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

Time Lapse Video

The Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion has an artist residency program called G.A.P.P. (Glass Artist Pavilion Project).  At first the artists in residence were all glass artists, but more recently they have been artists in other media who were interested in working with the glass artists on staff in the Pavilion.  The current artist in residence is Erwin Redl. He is perhaps best known for draping the Whitney Museum in red and blue lights for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Redl works with tiny light-emitting diodes mounted in a grid to play with viewers’ perceptions of space and architecture.  For his project in the Pavilion, Erwin and the GP glass artists created a series of glass balls filled with red liquid.  These are suspended in an array inside a light well in the Pavilion that is open to the sky.  Since nearly all of the interior and exterior walls of the Pavilion are glass, visitors can see the balls moving in response to the wind.  The installation is titled "Floating."

My part in this came when Erwin requested that we create a time lapse video of the installation for the entire year that it is to be in place.  I had never done a time lapse video before, so this sounded like fun.  I started looking into cameras, and the first one that came to mind was a Go Pro Hero 3, which is advertised as shooting time lapse.  We bought one, I went through the manual and set up the camera on a tripod outside the light well, and let it run.  The next day I removed the card, uploaded the images, and found that it had only run for two hours.  It turns out that although it will function as a time lapse camera, the battery is only good for two hours under optimum conditions.  Go Pro Support said in response to my query that no, I shouldn't try to run it directly off a charger; it would overheat and could explode!  Great little camera, but not what we needed in this situation.

What to do?  I did a Google search for time lapse cameras and came up with the Brinno TLC 200.  It's a dedicated time lapse camera and it's battery life at the settings I wanted to use is two months!!!  It shoots 720p video and it's only $130.  (The GoPro, by the way, doesn't shoot time lapse video. It takes a series of still images which you then have to drop into the timeline in your editing software.  The Brinno gives you an AVI file.)

 It looks like a toy, but what a great little camera!  It's insanely easy to set up and accepts SDHC cards.  Here's a shot of the installation.  You can see the tripod with the Brinno in the air space at the back of the light well.

 I want to get a few more.  I can think of lots of things to do with them.  You can get attachments to turn it into a stop animation camera or a motion detection camera, and you can get a waterproof housing for it.

Here's the video.  The only problems are the occasional reflections that show the camera.