Putting the project together

To round up the 3-year-long Herefordshire Life Through a Lens #HLTAL project, we’ve been looking back at how this ambitious project got started in the first place.

Putting the project together
How do you put a team together, for a project that draws on the history of a county over several decades?
Catcher Media’s Rick and Julia Goldsmith (Catcher Media CIC’s Founder & Creative Director and Producer & Co-director respectively) explain how it happened.
“We had worked with Marsha O’Mahony, our Oral Historian, before on another project: the job was advertised and we interviewed different people, but Marsha understood the most about doing oral history for film – she has a journalistic background and she really knows how to tell a story!”
“We had a phenomenal number of people apply for the internships in film and photography and we thought it was very important to have someone who was committed to working and living in the region.” It is notoriously difficult for young people to find this kind of opportunity within the county, once they graduate, and it was important that the internships should be paid opportunities, to ensure that they were accessible to people from different backgrounds. “Our project interns were chosen – Mike, Gabrielle and Jack. The idea of the internships actually came via one of Derek Evans’ daughters, who thought it would be good to offer young people opportunities, as this was something that Derek did. It was a nice way of getting younger people working with us – Gabrielle stayed for 18 months. Jack has made some contacts on the project and he’s helped with the final exhibitions and put together the virtual tours. It can be hard for young people in the county to get opportunities – it’s the couple of years after a degree – and this was hands-on real-world experience. All three of the interns had to get involved with live projects.”

The project needed more people on both the creative and marketing side of things, “Emma Drabble applied to be the project photographer, and was interviewed: her work was really strong and she had a similar background to Derek – it’s very important to have a rapport with people. Rebecca Farkas came on board to do the marketing and social media. She had experience of working with arts organisations; it’s important that people were sensitive to the project and resourceful. Innes Jones has been our in-house Graphic designer from the start of Catcher Media back in the late-1990s. His graphic style always suits what we want and he makes heritage projects look fresh, engaging and not too ‘dusty’. Using local businesses and professionals was an important concern. Vic Mars and Benet Walsh did the music for the films – coincidentally Vic has recently done an album inspired by his memories of Herefordshire – and long-time collaborator Neil Poole worked on the editing.”
A vital part of the project was a small but truly dedicated team of volunteers, “To find our volunteers, we did a call out on social media, through Hereford College of Arts and the 6^th form colleges. We did some presentations for media students at Hereford 6^th Form College – and a callout to students from Film Studies & Photography. We also did general call outs and found some through word of mouth. Herefordshire Archive & Record Centre (HARC) and Herefordshire Libraries volunteers were keen to do a photographic project. We had eleven volunteers scanning the images to make digital copies four of whom were attached to the project for four years! It was interesting for the volunteers to get to look through the photos, rather than just written documents. Working with Rhys Griffith, Senior Archivist at Herefordshire Archive and Records Office (HARC) has been really good – from our earlier Cathedral Close film and Chewing the Cud, onwards. He really saw the value of our approach and the project brought lots of school kids into the archive.”
“Steve Jones at Herefordshire Libraries has been coordinating the Herefordshire History website, where all of the digitised archive pictures can be found. Steve and The volunteers have been scanning and uploading photos and negatives, and adding the descriptions, which is a big job as there’s always new information coming in. We’re very grateful to Steve and Jan Naseratnam from Herefordshire Libraries, and also to Mark Sanderson from the Learning & Achievement Service at Hereford Council – without him we couldn’t have worked with so many schools.”
As the project ends, we all have to say goodbye to the archive and one another for now. Rick says: “It’s been heart-warming and pretty overwhelming to have heard so many stories, and to have met so many different people on this project, both to interview and to work alongside. I hope the legacy of the project is long-lasting one and enriches people’s understanding of the special place that is Herefordshire.”
The Herefordshire Life Through a Lens website will stay live until 2025, so you can read stories on the blog, browse Derek Evans’ wonderful photographs, watch dozens of oral history interviews and download assets for schools and care homes. The digital archive is held on the website at Herefordshire History and you can zoom in on the details of images and buy some of Derek’s prints there.