Social history curator Chris Rapley has taken Facebook by storm after releasing a series of short videos detailing Timaru history with a twist.
The series, called Top Tier History, has so far "spilled the tea" on the Hall murders and one of Timaru’s most "high key" disasters, the 1868 Stafford St fire, all through the use of Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang.
Mr Rapley said he was inspired to create the videos after seeing a similar social media fad.
"We’d seen on social media museums doing Gen Z stuff, but it wasn’t really as developed as what I ended up doing.
"It was stuff where people would stand at a museum and just point at something and say, ‘This is giving me life’ or point at a picture and say ‘Slay’.
"We had a meeting with one of our comms people who said ‘this sort of thing’s happening, do you guys want to do something?’ and it just sort of grew from there."
He said as funny as the other videos were, they weren’t really communicating anything in terms of museums.
"I wanted to do something which was funny but also educational and something people would actually get something out of rather than just a bit of a giggle.
"I thought if we could combine those two things together, we might have a winning formula."
The reactions the videos received online were very gratifying, he said.
"I had a lot of fun making them. You send it off into the world and just hope that it lands somewhere and it certainly did.
"The first one went pretty well, and then the second one’s come along and done even better, which was kind of surprising.
"I had a local high school history teacher here contact me and say they had been playing the videos for their history classes, which is just fantastic because that is what they were made for."
The videos were a real one-man show, he said.
"I went and did as much research as I could into Gen Z, Gen Alpha language, which I’d already been exposed to because I’ve got a 12-year-old at home.
"I was getting ‘skibidi’ and all that sort of language at home already so I did a deep dive into that and then I’d sit down and I think what are the stories that would suit an irreverent sort of approach.
"I write how I would tell the story and then the main points come up and you just start grabbing that language and sliding it in and making the story work that way, then I just go into town with a tripod and just film it by myself.
"I set it up and I think, OK, if I stand by that post, I should be all right. I hit record, run around, stand there for a second, run back and hit stop, hit play and go, ‘oh that doesn’t work at all’.
"People must have thought I was insane. I have to give a shout out to my daughter Alex, who supported me and read the scripts with me."
Mr Rapley said it was all just great fun.
"It pulls together a lot of things I’m really interested in. I love local history and history in general and I really like writing and love films.
"It’s just a real blast to write something which is just silly and fun.
"I’m lucky enough that here at the museum, we’ve got a boss who is crazy enough that he sort of says, ‘that sounds like fun, give it a crack’."
He said it was great to be part of a museum team that was open to experimenting with ideas like Top Tier History.
"I think we take a fun attitude to history in many ways, obviously history is a serious thing and you have to approach it with respect.
"At the same time, for certain elements of it you can be really irreverent with it and have fun with it.
"We do things like the dance-off, which was a few years ago, because we take the job seriously, but sometimes we don’t take ourselves seriously.
"We still think what we do is really important and we have to meet people where they’re at in terms of history, we don’t want to be a dusty old museum."
It was important to make history accessible to everyone, he said.
"We’ve got to find new ways of approaching people where they are and showing them what amazing history surrounds them.
"That’s things like the videos, where hopefully there’s Gen Zs and Gen Alphas, who are looking at it going, ‘That guy’s really silly, but that’s a really interesting story’."
Mr Rapley’s Top Tier History videos can be viewed on the South Canterbury Museum Facebook Page.
