Research

Brief

We have chosen to do the heritage video. This is the brief for this:

•Whilst we have photographs and there is some limited footage available on platforms such as YouTube there are no videos that encapsulate the rich heritage of the venue. 
•We would like some short linear visual media (about 5 -10 minutes) encapsulating the royal, architectural, social and performance history of the venue. 
•Sound? Animation? Film & Video? Open to creative approaches but think about the context of where the finished product may be used.
•We would like it show these on the Brighton Dome website and or on a plasma to tour groups attending 

Research

As we had chosen to do the heritage video, I began to look around at other examples.

This is the first one: 

http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2010/11/biodiversity-heritage-library-short.html (The Biodiversity Heritage Library, Martin Kalfatovic, 2010, website: http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/)

This one was pretty boring- just photos with captions. We wanted it to be way more multimedia than this. However, I noticed that it evoked a mood very quickly from the music choice, and that this helped the video a lot. We need to get some good un-copyrighted material for this.

This next one (a stop motion about cultural heritage)

(Mariam Heijne and Kelly Lenior, 2012, “Short Stop Motion Video About Cultural Heritage” address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qB8nyt1Zjs, accessed at 06/03/13)

 was a bit more like how I wanted some moments of our video to be- quite fun and quirky and arty. I liked their style of using well known portraits mixed with stop motion- it works really well. We'd probably make it longer and mixed with other video and interviews.

The next video is from Caterpillar Company which made a heritage video:

(CaterpillarInc, 2011, “Caterpillar Heritage Company” USA, address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHH5tVzYulU accessed on 06/03/13)

this is a bit different from the company we are working for, but the way the video is made is really cool. I loved the first shot which follows artefacts from different eras- I feel like we could completely follow this in a timeline. I liked the narration too (which is a first, as usually narration is over the top) and the use of archive footage mixed in really works with the narration; I feel like we could definitely look at the linear structure of this and take from it for ours. They also use newspaper cutting and photographs and I like this multimedia approach.

I also did some research on the website about what sort of history there is in the dome. There are loads to produce on- from royal stables to dances, to hospitals woman’s rights, and music events. There are also a lot of stories (the suffragette’s story is my favourite one) The dome have a YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/brightondome) which i was also looking at. There is a lot of archive footage of bands and events at the dome we could use.

Second meeting summary:

-We can’t do animation, as we don’t have the skills. This is sad, but we can come up with ideas around this. 

-A online virtual tour? Sadly, we don’t have enough expertise to pull off! This was my idea and i really liked i, as it was quite orginal. But yeah, i can't write any sort of stuff for it.

-Debate on how to start? Book opening? A track of the dome? A narrator introducing? Eventually decided for professional reasons, to use a track- looks best.

-Over all ascetic: Nostalgic, reminiscent , entertaining, educational, personal.

-What we want to include in each section:

Prince lodging house: Stables, lover story, the tunnel. (we have access to the tunnel?)

Cavalry Barracks and concert hall: Barracks for Indian soldiers, the Indian gate, studio theatre.

War Stories: Soldiers’ being nursed back to health, tea dances, bomb falling on the dome.

The organ: Organ playing through the war, Douglas Reeve.

Musical Milestones: Jimi Hendrix, Micheal Buble, David Bowie, ABBA, Pink Floyd, etc

-Start to try and email different places for historians and archive footage. 

Industry Projects

We have organized a group for our industry projects; I am working with Louise and Ella; this is quite a good mix of skills of sound, photography and video. We also have worked with each other before, so pretty sure that there wont be any prblems with this. We discussed which projects looked best. We had three which we thorught looked most interesting:

Our favourite was the Brighton Dome Heritage Site, which is a 5-10 minute video documenting the history of the Dome. We liked that this project had  interactive and multimedia oppertunities- we began to come up with loads of ideas in how to create a project which approaches all fo the senses. We decided on a linear timeline project, one which starts with pixilation and stop motion, mixed in with short interviews/soundbites from local historians/those who work there/those who parents might have met in the tea dances etc, and also with more experimental and cool things like 360 dgree sound bites of differnt periods (maybe as a beggining). We liked that the history had so many different aspects and was so interesting, and we all have alrady done quite a bit of work for the dome- meaning we already have important footage other groups might not have.

Our second favourite was Source New Music, which is a chairty for up and coming bands. We throught thsi would be pretty popular, but it has the room for some fun and experimenting. We decided we wanted a msuic video approach; we could take bands from brighton and film them in cool and unusual places that are very Brighton (Volks railway etc etc). These would be all mixed in together to a song with occasional sound bite interviews from bands saying why the night is good/why the chairty is good/form the audience being like: Its awwesome! and also with shits form the actual night there.

Our last idea was Brighton Dome Charity Arts. We didnt like how many retraints were placed on this, and the need for subtitles/captions. BUT we did come up with some cool ideas- a "slick and quick" video that quickly focuses on the beautiful building and uses archive footage of the festival intertwinned. Then we wanted to include short interviews with participants and do graphical displays of figures (how many people helped, numbers of people, etc etc) and use quotes.

We left with these ideas, and decided to do some research around other similair projects so we could see how they have been done, and decided to write a few drafts of some pitchs.


Here is our initial ideas page: