Road Trip Postcard/Promo Video
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
Our challenge for this project was to create a video that would both promote an exhibition that had little marketing budget and at the same time front load an interactive/interpretive component in the exhibition. For the exhibition we were featuring an area where visitors could read postcards from around the world. The postcards came from viewers of the video which instructed them to send a fun, quirky postcard from a road trip they might be taking.
After strategizing, the museum came to the conclusion to again utilize the YouTube platform. After much brainstorming and story boarding we came up with a concept video (shown above) of a person traveling to a bizarre roadside attraction (in this particular case a giant cement artichoke in Castroville). In the video you would never actually see the persons face, but you would see the events that led up to the attraction. One of the noticeable aspects of the video are a pair of high heeled stilettos that emerge from an opening car door. Additionally, the person would purchase a post card at the attraction, fill it our and send it. There would be no actual sound recorded by the camera. Instead there would be sounds that were found via sound effects websites.
Screen shot from California Camp Bug Blog
The video was shot on an HD video camera in about a day’s time and then assembled back at the museum with Final Cut Express in about two days. Finding the right sounds for each of the scenes met with some challenges. Once completed, the video was uploaded to YouTube. To drive traffic to the video we contacted many travel blogs and asked them if they would showcase it.
The video is currently the most successful one on YouTube for the San Jose Museum of Art with over 80,000 views. It was posted at one point on the YT homepage as a “Featured Video” where it accumulated most of those views. We received over a hundred postcards from around the globe and the video has been featured on many blogs. There are around 55 comments about the video and we at one point had 8 video responses to it. The response to the video has inspired us to create a video serial around the shoes to promote other upcoming exhibitions.