Thursday 5 June 2014

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!


Friday 23 May 2014

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 19th 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 19th June starting at 4pm.

 

Lexi

The wait is over...

Hello everyone... 

The wait is over! You'll all be very excited to hear that we've finished our videos. Yay! We're very excited about it too and are really pleased with the result. It's been a roller-coaster ride learning lots of new IT skills and how to actually operate a camera/ dictaphone as well as developing lots of new people skills. Happily, we feel like we're more knowledgeable people and, although there's still a long way to go until we launch our careers, we feel more confident 'heading into heritage' now...!

So here it is! We hope you like it and please feel free to comment and let us know what you think. It should be installed in the Yorkshire Museum by next week so make sure you pop along and see it in situ too.

It's just a short one today as we're busy preparing for the year-end exhibition - more on this to follow very soon - but we'd just like to say a quick THANK YOU to everybody who helped us produce our video, especially the staff and students at Star Carr, everybody who came in to give us talks and IT advice (you know who you are!), the Yorkshire Museum and also to the Heritage module gang - you're critiques were invaluable!
For a more extensive list watch the video all the way to the end (as if you need encouragement though?!)

That's all for now and you'll be hearing more from us very soon...




Tuesday 20 May 2014

It's all about logistics and lying under benches...

Hello folks! So much has happened in the past few days that we'd thought we'd better update you all.

So we left you in suspense on Friday afternoon with a "will they/won't they get their first draft in?". Well we did! After taking some work home and doing some small tweaks we managed to release our video to those who had been waiting patiently to see what we've been up to, so they could critique it over the weekend. We then rolled into Kings Manor on Monday morning, after a weekend of relaxing in the sun, all ready to hear some feedback. We got some really lovely comments; we even got told that it 'happily would go out on TV' which was a nice surprise! Some thing which were said we already knew we had to improve, like the white balance, the 'stripey lines' and the sound (one of the interviews was too quiet compared to the others).

It was also suggested that the music we used, which is Lexis own composition, was too 'lulling' and we should try something a bit more upbeat. We were very grateful for the suggestion (as we were for all of them!) however, we don't find the 'lulling' effect too much of a problem and we like having a piece of original music as part of our masterpiece so we think we'll keep it.

"I'm sure this will be fine with Health & Safety?"
Another suggestion which was really helpful was about the structure of the video. It was said that the 'what is special about Star Carr for you?' section seemed like it was a separate video to the first 'drawing' section and, on watching it back, we agreed. They didn't really flow and the concept of 'drawing what you see' was a bit lost at the end. We've therefore taken it out and added one more archaeologist to the mix! We've also changed our introduction and ending... again (told you a lot had happened!). It was suggested that the final question we were going to originally use - 'What does Star Carr mean to you?' - was also a bit lost and didn't really tie the video, or our overall concept, together so we've changed it. I'm afraid you'll have to wait and see what it is though... we want it to be a surprise! We have got a sneaky shot of us filming it though, just to tease you further (it was a bit of a logistical nightmare!)

Moving on to the introduction... that's different too now. It was suggested that the text we originally had (see our last blog post to remind yourselves...) shouldn't move to make less distracting and this, combined with other reasons, has led us to scrap the idea of having text overlaying the landscape. Instead we've decided to write the introduction over some simple (but beautiful... according to Lexi) watercolour drawings completed by Katrina. This looks quite good, we think, and also ties in nicely with the hand-drawn theme of the video. We filmed it this morning (talk about last minute...) and luckily for you we've thrown together a sneak preview which you can view at your leisure - minus the music. It would be great if you could let us know what you think in the comments below. 




So we're on the home straight and, despite having some technical difficulties - our thanks goes to Simon for trying to fix it... again! - we can see the finishing line. So hopefully, the next time you hear from us we'll have the final thing ready to reveal and you won't have to sit there in suspense any longer. Okay, maybe we're being a tad over-dramatic.. but still, we can't wait to show you what we've been making!

Back off to editing we go then, and until next time...!


Friday 16 May 2014

The story continues...

Hello all!

So you'll be happy to hear that we've been really busy the past few days; collecting our footage, playing around with editing and composing music. It's been a bit hectic but we've had so many laughs! As we posted on Tuesday, we had already collected a lot of the footage that we're going to use in the final film but we felt after going over the footage that we needed some slightly better panning shots of the landscape, along with some better shots of our interviewee's excavating.

The whole heritage team looking happy in the sun
and trying to ignore the flies!
Katrina filming our lovely volunteer Johanna.
So, yesterday morning we took the long trek back to get some more footage. The day dawned with blue skies and glorious sunshine which made for very high spirits, despite the early start! Happily, the sunshine also meant that the quality of light which we managed to capture was really lovely; much better than on Monday. Unfortunately, Monday's video footage was very 'blue' (which apparently wasn't to do with the rain!). We've figured since then that it had something to do with the white balance on the cameras so we're therefore having to find a way to alter this, which doesn't seem impossible. But that's not all.. oh no. Unfortunately, when we reviewed the footage we had a problem with what we like to call "stripey lines" (imaginative, we know) whenever there was any movement on screen. Apparently the proper term for it is 'interlacing' and there is a way to fix it but... it's going to take time. Luckily, we have the expertise of Simon Davis who's been our hero and worked out the best and quickest way to solve this problem. Thanks Simon! Our plan this afternoon then, is to play around with this and correct our footage to make our video the best archaeological video ever made in the history of archaeological video's! We clearly like to be modest...

Another exciting thing which we'd like to share with you is our new test video! After we got the footage back to Kings Manor we started to discuss the best way to put it together and structure the video in order to make it engaging and stop people from getting bored. We therefore decided that we would try to split the video into the archaeologists discussing their drawings in the first half, followed by them talking about what is special about Star Carr to them in the second half. After piloting our test video to the class we had some really lovely feedback and we've concluded that we're going to stick with that format; it keeps the audience better engaged and on their toes. Take a look below and let us know what you think.


We also played around with the form the that introduction is going to take. This only took us ten minutes to mock up so it's a bit rusty but feel free to have a look anyway!


Following on from that - this morning we've started on our first draft of the final film which hopefully will be finished by the end of the day so we can pilot it to the museum. We think, at this stage, whilst we're still full and happy from lunch, that it's definitely manageable. Time will tell! We've had a lot of suggestions from Gavin and a particularly nice one which we're thinking about doing is drawing the questions we're asking in the video and hence, continuing the hand-drawn theme. We're going to drag the benches outside around Kings Manor a bit more this afternoon and attempt this whilst tanning ourselves!

So, onwards we go... and we'll have an update for your lovely selves early next week. Until then, enjoy the sunshine whilst it lasts!



Tuesday 13 May 2014

Let the editing begin...

Us filming our first lucky volunteer!
Yesterday we spent much of the day getting the footage that we will be using in our final video (which is getting ever nearer). It was a good day with lots of enthusiastic volunteers and not too many problems bar the weather but, you can't have it all.

Getting the footage back today the main problem that we have encountered is how much footage we've managed to capture (much more than we ever had for the test footage). In a way it is a wonderful problem to have but a difficult one all the same.

After lots of advice from the professionals, including Don Henson (PHD student at the University of York) and Tara-Jane Sutcliffe (Council of British Archaeology), we have been given a few ideas to consider how to put together all the shots. So, our task now is to discover which ideas work well and achieve our main goal for our video; to make the archaeologists seem human...

One of our favourites!