A Slow Time in Arcadia

Here is the video we created at the San Jose Museum of Art on a Slow Time in Arcadia painted by Roy de Forest.




To download the mp4 version (file type needed to play on an iPod) at http://www.thestephensgroup.com/final.m4v .

Production

Today was production day. The thing that I found most challenging was finding music. In other digital media projects I have done music was always important. However, I thought finding the right music to convey messages and moods created by the art was even more difficult than normal productions. You can see the importance music plays in the podcasts that are professionally produced at for the museum.

De Forest’s work conveys a lot of themes and moods. I was unable to find one piece of music that could cover all of the contrasts in the painting. What I ended up doing was using a site called Looposonic. They have free loops of music that are copyright free that you can download to use in your media productions. I spent a lot of time listening to guitar loops. I was able to download some of these loops and paste them into Audacity (a free audio editor you can download from the Internet), sometimes putting multiple loops together to compose my own music.

The way de Forest’s pieces together of shapes with repeating patterns in his paintings reminds me of a quilt. As I was piecing together music clips to enhance the voiceovers it struck me that it felt a lot like piecing together an audio quilt.

I have never done a digital media piece centered around a piece of art before. I found that I used Photoshop a great deal. This allowed me to crop pieces of the artwork I wanted to talk about. I could also resize the image to better fit the dimensions of the video-screen better. I was also able to use the paint tools to paint over brush stokes to bring certain aspects to the forefront that I wanted to talk about. It was an interesting sensation to digitally paint over a painting.

Another cool thing about using media to talk about art is you can zoom in closer than you can really see with the human eye and really look at texture and brush strokes. As we were editing Allison and I talked about the fact that while a vodcast is made to be played on a video iPod, a lot of viewers will not download it to their iPod but look at it full size on their computer. So we were continually looking at in iPod dimensions and full computer screen. It is an interesting challenge to simultaneously design for both.

The Power of Questioning

Writing a script is not a linear process. For example, Rachelle Doorley the Interim Director of Education at the San Jose Museum of Art was telling me that in a recent podcast that they did a free-lance writer wrote the initial script. She reviewed the script and made changes. Then she sent the script to a colleague in the education department who sent it back with changes. Then they sent it to the curator of the exhibit for feedback. Then the person who was doing the voice-overs had some questions which led to more revisions. In total the script went through five major revisions.

Rachelle went over our script and gave us some very helpful feedback. First of all the script was too long. They would like us to shoot for a 45-90 seconds. Also our script primarily tells about the painting. Instead she would like it to be two way conversation. One where we offer what we see, but also ask questions to help the viewer go deeper in looking at the piece of artwork. Rachelle said we should be hesitant about putting an answer our there, because it could stop people from trying to think for themselves. Contemporary art is about opening up people’s minds to look at the work in a different way. Research says that when people go to art museums on average they spend about 5 seconds looking at a painting. The purpose of the vodcast should be to help them go deeper and to facilitate viewer interpretation. A metaphor she gave me was it is about seeing someone famous vs. having a deep conversation with a friend. These vodcasts should offer a new voice on these pieces of artwork from a Teacher Perspective. That will require participants to consider what lens they want to look at the artwork from and what story they will tell.

San Jose Digital Media Pilot

August 11th-14th, The Stephens Group is offering a digital media course for educators in San Jose, California. The course will be held at the San Jose Museum of Art. Participants will work with instructors from The Stephens Group and museum staff to create vodcasts around artwork in the museum. All comfort levels with technology are welcome. Participants can receive CEUs or 1 graduate credit.

This week instructors are at the museum doing a pilot vodcast. We will be blogging about the
process throughout the week. The following video shows some of the hopes and fears of the instructors the day before the pilot.



More information about the course is available at our website at http://www.thestephensgroup.com/sjdmc.php .