1. Initial Meeting

Let’s meet in person and discuss your ideas and your vision for the interview. It is important that you feel comfortable with us and that we understand each other’s expectations.

2. Preparing for the Interview

We will encourage you to think about the broad themes you will be addressing during your interview. For example, the themes could be your parents and grandparents, your childhood, school years, young adulthood, important relationships, marriage, parenthood - anything you that is important to you.

3. Collecting Photographs

In order to make your story more compelling, we would encourage you to look for personal photographs that will serve as a visual reference in your story. These may include photographs of your loved ones and hopefully photographs of yourself at different stages of your life. We will incorporate these photographs in the final video.

4. Location

Typically, we conduct interviews in the home. We would like you to sit in your favorite armchair, or next to your favorite artwork, or you can simply sit in a place of your home that is deeply meaningful to you. We believe that you are going to be the most authentic surrounded by the comfort and familiarity of your home. With your help, we will find the very spot in your home that is the most cinematic. On the day of the interview, we will bring our lights, film and recording equipment. Please keep in mind that it may take us a couple of hours to properly prepare the set.

5. Day of Interview

We will guide you through the filming process, since for most of us, speaking on camera can be a daunting experience at first. Please do not worry about making a mistake or even a series of mistakes during this process, because we can always edit those parts later. In fact, we can even reshoot the entire parts of your interview that you are not comfortable with. We will be there to help and guide you.

6. Interview

From our experience, the ideal length for the interview is around an hour, since speaking on camera for more than that can be exhausting. In some cases, after the first filming, we can take a break for a couple of hours and resume filming later that day. (Many of our clients choose to film over the period of several days.)

7. Editing

At Carousel, we are going to put your movie together; we will include the photographs that were used in your interview. Within several days, we should have a copy for your pre-approval to make sure that there are no errors in the way we assembled your film.

8. Delivery

We will bring you your film, stored on an external drive. (As of now, we are not in a position to keep your film in our archives, so please make sure that the final movie file will be stored in a safe place.)

9. Price

The price will depend on the scope and length of your project, which we will discuss with you during our first meeting.

10. Journey

Please keep in mind, by its very nature, this experience will be very emotional, as you look into your past and think about all those whom you have loved and lost. We promise to guide you through this journey. At Carousel Archival Stories, it is our hope that in the end you will find this experience to be profound, fulfilling, cathartic and even liberating.

We must live life looking forward, but we can understand it only looking backwards. 

Søren Kierkegaard