Small scale museum videos on the web
Andrew Lewis, Victoria & Albert Museum, United Kingdom
http://www.vam.ac.uk
This demonstration is aimed at people considering the use of video on museum websites.
It focuses on a micro-pilot on the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) website that is looking at improving the user experience of gallery pages by the use of small scale video.
The V&A has been experimenting with video in a number of ways. This particular project has been exploring how far YouTube format micro-video can be used to get across key museum information in a faster way to visitors of physical galleries. Gallery pages are shop windows and a recurring issue to be addressed is how to get across the feel and intention of a gallery as easily as possible for potential visitors. Gallery designers and curators put a large amount of thought into the layout of a gallery, but using static images and text to inspire visitors may not be the best approach when web users have high multimedia expectations and short attention spans when scanning for information.
The demonstration discusses what visitors might actually want from a gallery page by looking at real pages before and after the introduction of videos. It also outlines the very low level development process used, showing the detail of how design and production was achieved within exisiting resources. It includes the use of storyboards to control the production process, getting buy-in from nervous curators, maintaining a common format within a series of videos featuring different people whilst allowing their personality to come across, considering how successful the use of small scale video has been and the benefits and limitations of its application.
It is hoped that participants will come away with some simple and achievable tactics for practical use of small scale video.
Demonstration: Demonstrations 2 [Close Up]
Keywords: video, microvideo,
