Trials and tribulations...

Hello folks,

So we promised you a teaser video, right? Well here it is! (Katrina's first time using Movie Maker so please don't judge...)

So yesterday, we pitched our ideas and concepts to Natalie at the Yorkshire Museum (including our video above) and we got some really positive feedback. She also gave us some suggestions which we've been mulling over today...
These were things like; possibly changing the introduction shot from people standing awkwardly and smiling to shots of them digging or site directing... of them in their natural habitats! We really like this idea and we (at this stage) think we're going to go with it. Another suggestion which we really liked was asking the interviewee's to explain Star Carr as if they were talking to someone who knew nothing about the site. This was the only thing Natalie was slightly concerned with, as we found the video seemed to presume that the viewer had knowledge of the artefacts and findings from the site. Another way round this which we might consider would be to have a link to any extra information, possibly on our blog or the Yorkshire Museum's website - some more scrummy information for all you knowledge-thirsty readers out there!

One thing which we've found from making the video is that we can comfortably fit five or six people within three minutes of film. We're therefore thinking that we're going to aim to have one site director, one volunteer (hopefully David Lamplaugh who's been on site since the beginning, he's so fantastically entertaining!) and three to four students. Ideally we want them to be the stars of the show.
The only problem with this is that we may have so many willing volunteers that a lot of people may miss out on their chance to be in the limelight. It was therefore suggested by Claire that we could do a montage of shots at the end of the film with lots of people summing up Star Carr in one word. We thought this was such an interesting idea that we thought we'd have a go...

These are our two films which we've been crafting today using the idea of 'Kings Manor is...', and asking people to say one word which they would use to describe Kings Manor. This also gave us the opportunity to have another go with Movie Maker and Audacity which Simon Davis kindly came in to show us how to use this morning. After some 'aaaargh!' moments, we finally got ourselves together and produced these fabulous (we wish...) short videos. We found it quite a struggle to fit the audio to the video and as a result we've only come out of the process with five seconds of film after an hours worth of work! With this in mind, we're thinking at this point that we might have to, sadly, leave the one-word montage out of the final film. Hey, you never know, it could be a potential future project?!

A final thing you might like to know is that we've been being super duper organised today and have been preparing ourselves for our first day filming on Monday... watch out everyone! We've literally picked apart every tiny little thing which could go wrong and tried to prepare ourselves. Our lovely plans of the day will be going along with us... whether we stick to those will be another matter but we'll try our best. So we're crossing our fingers and hoping it will all go well (and won't rain too much...).

So wish us luck dear reader and until next time...!