LifeStories has its own website, but I’ll give you an overview of the project here. I started work on the concept about 5 years ago. I was looking at people who were in the later stages of life and was struck by how much information was lost when a person passed away. In my personal experience, I know that my knowledge of my grandparents is fairly limited, in part because they did not make a concerted effort to record anything for posterity.
I resolved that I would do that, but there wasn’t an application that suited what I wanted to record. I wanted to include audio, video, photos, stories and profiles of the people I was connected to. As a result I started to develop an application that would allow me to include all of these media types and present it in a chronological fashion. I created two applications that were on the iOS App Store for a short time. The first was LifeStories Studio, an iPad app that allowed you to create a LifeStory, and the LifeStories app which ran on iPad and iPhone, which allowed someone to download and view a LifeStory that someone else had created.
I took both apps off the app store so that I could add new features, and most significantly port the iPad application to a Mac to overcome some of the limitations that the iPad brought. The more I developed it, the more I realised that the scope of what it could be used for extended far beyond my original designs. Not only could it be used to tell the story of just about anything, but it is also the perfect container for creating an anthology of media. If you’re a fan of someone or something, an anthology containing a broad media mix can be very compelling.
I’ve even gone so far as to suggest that LifeStories anthologies as NFTs could be the basis for future home video ownership and could reverse the trend towards streaming everything. Here’s an article I wrote for Predict on Medium
I love creating LifeStories and I do it on a commission basis. Check out the website for more details.