[ TAKEN FROM DOCUMENTARY PROJECT 1 REFLECTIONS]




For the Interview I used the built in recording capabilities of my Mp3 Player, the Creative Zen Vision M. As is evident by the picture, it is a very unassuming piece of technology and did not require a microphone to record the interview. It was simply left on my grandma’s (Yvonne May) bed side table and left to record. There was a meter which showed how much sound the mic was picking up, I played with the sensitivity so that everything was audible but not overpowering. The device recorded the interview perfectly and encoded the interview as a wav file, which I could then refer to either with the player or through my computer. I was very happy with the recording function of the device. I believe that the unobtrusiveness of the device allowed the interview to go ahead very casually, as if it was just my grandma commonly telling me one of her stories from her past. The answers she gave me all seem very natural and unforced.

I am very pleased with the final product, mainly because I have a timepiece of my Grandma’s life, that will always mean something special to me. I was extremely interested in her stories, both personally, how she met my grandfather (who I have never met, he died of a brain tumor before I was born) and historically, learning about what the world was like in her time. I noticed some very interesting trends in how she looks at the world compared to how I would, along with some similarities between her day and ours. It was interesting how she refers to the English and allies as ‘we’ and never really separated herself from that. Throughout the interview and in her stories in general my grandma is very proud of her English heritage.
The transcribing process was not very difficult for me, since I could type her words almost as quickly as she spoke them. The hardest part was deciding on punctuation, since we do not talk with the same structure that we write.

Seeing as how my grandma is 91, she does repeat herself a lot, at points she will even repeat whole stories that she had just finished recounting. The rearrangement of her thought was the main focus of my editing to make the interview seem fluid and not confuse the reader through the constant repetition. She speaks in a very English manner, which includes of self reflexive comments such as “I think”, “I would have you know”. I had to take out a lot of those to make the piece flow. Additionally, she would ask herself questions after I asked a question, as if she was searching her memories for the answer. I had to take all of these instances out. Apart from that she is an incredibly eloquent speaker and a very good story teller.

Her life in Edinburgh seemed almost like a fairytale, especially her anecdote about how she met my grandfather. It seemed as if it was right out of a movie or novel. In fact, I really like this style of storytelling, it seems far more human than formal writing. I wish I could write how she talks. It was really fulfilling to shape a fluid story through the answers, it was a really fun editing process. I tried not to change her words or sentence structure as much as possible to maintain her presence in the writing. Through her age, she didn’t completely finish some thoughts, and I tried to finish them to the best of my ability.

The interview itself comes across as a comparison between a person from the mid 1900s to a person today. Particularly poignant moments in the interview were when she contrasted between then and now with regards to the media and news coverage. It was really amazing how cut off she was from the truth of the front line during the war. She has told me on numerous occasions that she had the time of her life during the war, when you would have thought times should have been tough. World War 2 was one of the biggest conflicts of our race’s existence, and had drastic consequences if Germany annexed Europe. It really surprised me that the situation did not weigh heavier on her conscience; she could have been invaded by fascists, who were not known to be the nicest of people. Today the public attitude and media landscape are completely different. I can only imagine the fear mongering that would be going on if we were facing an enemy as powerful as fascist Germany was back then. This is completely contrasted by our mediascape today, where we have images from the front line available 24/7 along with commentary from analysts and soldiers themselves. Furthermore, our media would underline every event, and make sure the general public knew, to some degree, what was going on. The world has clearly gotten a lot smaller through media technology. My grandma referred to Edinburgh as ‘her own little world’, to be so isolated from the rest of it seems really strange by today’s standards.

Another contrasting element to my grandma’s interview was how much she appeared to enjoy her job compared to some of the people in Stud Terkel’s Working. She seemed to have a definite feeling of pride for the work she was doing, something the majority of jobs are lacking in the book.