Bring Your Archives to Life
How are you engaging audiences and volunteers with your archives? Digital activity is an ideal way of keeping in touch, sharing skills and producing co-created content featuring your untold stories. If you need ideas, here are some of the solutions Digital Drama have created for clients this year. Please get in contact if you would like to discuss how we can help you bring your archives to life.
ARCHIVES & VOLUNTEERS:
BRITISH RED CROSS:
Digital Drama created the audio content for 150 Voices, an online exhibition for the British Red Cross to commemorate their 150th anniversary. This project is a great example of how to remotely yet successfully engage existing and new volunteers, run skills training and create content to connect with a broad audience. We trained 50 volunteers across the UK to choose an archive object, research its background, write a script and record a short audio description. Click to visit the online exhibition here: 150 Voices
ARCHIVES & ORAL HISTORIES:
HOME FRONT FILMS:
Working with archive film footage from London’s Screen Archives and oral history interviews with older residents of 6 project partners in London Boroughs, Digital Drama produced 4 short films on the WW2 topics of Digging for Victory, Bombing & the Blitz, Evacuation and VE Day. Oral histories were recorded with 90 residents in the boroughs of Camden, Croydon, Ealing, Hounslow, Kingston and Merton. Read more about the project at Home Front Films
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF HALESWORTH IN WW2:
Commissioned by the INK Festival in Suffolk and in partnership with the Halesworth and District Museum, we made a short film combining oral histories and images from the archives and trained 20 volunteers via Zoom in the skills of reminiscence interviewing and recording.
ARCHIVES AND ACTORS:
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES EXHIBITION ‘WITH LOVE’:
Having produced film and audio content for various exhibitions at The National Archives, once again Digital Drama were commissioned to record actors reading letters from the archives for ‘With Love’, exploring correspondence over 500 years featuring stories of heartbreak and passion. The recordings gave texture to the subsequent TNA podcasts and enabled a broad reach and lasting legacy for the archival material.
ARCHIVES AND AUGMENTED REALITY:
FILMMERTON; ALL THE FUN OF THE FAIR:
Taking archive photography to a new immersive level, Digital Drama commissioned an AR app for FilmMerton as part of the Mitcham VR Festival. Bringing to life the vibrant photos of Mitcham’s ancient fairground in a site specific pop-up exhibition, visitors used iPads to experience the sounds and moving images of ‘All the Fun of the Fair’.
Digital Drama’s audio installation opens at the Rose Theatre, Kingston today. Designer James Rowlands and team have created the back garden of a Kingston house at the end of WW2, complete with Anderson shelter, veg patch and photos of those who remember the end of the war. Come and listen to the the VE Day memories of local residents as they recall the euphoria of that momentous day in twentieth century history.
