USAFA Class of 1963 Memories
Yesterday I hopped on a Zoom call with Wayne LeFors and Tom Fryer, both 1963 graduates of the US Air Force Academy. Wayne and dad talked, laughed, and told stories together for an hour and ten minutes… and it was wonderful! Wayne introduced my parents, Tom and Angie Fryer, to each other via a blind date in Abilene, Texas, in 1968. Wayne and Dad are lifelong friends, and have maintained their friendship over four decades. I recorded our Zoom call and put it on YouTube, linking it both on the “Tom Fryer Oral History” page of our family learning blog, as well as the oral history page of our “Fryer – Henley – Ward – Lovell Family History website.
On a technical note, I chose to record this Zoom call “to the cloud” rather than locally, so Zoom automatically decided to show each speaker in full-screen rather than showing all 3 of us in the same screen. I created a thumbnail for the YouTube video using some screen captures from the recording, and made the collage in Google Drawing. I used the AI platform upscale.media to double the size of the downloaded image I used as a thumbnail.
I uploaded the audio recording from Zoom into Descript.com, which is an AI-powered podcast editor I learned about from ChatGPT as I re-wrote the chapter on “Audio Interviews” for my book project, “Pocket Share Jesus: Be a Digital Witness for Christ.” I uploaded the audio-only recording of our Zoom call and did some AI powered editing, including removing over 800 “filler words” from the actual interview audio and transcript.
This is the link to the final, published transcript on Descript, which is synchronized to the edited / “cleaned up” audio recording. Descript also analyzed the full transcript and suggested 10 engaging titles. I went with “Air Force Memories: An Interview with Wayne LeFors and Tom Fryer.”
Descript has multiple publishing options, and in addition to hosting the transcript and edited audio interview on their website, I also shared it on Google Drive as an audio file as well as a transcript with timestamps.
Finally, I uploaded the edited audio file to Storycorps, to (hopefully) provide a wider audience for this great interview. This is added to the other public interviews I’ve shared previously to Storycorps, bringing my total now to 6. This was the first time I’ve uploaded an audio file I did NOT record using the free Storycorps app. It’s great to have both options!
Last month I shared a 2 part workshop on successive Saturday mornings on “Family Oral History Projects” for the Mint Hill Historical Society in Mint Hill, North Carolina. I’m excited to share my good experiences using Descript with them, as they have about 50 audio interview recordings to process and share. I think Descript is VERY powerful and could be very useful for them, even better than the audio transcription features in Microsoft Office 365.
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