Make your own Big Ideas video

The short videos circulating on the MCN Twitter feed were produced using the following remote capture method. We're sharing this tutorial and tips to encourage more presenters to take on creating self produced videos telling us about your session at MCN in November. If you do, be sure to tweet it to @museumcn!

Remote interview capture for Mac users 

1. Smartphone/iPhone capture. Built-in video recording software is great, to improve quality look at the lighting and sound tips.

2. Recording with a Mac with iSight:

Open Quicktime Player

File > New Movie Recording

To select external camera or microphone click arrow next to record button to change settings

When ready click record in Quicktime

Once the file opens make sure to save it!

3. There some good free software and tutorials for PC recording out there as well, just not tried and tested by us so not sure which are the best. If you know one, please share in the comments!

Lighting tips

Set up so that you are not in front of a window, instead face the window for full, even lighting.

Turn down brightness on laptop and turn on a desk lamp to avoid the blue glow of the screen.

If there is a little bit of a color cast over the image, this can be fixed by working with more even colored lighting; using just daylight, or just incandescent artificial light.

Sound tips

Use external microphone: An external mic is always better, if you can borrow one, even a low-end microphone will help reduce ambient sound. If you have a newer laptop with one “headphone jack” for sound you can use an iphone style headset with a speaker to get more isolated sound.

Sound Check: Test out your set up first by doing a test recording, make sure your setting is to “Built-in input.” If your clip doesn’t have any sound proceed with using the built in mic on the computer.

Reduce ambient Sound: It is important is to record in a quiet place, so close the windows, turn off fans, children and refridgerators. Play back your test recording at high volume and listen closely for background noises that you can fix.

If you want to buy a microphone because you have now become obsessed with making your own vlogs these are all going to be a step up from a built in laptop mic:

• Cheap ($16):Cyber Acoustics CVL-1084 USB Desktop Microphone
• Better ($40):Samson Go Mic - USB Microphone for Mac and PC Computers (Silver)
• Way better ($55): Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone with Accessory Pack (White)
• Awesome ($160): Rode NT-USB USB Microphone

UPDATE

This blog was created to provide a space to informally share ideas and projects with the museum video production community. We can’t say we have sustained the initial excitement: we had 26 posts in 2013; 4 posts in 2014 and none so far this year. Most of the posts with no comments at all. But hey, see how we care about metrics and evaluation?

Maybe it’s the right time for you and me to give the blog a second chance. With the freshly rebranded Media Production and Branding SIG and the Educational and Interpretive Media SIG it’s the perfect time for a reboot. (Side note: be sure to get yourself officially included in the SIG by signing up via the form link on the above linked SIG page that you want to be involved in)

Personally, we are excited about this change and look forward to seeing how this fosters expanded conversations about the media production process in context of the institution and its story (MPB) or the context of interpretive and educational tools found within and beyond the gallery (EIM). We also look forward to the inevitable collaborative opportunities we will have with one another as well as with other groups like Metrics and Evaluation. I look forward to hearing your ideas for collaboration and discussion topics here on the blog and at our upcoming annual meeting, more on that soon!

The official communications for the MCN Special Interest Group on Media Production and Branding will (like all the others) continue on the MCN list-serv. This blog is an informal place for capturing our conversations that can be easily shared throughout the community. So we look forward to continuing to hear about projects, technologies and provocations about the production of media content for museums here, but it’s only gonna be fun if you're here.

I am working on a post about the real scriptwriting process, not the idealized one we reference when describing our production process at conferences. And Luis is working on some interesting stuff about branding to get the conversation going on this new aspect to our group.

It’s gonna be FANTASTIC.

Let’s rock and roll.

September MCN Pro Session

This past week Emily and I brought together some wonderfully smart people to talk through file organization and the specific challenges we have when working with audio and video media. I learned so much from our guest presenters, and I look forward to incorporating tools and techniques from their presentations into my workflow.

Session Description: Have you ever gotten tangled in a web of disorganized video and image files? What are the best practices for organizing and storing images, audio and video? What is the difference between interpretive content and collections content? What constitutes a work of art and a backup work of art when discussing file types?

Anna Chiaretta-Lavatelli and Emily Lytle-Painter, co-chairs of MCN’s Media Production SIG, will explore issues around digital file storage and organization in cultural organizations with the follow speakers:

Heidi Quicksilver, The Jewish Museum
Crystal Sanchez, Smithsonian Institution
Patrick Heilman, DIA Art Foundation

This is an informal “radio show” style chat with short “presentations” and Q&A.

MWA2013: Making it Pretty and Easy: Video for Museums on the Cheap

This is a very late update about my presentation at Museums and the Web Asia this past winter, I encourage those who were able to attend to share their experience of the recent MW conference in Baltimore!

So I have this production philosophy, and I know that at least several of you are on the same page with me on this-

Anyone can do it.

Consumer technology has come such a long way that we should not hesitate to put the camera in the hands of the curator, conservator, any professional at your museum, even (and perhaps especially) if they are completely inexperienced with video. Video is just another language for sharing information ideas and stories, augmenting text or replacing it.

As a video artist I was always toying with inexpensive technology to see how I could push it to behave either in a stylistic way that blindsided quality or as the technology has dramatically improved (understatement) using consumer cameras with my production know-how to create something that looks great. This wasn't any kind of revelation, it has been happening all around me over the past decade. In 2003, two years before YouTube was even born, Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation was released in theaters. It is a feature film created from years and years of footage captured on handicam as his own video diary dating back to childhood, and to further underscore the role of consumer technology, he had edited the whole thing in iMovie.

I didn't realize the relationship of my independent video practice to the work I was doing in museums until I began working on the Conservation Reel project, www.conservationreel.org. This Kress Foundation funded project provided the opportunity to explore the landscape of conservation video as it currently exists and then imagine up what the future of video production and conservation looked like with the voices of the Advisory Committee expanding my perspective. It became a two year endeavor to understand how video can be used by the conservation community, and how to teach someone from scratch to make great looking video quite simply with minimal tools.

I took this philosophy with me to Museums and the Web Asia in Hong Kong and a second abbreviated version of the conference in Beijing. It was a wonderful experience bringing these ideas to the broader community and I hope that it is just the beginning of a longer and broader conversation that will help us move forward in considering best practices for content production in museums.

My presentation from the conference is available on SlideShare:

MWA2013 Making it Pretty and Easy: Video for Museums on the Cheap from Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli