Story Interrupted.

My favored family story platform, StoryPress.com seems to have gone belly-up. It was VERY user friendly and FREE. Easy to upload videos or photos and add narration. I discovered it when Thomas MacEntee announced he’d done a story about his mother.   This was shortly after I’d struggled to produce my first YouTube video.

I was amazed at the simplicity of StoryPress. It is disappointing that the site will be shut down at the end of September.  Apparently the venture was not profitable. They say they’ll review their business model to see if they can come up with revisions that will make it work for them.  I hope they are successful.

The good news is that I was able to download backup copies of my stories; and that the backup consists of separate image and audio files. I won’t have to start from scratch.

The goal is to create a history in an appealing contemporary format. What is the likelihood that my kids and grandkids would read it in a book?  Small. So multimedia is my choice.

A year ago my impatience led me to give up on Microsoft’s Movie Maker because it is not intuitive – at least to me. But I’m going to try it again after watching a couple of tutorials. (When all else fails, read the instructions.) It’s always a bit frustrating trying to learn new software but I’ll give it a go.

I’ll be redoing the stories I had on StoryPress and posting them on YouTube.  They are “War Baby” and “The Shipp Family in Prussian Poland”.  Then I’ll resume work on the next story about crossing the Atlantic as a passenger in steerage in the 1880s.

Back to the drawing board.