Museum Adventures... and our Final Farewell!

Hi everyone!

It's been quite a while since our last post so we thought we'd get you up to date and tell you all what we've been up to since we finished the videos. This is also our last post as today is our last day of the module so try not to be too upset! We're feeling nostalgic already...

Showing our final videos to the Museum!

So after our videos had been installed in the museum (go and have a look if you haven't already) and we'd printed off our lovely surveys we all traipsed round to the museum feeling enthusiastic and ready to talk to the museum-goers about that subject we all love... archaeology! Initially we were feeling rather sceptical about the amount of surveys which we could hope to get as last year they only managed to get around 25. Luckily for us however, the weather was on our side! The horrible rain seemed to be bringing a lot of people into the museum and so we managed to get 73 responses which we were very pleased with. This meant we had enough data to write up a meaningful report later on. In hindsight, we all had a lot of fun. There was a general preference amongst us all for the observational studies, except Kat who managed to run around and capture lots of people (with the help of a few sweeties!), but by the end of the day we all felt more confident approaching people and there were some really lovely folk who just wanted to chat for ages!

With our very numerous results in hand we came in today ready to write up our final report so it can be archived for the future. This seemed like a very daunting task when we first arrived but by splitting into groups and with a lot of teamwork we managed to write up our results in just over two hours. Go us! Astrid and Lexi concentrated on the observational results with Lizzie and Katrina writing up the survey results. This worked well and has resulted in a professional, well-written report with some pretty word clouds thrown in (!). We hope it will be useful to anyone who wants to use it in the future. Check it out here:

Evaluating Public Interest in Archaeology: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis at the Yorkshire Museum

As this is our final blog post, we thought we would share with you our experiences of blogging (and hopefully inspire some of you to give it a go). In the beginning the blogging took quite a lot of time, and some of us had a challenge in replacing the "essay language" we have been taught, with a more engaging way of writing. However, in time we've relaxed our style, and now we very much enjoy the blogging. This module has been a rollercoaster ride, and we have managed to do so much in so little time. The blogs have therefore been a nice way of summarizing what we have been doing, and explaining all the choices we have made in our work process. We hope you have enjoyed them as much as we have; we are really happy to see that so many, from so many different places, have followed our journey. Hello to all our readers from the US to Malaysia, and everyone in between! Our blogs have had 300-400 views, which is more than we ever expected, and it is nice to know that our work in heritage isn't going unnoticed. So thank you again to everyone!

Blog views for Head Over Heels into Heritage

Blog views for Moving Forward into the Past

Next up for us is the year-end exhibition, which is happening in only two weeks. Please come along to see our fellow student's fabulous work on the sites they have been working on...

So Thursday 19th of June at 4 pm, K/G60 in King's Manor is the place to be!

All that's left to say is thank you for following us these last few weeks. We've had so much fun, and we want to end by showing you the video Gavin Repton made for the Yorkshire Museum, of our journey through this module. So enjoy, and farewell!

Click here to see Gavin's video

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.