Hurricane Film's

Last Friday, two employees from Hurricane Film's came into our lecture to talk about their project People Stories - http://www.people-stories.com/ in relation to one of the question's we have been asked -

In an age of media saturation how do you generate and maintain an audience and most importantly how do you engage them to participate? This project appeals to an older demographic and has world-wide appeal, a large user base is the Liverpool Diaspora. What would you suggest as a strategy to draw users in and make it easy, but engaging for them to participate in a meaningful way.

The talk outlined the aim of the company - to go to local Merseyside people and gather video's and pictures of their life experience. From video's of children playing in the streets in the 60's, to how specific building's have changed throughout history via photographs, the site documents these people's stories as a sort of historic facebook.


Hurricane Film's gather their documents through visiting local community centres and writing groups, and both filming and keeping copies of the information they are given. The members of such groups are given the means to log onto the site and upload their own content, however this has it's obstacles as not everyone can access the site, regardless of how user-friendly it is. The matter of age and available technology means not everyone finds it easy to use computers, no matter what the task they wish to accomplish. 


In regard to the question, I thought of several ways in which they could generate interest in the site, and how they can give that access to the members that wish to add their content.

• Visit schools - showing the site to pupils and creating a History project for them based around the site's content, would allow the children to hear stories of their relative's history, as well as giving the relatives a platform for their stories to be heard by many others. The children most probably have experience of uploading content, and so it creates a new means of gathering information as well as a means of uploading.
• Go to museums - work with the local museums to create an area looking at Liverpool history, and use the content that has been generated in an interactive manner. Interactivity will excite younger generations, and through them their parents have access to the site and therefore a place to upload their family history.
• Theme's - the company spoke about using themes to generate interest in the site, and I think this idea could tie in with the school visits. If they had a theme that looked at schools and children's memories of what school was like, the children could contrast their own relatives memories of school with their own.
• Overcoming barriers to uploading - Within the local community centres that are visited, the company could work to do a monthly upload - an afternoon where the members could come with their content, whether that be handwritten, photographed or digitally, and the content can then be scanned directly onto the website. It's a small means to help those who are unable to use computers individually, and another option may be to give tutorials at these sessions to help teach the group about computer use.