Planning and Preparing

Hello all,

As you are aware of we have offically finished our films, however, we still have lots to do, and we will continue to keep you updated for a while longer. These days we are mainly busy with planning the year-end exhibition, and preparing for the evaluation we will be doing in the Yorkshire Museum. If everything goes according to plan our films will be part of the museum exhibit next week, and we are excited to hear what the museum visitors think of them.

Today has been all about planning and preparing, as we have started thinking of how to do evaluations in the museum. As none of us had any particular experience with surveys and interviews, it was very helpful to get some help from Sophie Norton and Tom Smith, who taught us about data collecting and Google docs. We spent quite a lot of time deciding on what methods we wanted to use for our evaluation, as they needed to reflect the research aims we decided on. We chose to focus on surveys and observation, in addition to giving
the visitors the chance to comment on our films. We wanted to get as extensive results as possible, but as there are only four of us, we had to focus on a couple of methods, and hope they will give us enough results.

In the surveys we want to ask the visitors if they have an interest in archaeology, and whether the museum visit has contributed to this interest in any way. In the observation we are going to spend time both in the Star Carr exhibit and the Roman exhibit, to see how people interact with these exhibits, and if there is any difference in the amount of time they spend in the different exhibits. We are also interested in seeing whether they are watching our films, especially as they are located in an area of the museum that is easy to miss.

While Katrina and Lizze were working on creating the survey, Lexie and Astrid were planning the logistics of our evaluation day. We will spend all of Thursday in the museum, and hopefully get all the results we need to write a great final report.

The Final Countdown

Now the videos are finished and ready to be installed we have all moved on to a new, and equally difficult task, of curating the end of year exhibition.

In order to finish this on time we are now all working on separate tasks which will come together on the 19^th June when the exhibition opens for one night only.

I’m working on the logistics of the event. This is everything from working out how to display all the slides at their best (of which there will be 14 in all) to making sure that everyone is fed and watered. It may only last for a few hours but there is a surprising amount that needs organising!

Astrid is working on the media publicity for the exhibition. So all Twitter and Facebook posts that will be appearing are beautifully written by her. There should be a few turning up on your walls and feeds in the not too distant future. Make sure you read them!

Katrina is working on the official press release for the exhibition. Being the most formal and precise of the tasks it’s proving not to be an easy task. However, I’m sure it won’t be long before Katrina has it polished to her normal high standards. Make sure you look out for the official press release which will be heading out soon.  

Lizzie is once again utilising her amazing artistic eye and creating the posters to advertise the event. I expect you’ll see one or two of those around by the time the exhibition comes around.

Overall, it won’t be long before you’ll be able to see what we’ve been working on and we hope to see you at the end of year exhibition on the 19^th June starting at 4pm.

Lexi

Fantastic Flint

At last, we are ready to show you the result of what we have been working on the last weeks. We are very excited to share it with you all, and we'd love to hear what you think.

Enjoy the film.

Finally!

The last few days have been very hectic, to say the least. Despite a lot of issues cropping up along the way, we have a finished film, ready to be put up in the museum in the next few days! When we last posted, we had all our clips and audio ready to go and somehow in the last 4 days we've managed to edit them into a final product.

Astrid has been working on both the interview recordings and her own voiceover clips to ensure they were concise while still providing a coherent narrative. After having worked on this for so long, and having listened to it over and over, it was really hard to decide what more could be cut from the film, and the feedback we got from the rest of the group was very helpful. This made us able to cut some parts that did not really contribute to the narrative. Making a film that is both factual and engaging is a real balancing act, but we hope we have managed to reach a middle ground.

Until now we have to a large extent worked on different tasks, based on what we are good at. As Lizzie is the creative one, Astrid has focused on the planning side, including editing. Until yesterday we had lots of separate bits of drawings, animations and audio files, which could then finally be put together. In this editing phase we really started to see the limitations of Movie Maker, regarding how audio and video are put together. However, after some frustration, Astrid was able to make it work, and we think it turned out alright.

One of the drawings before and after colour editing 

Lizzie then finished off the drawings, adding to the colour and including some final details. She also added very simple animations using Movie Maker, for example the fire glowing. We did discover an issue with using Movie Maker to create the animations in that they aren't entirely smooth. However, they are as good as we could make them considering the time constraints and limits of Movie Maker. While the animations are subtle we believe that they, along with the ambient sound, add an immersive quality to the drawings without distracting too much from the narration.

By yesterday we had finished a rough draft of our film, although there were still several issues that needed to be worked out. We sent it off for feedback and received several constructive comments overnight. These comments included issued with the sound being too quiet in some places, and the ambient sound overwhelming the narration, and some of the transitions being too jolting. However in general the feedback was very positive!

We had our own list of small issues to work out with our video today, including adding the finished animations, ensuring the timing between the audio and the video/animation was correct, changing the title and cutting some of the unnecessary interview clips. Sorting out the timing was particularly difficult, as every time we edited a clip or added a transition everything became out of sync again. However, as mentioned, we managed to get it to work.

While it's been difficult at some points (and we're starting to get very tired of Movie Maker) we've solved most of our issues and are very proud of the film we've produced.

From Footage to Film

The last few days have been quite busy, as we are now only a week away from installing our video at the Yorkshire Museum. We still have work to do, but we are really starting to see our film taking shape.

On Thursday we spent the morning reshooting one of our interviews. When we listened to the interviews after the first day of shooting, it became clear that the background noise was a bit too distracting in one of them, and we decided to re-do it. The rest of the day we were back at King's Manor editing our film, and we are really starting to understand how much time it takes to edit sound and video, compared to the actual time spent filming.

Lizzie has continued with the drawings and animations, which are close to finished. We have now experienced some of the challenges technology brings, as some of the files containing the drawings were corrupted, and now unusable. As these included Lizzie's favourite overview drawing of Star Carr this was really frustrating, but the new ones she has made are in Astrid's opinion just as good. Lizzie has also added ambient sounds to the animations, which makes them seem more alive, and sets the scene for what the voice-over will be talking about. This includes the sound of flint knapping, and the sound of a piece of flint being thrown into the lake. Next on the list is to include the voice-over in this, and make sure that the effects and the talking do not out-do each other.

The drawing so far that will illustrate the flint knapping scene

This voice-over is what Astrid has been working on lately. During the interviews we ended up with a lot of really good footage, and the challenge was to extract the bits that best would fit our story. All the archaeologists we talked to are very knowledgeable about Star Carr and the Mesolithic, and our main goal was to try to bring their enthusiasm and passion for the topic into our film. Flint is not necessarily something everyone appreciates or even knows about, so to have people who are truly enthusiastic about it narrate the video, is something we see as very valuable.

We are starting to see the end product of the film, but we will have to continue working during the weekend, to produce a first draft that we can distribute to get some feedback. There is no doubt there is a lot of work involved in film making, but we truly enjoy it, and we really look forward to seeing the final product. If you have any opinions on what we have done so far, feel free to comment, and we will be back early next week, hopefully with a first draft to show you.

The Heritage Team

Lights, Camera, Action!

Yesterday, we carried our planned interviews with experts involved in the Star Carr project. We took both video and audio recordings, but we think that in the final film we will be using only the audio; we hope we can use the interviews as a voice-over for Lizzie's artwork. We ended up with around 45 minutes of interview audio, so it's going to take some careful editing to cut it down to the three minutes we need for our films. We interviewed 5 experts and, very briefly, two students and we hope that by using multiple people we will be able to demonstrate a variety of information and opinion in our voice-over.

Today we have been reviewing the footage we took, labelling it and working out what parts can actually be used in our film. We have also made a list of footage we did not manage to get, as we have another filming day on Thursday.

This video is a quick experiment, using footage of an excavation and some of the interview audio we took. 

Filmmaking 101

Hello everyone,

After yesterday's visit at the Yorkshire Museum, we are now back to filmmaking. We started the day by learning more about Windows Movie Maker and Audacity, as we had the chance to ask questions to Simon Davis. These are the two main tools we are using for our film, so it was really helpful to learn some of the more advanced settings, and also the limitations of the programs. We discovered that some of the elements we wanted to add were impossible, but we believe we can work around them. We have learned that in filmmaking it is important to be able to improvise, so this is good practice.

We also continued with the planning process, including preparing the interviews we will do with people associated with Star Carr. We discussed who will be responsible for the different tasks, and started to think of backup plans in case something goes wrong on the day of filming. In addition to this, we also worked on the narrative of our storyboard, in order to help us prepare interview questions. We do not want our film to be simply a factual report on flint, so we need to ask questions that will prompt a more emotional response, and show how amazing archaeology can be when it is told by enthusiastic people.

Following this, Lizzie kept working on the drawings, trying to add some animation. Very basic animation turned out to be possible even with the limitations of Movie Maker, and we think that even a small amount of motion makes a difference.

This is a new version of the video from the first blog post, with animated light effects

Lizzie using a drawing tablet to make the illustrations

While Lizzie was working on the animations, Astrid recorded a test of what our introduction might end up like. The video will be replaced with footage that includes people, as one of our goals was to show how people interact with the exhibits today. As we are aiming for a general audience, we wanted to make an introduction that engages people. We decided that the best approach would be something between dramatic and factual. Hopefully people will find this entertaining, while also actually learning things about the Mesolithic. 

A test introduction for our film, showing the artefacts in the museum, and explaining the concept for the video 

Over the weekend Lizzie will continue with the animations and drawings, and Astrid will continue with the storyboard narrative. With that as a starting point, we will both make questions that we can use in our interviews on Monday. It will be nice to have some actual footage to work with, and to see our film starting to come together.