Legacy Magazine

Tony Ingraham

As an interpreter, have you ever dreamed of sharing your stories on TV, or better yet having your own TV show? With the explosion of video technology and distribution choices, it’s never been more possible.

Small, affordable camcorders can take quality video that is fine for TV and the Internet. Photo by Tony Ingraham.

We interpreters are in show biz. We are driven to share our love of a place, a story, or a subject with an audience or participants in our program. We usually employ objects, props, performance, word craft, or “illustrative media,” as Tilden summarized it.

It’s generally agreed that personal interpretation is ideal—participants being present with a live person who helps reveal wonders in a real place or with real objects. All the participants’ senses get involved at the site, and, my goodness, they even can ask questions. And there is no substitute for infectious, in-person enthusiasm.

But when the 14 people who attend your program applaud and go home with your spark in their hearts, your show is over. You’ve given the world quality, but not necessarily quantity. The 300,000 other people who visit your site were not there; nor were the millions of others who have yet to come. Meanwhile, administrators have faced up to fiscal realities and have decided to reduce your site’s interpretive staffing budget.

That’s when many of us begin thinking more about nonpersonal interpretation to reach our audiences. Meanwhile, the world is exploding with video.

New York State Park interpreter Sarah Fiorello explains the geology of Cavern Cascade in a video of her guided walk in Watkins Glen State Park during the celebration of the park’s centennial in 2006. Photo by Tony Ingraham.

Being Seen in Public
It’s difficult to keep up with all the changes in video distribution, access, and personal video production. If you have a portable device, you can watch nearly anywhere, anytime. You can stream video to your widescreen TV from the Internet, or record your favorite show on cable with your DVR to watch later. Meanwhile, the latest movie just released on DVD is headed your way in the mail; or maybe it’s part of your cable subscription. You can watch short videos on your favorite website.

At this point, some interpreters may get nauseated. Many of my friends don’t get cable TV because they want to limit their immersion in mass culture that spends billions to mold us into distracted consumers. But let’s face it—we live in a video culture. If you want to be seen, you get on the screen.

Okay, you’ve decided you are interested in using video as one tool to extend your interpretation to a larger audience than you otherwise are able to. But you’ve watched many mainstream nature and history shows and are intimidated by the enormous production team lists that roll at the end. There is no way you can assemble the resources and professionals to put on anything like that. Fortunately, you don’t have to.

Ever since high school in the 1960s when I had a home movie camera, I’ve wanted to get back into making short interpretive films. Back then, I shot footage of hikes with my father in the mountains to show to family members. Then I became an adult and life got busy. I didn’t return to my interest until many years later.

The author is about to go on live with his show, Cayuga Lake Heritage, in the mini-studio at Ithaca’s public access TV station. Photo by Lauren Stefanelli.

I had a career with New York State Parks in charge of environmental interpretation in the state’s gorgeous Finger Lakes region. I bought a VHS camcorder to record programs and events for training and documentation. I made a couple of training videos, one for interpretive content, and another for general seasonal employee orientation for all the parks in the region. I received an agency regional award for the latter, and then was scolded by my boss for the amount of my time the project had consumed! I laid my camera aside once again. (That was in 1994, and I’ve been told that park managers are still using the staff orientation tape.)

The years rolled by and I took advantage of an early retirement incentive to leave and pursue some deferred dreams. My wife and I published a couple of interpretive books (including A Walk through Watkins Glen—Water’s Sculpture in Stone, the 2009 NAI Media Award winner in the small book category). And I bought a video camera.

In fact, I had subscribed to Videomaker Magazine (a great resource) and salivated over the possibilities for a year before I actually bought the camera. And I took a month-long class on TV production at my local cable TV public access station. That led to my first interpretive TV series, Nature Nearby.

The Miracle of Public Access
Many communities across the country have “PEG” (public, educational, and government access) television channels. Local municipalities can require a cable television franchise agreement to include channels for ordinary citizens, schools, colleges, and local government to “cablecast” their own content. They may also include studios and equipment for use by local producers.

Ithaca, New York, has had a PEGASYS (PEG Access System) station for many years. Area colleges provide regular programming on the educational channel. Municipal meetings are aired on the government channel. And local citizens who have passed a certification course can produce their own content for the public access channel. Use of the equipment and studio are free. All programming must be noncommercial.

PEG channels, where they are available, provide a great opportunity for interpreters to reach out to larger audiences. In Ithaca, that is potentially at least 67,000 viewers, and the numbers are much greater for larger communities. Granted, in the channel-flipping universe, PEG channels have a hard time competing with regular, professionally produced programming. But I have been surprised by the number of people who have come up to me and said they have seen my show.

Rolling Your Own
In my Nature Nearby series, I generally have used my own camera, but I didn’t need to. The station has a number of high-quality camcorders to borrow, along with other accessory equipment for sound and lighting. Indeed, it seems that most of the amateur producers use the station’s equipment. If your community has such a station, you could produce local television programming with virtually no cost for equipment. Not all public access stations, however, have equipment to loan.

Owning your own equipment and editing software gives you total flexibility as to when you shoot and when you edit. It’s now possible to buy a small, high-quality, high-definition camcorder that is adequate to the purpose for just a few hundred dollars. I carry an affordable HD “pocket camcorder” on my belt at all times and I catch much more footage for my show than I would were I deliberately heading out for a shoot. I can do unplanned, on-the-spot interviews, or just have the camera handy at some event or location on the chance that I might be inspired to capture something. There is a down side to owning your own, however; if your equipment or software malfunctions, you must get it repaired yourself, if service is even available.

Many new public access producers have grand ideas about the shows they will create, only to find they are in over their heads. Video production (shooting), and post-production (editing) eat time! There are lots of learning curves with equipment, editing software, and the art of producing a program that audiences actually will want to watch.

Citizen producers commonly are too ambitious and make a show too long or more frequent than what they actually have time for. I’m retired and sometimes I still struggle for time to produce my episodes. Some produce shows on no particular schedule and submit them for cablecast when they are ready. Others host a new episode every week.

Using a Team or Going it Alone
A nature center, museum, or organization can create its own show. Small teams of volunteers can divide up the tasks with several people available for videotaping events or speakers, for instance, and others dedicated to mastering the editing process.

For Nature Nearby, I produced a variety of natural history episodes up to an hour in length for local cablecast. Some were easy—recording a presentation and putting it on TV. Others were created over several years and involved a small team. With the Friends of Robert H. Treman State Park, I produced The Treman Show using four narrators and their research, writing, and image resources. Another episode followed the discovery and archeological excavation of the site of the 19th-century Enfield Falls Hotel in the same park over a four-year period. Yet another show featured the confrontation between an environmental group and the National Forest Service over a planned timber sale.

Recently, our PEGASYS station created a “mini-studio” that requires only one person to operate for live, on-air programming. I have started a new biweekly, half-hour show called Cayuga Lake Heritage, featuring the natural and cultural heritage of the 38-mile-long Finger Lake that begins at Ithaca. This frees me from needing a production team, and it’s a bit like a one-man band. I can employ video clips, stills, music, DVDs, and my live presence on air to tell my stories. I love it.

Telling the World
When my show is ready, I send out an email announcing the show and its schedule, and I post it on Facebook. Some people write back and complain that they don’t get the channel. For these folks, I have posted entire episodes on a video hosting site such as Blip.tv or Vimeo. These are free and they produce good quality reproduction accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. And sometimes I just post a clip that I included in the show on YouTube. I will also commonly embed these online clips in a website and on Facebook, or create a link to the full episode.

You can see The Treman Show, for instance, by following a link at http://friendsoftreman.wordpress.com.

It was designed for an interactive video kiosk in the park’s historic grist mill, where visitors can select three-minute segments on several park topics. If the video equipment malfunctions, at least the entire show is viewable online. And the video also may be made into an interpretive product for sale at the park. Though it is an amateur production, The Treman Show won awards as the best show produced in 2008 for Ithaca’s PEGASYS channels. Some area educators have obtained copies for use with their classes.

With public access television and online video hosting sites, there is an expanding opportunity for you to tell your stories to the world. And it’s fun!

Tony Ingraham is a life member of NAI. In the mid-1990s, he was director for Region 1.

Steve Lucht

Being an interpreter is not my first career choice. I started in public radio and was there for 10 years. Most of that time was at WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio. During that time I produced a number of short features for a local news/cultural affairs magazine. Several of my stories were based on topics of historical significance to our broadcast area. I was drawn to stories of that nature.

Well, it happens sometimes that we get the itch to move on to something new. In my case I knew that although I loved public radio, I did not want to make it my full-time career. As I searched my soul for what else I could do for a living, I found that my interests (teaching and history) meshed well with this career field called public history. So I went to graduate school. But I never really left public radio. It was something I planned on returning to in some fashion as part of my new career path.

The author interviews Shaker scholar Dr. Carol Medlicott in the last remaining building of the Shaker village of Watervliet, Ohio.

Now, five years into my new career, I have begun to produce radio stories once again. I see this endeavor as a natural extension of the interpretation I do professionally for Dayton History, a historical organization that owns and operates a number of historic sites throughout Dayton, Ohio. I see myself as a radio interpreter as well as a cultural heritage site interpreter.

The NAI definition of interpretation says that it “is a mission-based communication process that forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent in the resource.” Using radio or other mass media for interpretation almost seems counter-intuitive to that definition and what interpretation is vis-à-vis historic sites, parks, zoos, museums, nature centers, aquaria, and botanical gardens. The traditional understanding of interpretation is that it takes place at the site of the resource through the interaction of interpreters or interpretive media and the site’s visitors. But with mass media there is no contact with an audience. There is no direct interaction with people. The audience is somewhere out there in the ether.

I believe, however, that the definition of interpretation can and does work within the realm of mass media. The mass media are just another form of interpretive media. They just use a different mode of relaying information outside the setting of a park, zoo, museum, nature center, aquarium, botanical garden, or historic site. It is looking at what interpretation is and how it is conducted from a different perspective.

There are practical reasons for using radio for interpretation, such as the numbers of people you can reach with your organization’s stories (for example, there are 2,000 people listening to WYSO at any given time during the day). But, for me, it is the nature of radio that offers the most enticing reason.

Radio is a very intimate and personal medium. The audience usually does not gather in groups to listen like they do to watch television. Listening to the radio tends to be a solitary process. Even though the radio signal is reaching tens of thousands of people, you as the teller of the radio story, as the interpreter, are speaking to only one person—the listener in his/her car, home, or wherever he/she may be.

This intimacy can engage and draw the listener into a story. The intonations of the voice, and the use of words and sounds in a story on any subject can stir the intellect and foster an emotional connection with the subject matter. If you are excited about what your organization has to offer the public, then that will be evident in your production.

This power to engage the listener also makes radio a very “visual” medium. A well-produced story can take the listener, through his or her imagination, to your natural or cultural heritage site. This can encourage people to come to your site for the first time or for a return visit, so they can see firsthand what they heard.

This “visual” nature of radio presents a challenge in using radio to interpret. The audience cannot literally see what it is the radio interpreter is talking about. Writing for radio requires one to employ descriptive and engaging language written and delivered in a conversational tone in order to grab and hold the listener’s attention and make him/her “see” what is being described in the radio story. This can be a challenge and difficult to do well, but this should be right up our alley as natural or cultural heritage interpreters. We use economical and engaging language every day in our jobs.

Another challenge of using radio to interpret is that, on the surface, it seems there are no opportunities for the radio audience to interact with the radio interpreter and vice versa. This seems to go against the interpreter’s nature. True, there is no direct or immediate means for the audience and the radio interpreter to communicate (unless it is a call-in program, a radio format I do not care for). But in today’s digitally connected world you can communicate with the audience in any number of ways almost instantaneously: Twitter, Facebook, email, chat rooms, etc. You could even have an online chat with your audience as the story is airing.

So, how does one go about producing interpretive stories for the radio? I do not have experience with commercial radio, only public radio, so I will address this question from that perspective. First, start building a relationship/partnership with the public radio station(s) in your area. Talk to the program director or general manager about what it is you would like to do. They can tell you if what you want to do will fit with the station’s programming. They also may be willing to train you on how to produce (record, edit, and mix audio) and write for radio. Another good resource for learning the art of radio is the Association of Independents in Radio (www.airmedia.org).

How to produce a radio story is beyond the scope of this article. However, there are a couple of issues I will address that I consider to be the most important part of a well-produced, engaging radio story: whom and where you record. Do not record only yourself talking about the natural or cultural heritage resource at your site. Bring professionals, scholars, professors, or other experts in the field into the story. They can bring additional perspectives and information to the story. Also, having more than one voice is much more interesting for listeners.

Do not record the people you interview for the story in the studio or over the phone. Instead, interview your subjects in the location where your resource is. For example, Dayton History has in its collections the last remaining building from the former Shaker village of Watervliet, Ohio, near Dayton. When I produced a story about the Watervliet Shakers, I interviewed a Shaker scholar in that building. I took another Watervliet Shaker scholar to the site of the former village and interviewed him outside. Interviewing these people at the location of the subject of the story takes the listener there—it brings the listener to your natural or cultural heritage site. The listener will “see” where you are in their mind; doing this will make your story much more compelling. The natural sounds of the environment in which you interview people will help paint the picture of the location in the listener’s mind.

In order to record and produce a radio story you need equipment. The radio station might have audio equipment you can use. If not, do not worry. The beauty of radio is that it is inexpensive to produce stories. We all have computers. Good software for recording, editing, and mixing audio is inexpensive, or even free. A digital recorder, microphone, microphone cable, and headphones can all be purchased for around $400. That is all you really need to get started. Of course, if you want to set yourself up with a soundproof studio, that will cost quite a bit more, but is not necessary to get started.

It is a lot of work producing good radio stories, but the benefits are worth the effort. For one, your organization can develop a mutually beneficial relationship with the public radio station(s) in your area. The reach of their signal often covers a great geographical region that can encompass tens of thousands of listeners and potential visitors to your site. Also, using radio can be another tool in the interpretive process. By producing a compelling interpretive radio story, you can forge “emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meanings inherent” in the resources at your natural or cultural heritage site, thereby making your site a greater resource to the wider public.

Steve Lucht is the lead interpreter at Carillon Historical Park, a property of Dayton History in Ohio. Reach him at sdlucht@hotmail.com.