SAG Life Story Essentials series helps you capture, shape, and share the life stories that matter most — whether they are your own, or the stories of loved ones. We capture these stories using easy oral history techniques.
Across three 2 hour live/online workshops, you’ll move from raw memories to polished stories, learning simple tools to make the storytelling relatable, joyful and sharable.
Each session stands alone, but together they form a complete journey: from Research to recording to storytelling.
Course Outline
Part One — Research Essentials
Starting with a simple timeline, you’ll learn to map out life events, spot key milestones, and organise memories in a clear, visual way; an essential research stage in a life story project.
Workshop 1 Outline: (90 minutes)
- Timeline basics
- Choosing and preparing your subject
- Tips
- Organising supporting material (photos, letters, memorabilia)
- Questions
Part Two — Easy Oral History
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to plan and record meaningful oral history- style interviews with the people around you. By the end of the session, you’ll be ready to record an oral history interview to use for the final session’s project.
Workshop 2 Outline: (2 hours)
- Setting up for success: choosing your space
- All about questions: prompts that unlock memory and meaning
- Interview structure
- Interview demonstration
- Questions
Part 3 — Voice to Story
You’ve captured the voice — now it’s time to find the story. With your recorded oral history, learn the easiest way to convert the recording into a text-based mini-biography.
Workshop 3 Outline: (2 hours)
- What Now?
- Uses for your oral history interview
- Creating a life story booklet
- Questions
This is a hands-on workshop rather than a presentation with activities through-out. A recording will be made and distributed but you’ll get the most benefit by attending live.
There will be handouts emailed out after each session. The final handout will give you suggestions for other activities to expand your skills and uses for your interviews.
Presenter: Jane Hutcheon
Jane Hutcheon is a journalist, researcher and family history buff. After 25 years with the ABC, she turned the lens on her own ancestry, creating the 2022-4 theatre production Lost in Shanghai. Jane is the author of three books and writes for the ABC, The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald and others. You can find her on Substack: http://janehutcheon.substack.com
