INTERNSHIP: Lunch & Learn Videos

During the course of my second Internship with the Orillia Museum of Art & History I was able to create a new series of videos that served as both promotional and educational material for the museum.

Every month, OMAH hosts an event called Lunch & Learn wherein participants can experience an artist talk, lecture, screening or workshop and receive a complimentary lunch. During my first internship in the spring I was present to film these events, but at the time the purpose was to create stock footage for the museum. Therefore only short clips were filmed over the course of each event. This time, I was focusing on documenting the content that was being delivered and creating an archive of each presentation.

Each presentation runs for approximately one hour and I had to make sure to try and keep the camera consistently recording and on the subject.

For October's Lunch & Learn, OMAH invited the museum's Artist in Residence, James Ireland, to give an artist talk about his career in design. James is a very animated person and moves about quite a bit, making it a little challenging to keep the camera focused on him constantly. For YouTube, it is in the interest of very few to watch an hour long talk, and so I sifted through the footage to find key themes and pockets of information-heavy segments. The resulting two videos focused on the themes 'Dry Point Etching' and James' 'Career in Design'.

The other challenge came with recording audio of the presentation. Unfortunately there was no microphone for James and I was not equipped with an external one for my camera. James also has a thick Yorkshire accent, which is quite endearing in person, but made it hard to distinguish some phrases. There was a rather loud vent that hummed throughout as well. Given these challenges, a large amount of audio editing was required in post-production, of which I am still not fully pleased with the result. As an attempted solution I spoke with another intern at the museum who works with accessibility devices and we talked about creating closed-captions for these videos to help aid with audio problems. We are in the process of putting those in place.