The Art of Exhibit Trailers

Ever wonder how companies manage to promote their products or events in a short period of time on TV? So do I. In the recent project that the publicity/marketing team is doing, an exhibit trailer is in the works. We had a general idea of what we would like to do: promote the exhibit and promote the Historical Administration program. What we found out that it is easier said then done.

Thanks to Brittany, one of our fellow classmates who is part of the exhibition team, and her work with Google Sketchup, we were able to export the images into a video format. It took about an hour to export the video from Google Sketchup and have it ready for editing on iMovie.

So we now have the footage that is approximately less an a minute, but now what? The next step that we took was to write a brief script of what we would like to say in the video, separated in several parts. Using our press release which we created recently for our publicity launch, some sections for our video were already written up to use in our video.

Next, we needed a voice… a voice that could sound a bit like Dr. Guy Buzzard, hence we chose Jim. After finishing our script, we recorded Jim’s voice using Audacity, a free audio editor and recorder program. Audacity allows us to record, edit, and also export the recordings as MP3’s. Perfect!! Our class attended the Audacity training workshop to get those extra technology skills, which came in handy when creating this trailer. There were some problems we encountered while using the program, but ultimately for it being a free program, it did its job. We were able to clean up the sound, combine various recordings and insert them within the audio that we ultimately used. One of those problems was that one of our recordings that Jim had done for both the introduction and end of the video were somewhat lost. We tried not to panic and loose precious time, therefore I took our script and recorded the introduction and ending to place in our video.

While editing, the next challenge that arose was timing. Timing was not on our side because when we finally got all the audio we needed, the video was too short, or when the video was finally edited and great, the audio was off. The program that we used on the Mac computer in the HA lab  in order to edit our video was iMovie. Just as we received training on Audacity, we also received a workshop training on iMoive last semester. iMovie is an amazing program to use when editing videos because it has so many special features we could use, such as slowing down the video, zooming in or out of a clip, and of course, add audio into it. Since the Google Sketchup video was a bit short in the end, we thought it would be a great idea to use our famous 3 tier image we use and placed our social media sites to promote them as well in our video. (shown below)

Patience is key when doing a trailer so after adjusting the video and audio on iMovie, we were finally able to view our final work.  After 3 long hours, we were finally finished. We recorded the voice tracks, we edited the video clips, created an ending slide to promote our media sites, and lastly we created our first exhibit trailer. Take a look:

Since this is our first trailer (because yes we will be creating more videos for ya’ll to see), it was a great experience to learn how to create one and also take into account that audio and video editing is not as complicated as felt in the beginning.

Check out and follow our progress on our media sites:

Website: http://www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2014/home.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Textandtextiles2014
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/buzzard2014
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/textandtextiles/
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtWOFohjb8IrKGlpBGhoXlg

Social Media: A Connection to the World

Social Media has now become the new technological expansion to reach an audience. As fellow alumni Andy Supperich from the Historical Administration program (Class of 1999-2000/01) suggested, one must keep up with the growing technology in the museum field as it becomes more and more important to promote exhibits. Before, a museum would just send out information pamphlets of their institution to Welcome Centers, but as the future of technology has increased and influenced the public, the new way to attract the people to visit a museum is by social media pathways.

As the publicity team in the historical administration group begins to create social media links to reach a broader audience to visit our exhibit, it is interesting to note how important it is in the museum field itself. As we have just finished creating our website for the “Text & Textiles: Crafting the Lives of Guy & Irene Buzzard,” it has  been a great experience to learn to use these social media links  to attract our broader audience.

One amazing job occupation I just learned about while in our Leadership in Museums II course with Mrs. Pat Miller was how important social media is to an institution, such as the Field Museum.For example, Jane Hanna is the Social Media Strategist at the Field Museum in Chicago, where her job consists of being in charge of updating the social media pages the Field Museum has. One fascinating social media outlet that they are using is Facebook, which their page alone consists of 93,266 “Likes.” One thing to note is how with the cutbacks on museum faculty, research positions are often one of the positions being laid off and as we see here, they are still dedicated in having a social media strategists part of their faculty. It might be more important to an institution to keep a person like this since they  help reach and keep these network connections to the public to receive more visitors at their institution.

(Click on the image to view Jane Hanna’s Profile page) 

As we continue on our goal to promote our exhibit using these social media pathways, Facebook seems to be the primary site as well for us to reach our audience. Just since Saturday, February 15th, 2014 when we launched our Facebook page, we have already reached 50 “Likes.” The great thing about using Facebook is that there is already a community of Historical Administration at EIU! facebook page that allows us to contact all the previous alumni from the program to our exhibit. One thing we plan to promote on our Facebook page is our “Buzzard Beacon Flashback Fridays” which are excerpts from Dr. Buzzard’s family newsletter. This has also been a great way to showcase the progress we have done in creating this exhibit as a group throughout the year.

(Click on the image to view the Facebook page)

Other social media websites we are also using are Pinterest and Twitter. Pinterest itself is very fascinating because it is both a way for us to promote the Buzzard’s text and textile work, but also give a picture/glimpse  of what artifacts are included in our exhibit. As the publicity team begins to see what kind of things can attract the publics attention to view our sites, we came up with three main events we shall use to promote our exhibit throughout the week. First off we have “Textile Tuesdays” where we will promote and feature one of our main objects from the exhibit. This would be great to use on Pinterest because we get to create “boards” on our page which will then contain individual “Pins” that people can see and learn about the objects.

(Click on the image to view the Pinterest page)

Since our exhibit is called “Text and Textiles,” we all agreed it would be a great idea to also promote the “text” in the exhibit and call it “Buzzard Beacon Flashback Friday.” What that would consists of is us going to the Buzzard Beacon newsletters that Dr. Buzzard wrote to his family for several years.

Lastly, the other important promotion event we will create is “Big News Wednesdays” which will alternate every 2 weeks to give our audience an update of our whole exhibit as a group or feature one of the three groups in our exhibition course. This will give us both the advantage to keep track of what work we have been doing and also share with others that might have been in the Historical Administration program before us a “flashback” of what they did when they created their exhibit.

Now Twitter. Twitter to me is very interesting and fascinating, but also something I have never had to use before this publicity/social media launch event. I know it consists of #’s and “tweets” but besides that, it has been interesting to learn how to do.  The great thing about Twitter has been that we can have it synced to our Pinterest page but also we can reach a broader audience that might not use Facebook.  The only complaint I have about Twitter myself is that it is hard to write a 160 character blurb for our post but this also gives a great lesson as we have had to learn ourselves while in the exhibit course of how to be precise and on target when writing labels for our artifacts. One humbling observation that our group had was that our first follower on Twitter had been a man from Moscow, Russia, therefore our challenge to reach a broader audience was a success! We have not just reached the local level but also the international level at this point with the help of social media websites.

(Click on the image to view the Twitter page)

If you are interested in following one of our three social media sites:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/Textandtextiles2014

Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/textandtextiles/

Twitter: twitter.com/Buzzard2014

And don’t forget to check out our website as well at: www.eiu.edu/ha/exhibits/2014/home.html