At last fall's Third Coast Festival Conference in Chicago, Neil Sandell did a session called, "Secrets, Whispers, and Lies: Crafting a Personal Documentary." It was one of the best sessions I attended at the conference, as Neil pulled back the curtain and showed how the producers at Outfront capture such personal and engaging stories from Canadian citizens every week.
For those of you less familiar with Outfront, it's a CBC program that invites listeners to approach them with the stories they want to tell. So, in that way, the producers at Outfront have an advantage. The person they are interviewing already wants to be there. There's no convincing them of the value of the experience, in having their story told. They are the ones wanting to tell it. So the techniques Neil described - having them complete sentences you start, having them imagine with their eyes closed the place where the story takes place - probably are a bit more successful in this kind of scenario.
All of that to say that I am a huge Outfront fan, as I think both Jen and I have already noted a few times on PRR. What I love about this episode is the use of natural and active sounds to give us a sense of the family dynamic. At times I felt a little uncomfortable as the daughter questioned her parents' saving of ketchup packets or old clothes. It reminded me a bit of when I helped my grandmother move out of her house in Southern California. Having grown up through the Depression, she learned to save everything and the result, 60 years later, was that my family and I were having to sneak handfuls of fast food restaurant napkins and ketchup packets into garbage bags (or else my grandmother would fish them out and return them to their rightful place). At the time, I was in college and laughed at her saving of everything. But now I have a better appreciation of what she experienced and how that influenced her philosophy about money and wasting. I think the daughter in this story obviously loves and appreciates the sacrifices her parents made for her - you can hear that in her narration - I just wanted to hear it in the interaction with her parents as well.
Post new comment