International Museum of Art and Science - Madison Hernandez, Week 3

    Hello, everyone. This past week has officially been my third complete week at IMAS. Since the bulk of the filming process wrapped up during the second week, it left me with an insane amount of editing to do. By the end of this week, I had compiled over two hundred clips of 21 staff members into a 30 minute onboarding video. 

    If I had known that the rest of the week would be spent sitting down in front of the computer, I would have been a bit more grateful to still have three more filmed interviews to complete on Monday. Those of which, consisted on my supervisor, who had been in D.C. the week before, the marketing coordinator, and the exhibits technician. One of my favorite parts of directing the interviews which I am not sure if I touched on in my last blog post was being creative and utilizing every area of the museum to create unique backgrounds for each interviewee. This time, I had stationed my supervisor in El Studio, an interactive art studio exhibit that features how art and science interact with each other through motion and light. Afterwards, we headed to BioZone to get b-roll of the IMAS’ ambassador animals, and I managed to catch one of their Madagascar hissing cockroaches give birth!

    Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were very monotonous in comparison. Given the amount of work I had made for myself however, I knew there was no time to waste. I broke down the editing process by department, beginning with education and ending with visitor services. While not the most interesting task in the world, I have always loved video editing, and had plenty of experience with it in high school. It’s almost like solving a puzzle, as I had to figure out exactly which pieces go where in order for the interview segment to make cohesive sense. On Wednesday, I needed to reshoot the facilities department, as it was throughout the editing process that I realized what a grave mistake it was that I held their interview outside. I finished the bulk of the interview editing on Thursday, leaving my main objectives for the next few days to be adding background music, filming b-roll, and editing the intro/outro to the video.

     A slight surprise came on Friday when I was notified that a full-time educator had accidentally been excluded from the entire process. Upon hearing this, I quickly scheduled a filmed interview time with her in the BioZone, which she quickly agreed to and gave me valuable shots of the day to day operations of a museum educator. I finished the week by selecting and editing the background music (courtesy of Artlist) and editing the video’s outro. While I put extreme care into editing everyone’s interview segments, I can confidently say I am proudest of the outro. I wanted the focus to shift from the impact the staff has on the IMAS to the impact the IMAS has on the staff. Thus, I created a compilation of everyone stating their favorite IMAS exhibit to close out the film. I had loved hearing about everyone’s different experiences with the museum, and compile the feeling into something the whole staff could watch.