Partnering With You In Our Process

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.Groucho Marx

Working together!

Brothers, Peter and Hugh Sibbald
©John Sibbald, 1964.

We use audio and video recording to create extended personal documentaries with an approach that is more memoir than biography, stories from a life rather than merely about a life.

Overview of Our Process:

Choosing from a palette of digital multimedia, clients can commission projects of varying scope from short broadcast quality audio-recorded stories, through visually supported sound memoirs and career tributes, to in-depth TV-bio-pic-like multimedia personal history films — in their own voices or from the voices of families and friends.

You peruse our packages to chose an appropriate beginning point for a discussion, and then contact us. Initial consultations are free according to the package level. We will be happy to answer your questions and to work with you to focus and fine-tune an approach to fit your unique need. This is a highly individualized process, and our service is personal, hands on, and low-key. We will not up-sell. Indeed, in the end if a single picture is enough, Peter also runs Sibbald Studios at The Briars, making portraiture available either at the Briars Resort or any place you wish to have him travel.

Once we have agreed on an approach, outcome, time-table and price, we will encode this in an agreement, and when we have received that signed agreement and a 50% advance, we will begin.

Depending on the scope of the project, this may vary:

• supplying you questionnaires and story-prompting tips
• pre-interviews and brainstorming sessions to develop story lines, lists of interview questions and auxiliary interviewees
• site visits to scout locations and peruse family archives for the purpose of selecting  support imagery, existing audio and footage as well as other materials for potential inclusion in Video Portraits.

In any event, the key to the process is the work that happens before cameras or audio recorders ever start to roll, and that begins with communication. Ongoing communication will be paramount and any changes that evolve will likewise be confirmed in writing  electronically or by hand-written note.

Our aim is that you will have only one surprise: just how delighted you are with our work.

Investment:
Although on the surface it may appear such projects take little more than the time necessary to record the conversations, whether video or just audio, this recording is but a brief if exciting step in the overall process. Depending on the package, hours of preproduction may be required to ensure great recorded conversations, and for each one of those by the time additional interviews, footage, images, and sound design have been woven together, the process may have extended out in several dozen hours or weeks post production for each hour of recorded material. Investment can be considerable, but then the point after all is a legacy that can be passed on for generations. This is why for both voice and video portraits we offer simple packages that focus on the recording phase with only nominal post production to ensure people’s stories can be captured.