I first listened to “Show ’em Jackie”: Bat Boy Remembers Being On The Field With Jackie Robinson” by George and Bill Bates. In this story, George discusses with his son Bill how special it is that his father captured the oldest known footage of Jackie Robinson as a professional baseball player as he was asked to be a batboy for the day. While I did discover reading the text below the video that this was a dad and his son holding more of a conversation, it still does come off as somewhat of a professional interview. The audio was excellent throughout the clip, and while it did jump right into the conversation, an instrumental song was used at the end, slightly overlapping the speaking to close it out.
Next I heard the story of Temica Hunt and Necothia Bowens-Robinson in “Love and Skating: One Family That’s Rolled Through Six Generations.” This was also a conversation between two family members, but it flowed less like an interview and more like a mother and a daughter reminiscing on past memories. There was no actual interviewer, but someone from StoryCorps did start off the clip with a brief intro. The audio quality was also very clear in this clip, and background music was used in the same spot to close out the story, slightly overlapping their voices but getting louder when they finished speaking.
In both clips there was no background noise and it was very easy to hear and understand the speakers even with low volume. They both also used music as I stated above to wrap up each story so there wasn’t an abrupt ending, and the music became gradually louder to give it a more professional finish.
The main differences I noticed was that the first clip sounded more like an interview than the second video, but the second video was the only one with an intro. The Jackie Robinson story jumped into it right away while the skating video began with a sentence from StoryCorps, a clip from the main part of the video, and a longer intro from a StoryCorps representative. Both starts of the story were fine, but I personally liked the one with the StoryCorps intro more as I felt more prepared with background information going into the story.
Links: “Show ’em Jackie”: Bat Boy Remembers Being On The Field With Jackie Robinson – StoryCorps
Love and Skating: One Family That’s Rolled Through Six Generations – StoryCorps