We’re starting something different today. In addition to our custom LifeStories work for clients and our free LifeStories app, we’re introducing our first premium, ready-built LifeStory.

As you may have gathered, we’re telling the LifeStory of Harry Potter.

In order to work within stringent copyright laws there are quite a lot of limitations on what we can do. Essentially, it’s a case of us building a framework app, and populating it with a user’s personal Harry Potter audio and video content. To make sure that it is the customer’s content, we supply the physical disks as well.

To make doubly sure that there is no scope for piracy, or distribution, we also supply the iPad and tie the app to the specific device.

Even with all of those measures, it would still be illegal to do this in most countries. As a result we’re only selling the collection in the UK.

The advantage of supplying the iPad means that we can be sure that there’s plenty of space for the content that we want to include. In the case of the Harry Potter Collection, there is over 50GB of video. That’s not really a practical size for an app that you’d download anyway. 

For my latest LifeStory I wanted to do a simple timeline of a body of work. I could have done something modern, but all modern material is subject to copyright, so I thought I’d do something where the copyright has expired. I decided I would do a timeline of William Shakespeare’s plays between 1589 and 1614.

As they are out of copyright I could include the complete works as PDF documents, but I had the bright (ok, maybe insane) idea of bringing them into the 21st century, so instead, I spent 4 weeks converting 35 plays into Whatsapp format and importing them in as group chats. I’ve used open source material and corrected for all errors that I found against the RSC’s Complete Works.

This LifeStory is now available for download in the LifeStories app. The following plays are included in full, along with character lists and some stage directions. 

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• All’s Well that Ends Well
• Antony and Cleopatra
• As You Like It
• Coriolanus
• Cymbeline
• Hamlet
• Henry IV Part 1
• Henry V
• Henry VI Part 1
• Henry VI Part 2
• Henry VI Part 3
• Henry VIII
• Julius Caesar
• King John
• King Lear
• Love’s Labour’s Lost
• Macbeth
• Measure for Measure
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Othello
• Richard II
• Richard III
• Romeo and Juliet
• The Comedy of Errors
• The Merchant of Venice
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• The Taming of the Shrew
• The Tempest
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Winter’s Tale
• Timon of Athens
• Titus Andronicus
• Troilus and Cressida
• Twelfth Night

Edit: This article was written before we took the LifeStory creation process completely in-house.

Having created five LifeStories for the launch of the LifeStories apps, I thought it would be useful to share my experience with some suggestions for how to create your own LifeStories.

1. Get the right tools. You’re going to need the right tools for the job, so you need to make sure that you have access to an iPad (preferably with a decent amount of available storage), and you’ll need to download the free LifeStories Studio app.

2. Identify your target. Are you going to write autobiographically, or do you have some other subject in mind? You can create as many LifeStories as you like, so the choice of subject is up to you. However, writing a good LifeStory is an investment in time, so it should be something that you’re interested in. The old advice of “Write what you know” and “Know what you write” seems pretty good to me.

3. Identify your audience. Who are you writing the LifeStory for? Something that you create for your own consumption is likely to be very different from what you’d create if you’re going to publish it for a wider audience.

4. Planning is key. It’s very tempting to open the Studio app and start writing Stories. That’s like buying a load of bricks and starting to build a house, and then figuring out what it’s going to look like while you build it. The chances are that what you end up with will not be what you wanted. Spend some time thinking about what you’re going to do before you jump in.

5. Decide on the scope. This mainly translates to the time period you’re going to cover. For example, let’s say you wanted to do a LifeStory of Donald Trump. You could restrict the period you cover to just his presidency, or maybe include his campaign as well. That would be more manageable than if you chose his entire life including the growth of his real estate empire. Do you have enough material for a broad scope, or would you be better being selective?

6. Decide on the level of detail. A LifeStory normally consists of numerous events. You need to decide how much detail you want to apply to each event. This could affect the amount of media you need to accumulate or the amount of text you need to write. Sometimes, less is more. Taking the Trump example again, you could produce something very detailed by identifying individual events and writing stories for each one, or you could just compile a LifeStory based on his twitter feed, writing his story in his own words. It would be much more superficial, but many people would find it more readable.

7. Decide on your perspective. If you’re writing autobiographically, are you going to tell your whole story, warts and all, or are you going to select the parts that you remember most fondly? If you’re struggling with health issues and you’re writing your LifeStory, or if you are a carer doing it for someone, medical advice suggests you stick to the positives. If you’re a fan of a musician or band and you want to write their LifeStory and share it with other fans, you’d be expected to write in a positive light. On the other hand, if we go back to the Trump example, here we’ve got a polarizing figure, so you could choose to write from overtly positive or negative perspectives.

8. Gather your media. If you plan on publishing the LifeStory or just sharing it with friends, you should bear in mind the dangers of breaching copyright. You can’t just grab anything you find on Google and assume that you can use it. That said, if you’re writing your own LifeStory the chances are that you own the copyright to your media, so it’s just a case of selecting what you’re going to use. You may find that you need to digitize photos and videos. You may also have documents that you need to scan as PDFs. In many cases, it is worthwhile recording audio directly into the Studio app that you can then use. Once you’ve gathered your traditional media, turn your attention to your Facebook and Whatsapp activity. Is there anything there that needs to be included? When I wrote my own LifeStory I found a Whatsapp chat that perfectly encapsulated our decision to buy a dog. It made an ideal inclusion.

9. Optimize your videos. Video eats storage space, makes a LifeStory much larger if you want to publish it, and more often than not is unedited. It is well worth the effort to sort out the wheat from the chaff and break your videos down into optimized segments, getting rid of anything tedious. At the same time, you can compress them into a format more suitable for distribution. Most video editing programs have optimized export settings built-in.

10. Decide who are you going to include. The Connections feature in Studio allows you to include people who are related to the subject (by family or otherwise). You have the opportunity to write something about each of these people. There are a number of decisions to be made. The first is who you are going to include as a Connection. You have to decide where to draw the line between who’s in and who’s not. Once you have a list, you have to decide what to say about each one. If you plan on publishing and there’s a chance that the subject will read what you have written, consider their reaction when writing.

11. Create your categories. This applies to Stories and Connections. Categories are a great way of organizing your material into logical folders. You can create as many as you like and be as creative as you want.

12. Switch between Public and Private. Each Story and Connection in Studio has a Private/Public switch. This determines whether the contents of the Story or Connection will appear, or will be marked as hidden. You can write more material for private consumption than you want to release publically, and just ensure that before you choose the Publish option, you go back and switch anything you don’t want seen to Private.

 

The availability of the Internet in the mid-’90s transformed family history research as more and more records were digitized and put online. Websites like Ancestry.com provided subscribers with tools to research and catalog their family trees. People were able to make a connection to their past and had the ability to dig deeper and go back further.

This relatively sedate business was given a significant jolt when someone figured that you could use a DNA test to establish a person’s ethnicity. Suddenly, DNA test labs started popping up and all of the major family history websites took advantage to offer DNA testing services as a premium product offering.

The market for direct to consumer DNA testing is already worth over $1Bn and is still growing, but it’s a competitive business and naturally, customers and analysts are looking to see where the family history business is likely to develop next.

Perhaps the clues are right in front of us. Prior to DNA testing, family history research was mostly about the people you found in the past; the great, great grandmother who emigrated or the great uncle who fought in a major war. It was about peeling back the shroud of the past to see who you would find.

DNA testing has subtly shifted the focus. It’s no longer about the people we find, it’s more about finding out who am I?

Without most people realizing it, family history has become a lot more about personal history. If you accept this trend, then the question is what these more self-aware customers will want going forward?

We believe that the epiphany that family historians will come to recognize is that they are the ancestors of the people of the future. They are the people who will be shrouded and lost, unless they make a concerted effort to the contrary.

The solution to this problem is for people to document and preserve their life stories, pulling together the audio, video, photos, and social media interactions that highlight their lives. It’s a statement of “This is who I am, and this is how I want to be remembered”.

Once created, the LifeStory needs to be made accessible for generations to come, which of course is the greater challenge. How can you ensure that the LifeStory that you create today will still be accessible in 100 years?

It’s a challenge. There’s no mistaking that, but it’s a challenge that we’re meeting head-on, here at LifeStories. We’ve developed the tools to create LifeStories. Now we’re building the infrastructure to persist those LifeStories long into the future.

Follow us on social media as we build for the future @LifeStoriesApps.

Wow. What a mouthful.

It’s true, that is what we’ve created, but we’ve had to come up with a better name than that.

So we call it a LifeStory.

If you’re looking for details, you’re a few days early. We’re just finishing up our apps and then we’ll have the big reveal.