One of the hottest hobbies in the United States is genealogy. For a lot of people that means tracking down long-dead relatives to fill in blank spaces on the family tree. For others, genealogy is becoming more of a living story -- rounding up sights and sounds to create a multimedia family history. That's what Lucie Arnaz had in mind when she set out to tell the story of her very famous parents, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
There was no shortage of material for the project because Lucille Ball was a rabid scrapbook-keeper. And her daughter, Lucie, grew up with a burning desire to make something out of all that family history.
"I had huge scrapbooks about twenty-five or thirty pounds apiece," says Lucie. "And God forbid a fire or a flood or something. I thought, 'This is not right.' What do people do these days when they want to shrink stuff down and have a second copy in a bank vault? Oh, microfilm! Wake up, it's the 90's! You don't microfilm it, you digitize it!"
And so Lucie Arnaz immersed herself in a new art form: multimedia production. Her first title is "Lucy and Desi, The Scrapbooks." It's filled with plenty of goodies for Lucy and Desi fans, including old newspaper photos, publicity stills from Hollywood, and even Lucy's birth certificate.
And along the way, Lucie realized there was another CD-ROM waiting to be made; one that would help people create their own family history projects. "I explain all of this on the "How To Save Your Family History" CD-ROM the way I needed it explained to me," she says. "Because I always say to people when I'm going into something that scares me a little, 'Assume nothing. Talk to me like I'm an idiot; just walk me though it piece by piece.'"
The result is multimedia production for the complete beginner. The software shows you how to organize that digital scrapbook. "You drag what you've digitized and put it in any order you want and throw the audio anywhere you want and you put your captions in," says Lucie.
Arnaz freely admits this software stuff is all very new to her. She had the ideas and left them up to others to execute. "I had something put on there and they would send it back to me, and I would say, 'Oh no, this is too wide. That's not the way I pictured it. We need to change it'. And they'd go, 'Change it?!?!'"
As it turns out, sharing her family history with the world gave Lucie Arnaz a new appreciation for her parents, and her brother, too.
Lucie hopes to sell a few CD-ROMs, but she also says there's something bigger behind all this. "Just having done this has brought our entire family so much closer together, what is left of the Ball family. We had become sort of estranged after my mom and dad passed away."
Posted 9/19/97