for preserving life stories through audio narration, slide narration over photographs, and the video interview, each conveying memories with authentic voices and visuals.
Capture life stories with your smartphone camera, compare built-in and external lavalier microphones, and explore video editing options such as iMovie, Adobe Premiere Clip, and FilmoraGo.
Arrive with a charged battery and compose the scene using the rule of thirds and a clean background. Use a tripod for a stable shot and adjust focus and exposure.
Set up onsite audio by charging the smartphone, choosing between the phone mic or a lavalier, and placing the mic near the chest to reduce echo and maximize sound quality.
Optimize onsite lighting for interviews by using available light, avoiding bright windows and overhead fixtures, and repositioning lamps to ensure clear, well-lit legacy smartphone videos.
Arrive on site, introduce yourself, and put the interviewee at ease to draw out the best story. Set up camera, mic, and lighting, and turn off cell phones.
Film a face-to-face interview for life stories by starting with factual questions to warm up, then ask single-part, thoughtful questions to avoid confusion. Maintain proper lighting and encourage complete answers.
Use video editing to truthfully tell their story, avoiding out-of-context edits or rearranging scenes, and respect the intimate process as the second most important step in story capturing.
Explore simple to complex video editing types, from raw clips with no edits to layered timelines with b-roll, music, and graphics that enhance storytelling.
Learn to use video editing components (interviews, photographs, music, transitions, and b-roll) to tell a life story and keep the main narrative clear by managing scene length.
Understand how copyrights protect an author's work and how to obtain licenses for music, video clips, and photos, including royalty-free options and YouTube's library license.
Discover practical strategies for saving and using legacy videos, including mp4 and mov formats for social media, web streaming, and future-proof storage to tell stories with authenticity and style.
Discover that there is no right or wrong way to tell a story, and your own storytelling style will emerge with experience.
Wrap up by learning to capture life stories with a smartphone, using equipment and software for effective interviewing and preserving video and audio for a lasting, authentic legacy.
Life Memories are valuable, and fleeting. There is huge value in capturing them the right way on a smartphone.
Do you want to ensure the memories of loved ones, friends and family, are preserved for you and future generations the right way? Without spending excessive amounts of time and effort?
This online course will teach you how to capture life memories using proven storytelling techniques and approaches.
This course is designed to teach you the ins and outs of capturing life memories with a smartphone by showing you the art and craft of how to plan, map out and produce them. While there are other courses about smartphone interviewing, it's hard to find a course that gives you a step-by-step insight into capturing stories professionally that really will be a resource now and into the future.
This is the course for you, taught by Larry App who has personally made dozens of films of this kind. The principles and methods he teaches in this course can be applied by you today. His approach to the interviewing process is especially noteworthy.
"I'm glad to share with you from my experience over the years of helping people capture their life stories.
After taking this course, you'll appreciate the privilege and the honour of someone trusting you enough to bring you inside their personal life.
You'll know that you have done a great thing by helping someone leave a legacy with creativity, authenticity and style.
You'll experience the gratitude of the person and their family and their friends.
Those who would find particular value in this course would be those who are interested in preserving someone else's story.
Also, those who are interested in preserving their own story - and that might be you.
Local historians, genealogist teachers, students, writers, retired folks, journalists, family and friends.
This course is not for those who are interested in only the technology of capturing life stories, and those who capture life stories professionally and are satisfied with their own style.
What you'll get from this course is how to recognise a story, how to use various techniques that can be used to bring a story to life using only a smartphone and a love and appreciation for stories for their own sake.
I invite you into this course with a warm welcome. What you will learn here will set you apart from others because you'll learn to capture life stories with creativity, authenticity and style.
Looking forward to seeing you inside the course!"
- Larry App
Our Promise to You
We'll be here for you every step of the way. If you have any questions about the course content or anything related to this topic, you can always post a question in the course or send us a direct message.
We want to make this the best course on how to capture amazing life stories, using the best techniques combined with storytelling knowledge. So if there is any way we can improve this course, just tell us and we'll make it happen.
Dive Right In
This course dives right into capturing life stories with immediate examples of where they are found and how they can be drawn out. You'll learn what makes great storytelling, so that you can choose how to plan and make impactful films each and every time. You'll learn how to structure, design and deliver interviews that tell powerful and emotionally engaging stories.
Learn how to spot and interpret stories.
Learn how established interviewing principles and techniques can be used to amplify the impact of your films.
Learn how to use freely available (free and paid) apps to improve your life memory capturing.
Learn how to use the right workflow so that you save time, money and energy.
Learn how to use your craft online.
Start capturing amazing life stories today!
With our 30-day 100% money back guarantee, there is nothing holding you back from jumping in right now and trying the course out.
Go ahead and click the enroll button, and we'll see you in lesson 1!
Cheers,
Larry App & Paul Jenkins