The Beginning

Hello, and welcome to our blog. Our names are Lizzie and Astrid, and we are students at the University of York. We are currently doing a module on Heritage Practice, where we will create a short video based on the Mesolithic site of Star Carr. This blog will follow the process of planning, making and installing this video in the Yorkshire Museum.

Our general brief is to create a video that can be used as part of the museum's Star Carr exhibit. We have chosen to focus on one specific artefact type, which may not get the attention it deserves as part of a museum exhibit. We have chosen flint, which in our opinion is overshadowed by artefacts such as the antler frontlets. These headdresses obviously deserve the attention they get, however, we think it might be interesting to bring some of the other artefacts into the spotlight for a while. We have decided to follow the flint artefact from its creation until it ends up in the museum, and through that we hope to add a human element to this part of the past. This concerns both how it was used in the Mesolithic, and how we interact with it today.

Earlier this week we visited the museum to examine the Star Carr exhibition and the area our video will be shown in. We also had the opportunity to get a closer look at some of the artefacts from Star Carr, as well as other prehistoric sites. We saw different types of flint artefacts, which helped us decide to use this type of material as the focal point for our video. We were also talking about different types of audiences, which is one of the things we will have to keep in mind, to make our film interesting for, hopefully, as many museum visitors as possible.

Listening to curator Natalie McCaul talk about the prehistoric exhibit
Photo: Sara Perry

We also began to plan how our video should look. We discussed the audience we wanted to present our video to, as well as the messages we wanted to convey. We have started to plan the structure of our video using a storyboard, and we have discussed what visual elements we want to include. So far, we have decided to use shots from the museum, animation and drawing, and interviews/voice-overs. We are trying to avoid using the 'talking head' approach and rather focus on other types of narration, based around artwork by Lizzie. We think this will engage the viewers in a better way.

In the next few days Lizzie will continue experimenting with drawing and animation, and Astrid will develop the storyboard. We have lots of ideas for this project, and we are excited to share them with you.

Part of our storyboard, with a temporary working title

This video is an example of how we plan to incorporate Lizzie's drawings into our film. We might include simple animations later.