Last week Rick Stutz, Coordinator of E-Communications at Juniata College, emailed me to share the video tour that was created for his college’s library.
This funny 4-minute video piqued my interest, so I decided to find out how it had been done.
Rick Stutz, Nathan Wagoner, Director of the Digital Media Studio and John Mumford, Library Director (who stars in the video) answered collectively my questions by email.
1) Can you tell us a bit more on how this video was produced?
The idea started with a simple insight: a ‘tour’ of a building like a library (or like most buildings on a college campus) is almost always a grocery list, disconnected and difficult to absorb. Telling a story that included a tour seemed like a much more engaging way to accomplish the same goal. In addition, everyone involved liked the idea of borrowing a trick Tarantino used in Inglorious Basterds to solve the same problem – just label stuff on the screen with arrows and circles. Then you don’t have to talk about it or try to find some way to imbed the information in dialogue. That sensibility also hits our intended audience (incoming students) perfectly.
The team was composed of a few people from the library who explained their needs in the beginning and provided script oversight, the Director of the Digital Media Studio and two students who wrote and directed the piece. It was their first time creating something from scratch and it took a lot of brainstorming and script rewrites. Production itself was entirely managed by students in the Digital Media Studio. Of the two actors, one is a Junior Theater student and the other a 2010 alum.
The budget would be mostly student time, largely in pre-production. I would estimate roughly $500 in student wages and probably 3 full days of my time in pre and post-production .
So far, everyone seems to love it!
2) How have you publicized the video?
Facebook has continually played a large role in pushing out nearly all the media we produce, and this case was no exception. Within minutes, we had a bunch of comments and likes – and alumni took our subtle clue and started listing other “hidden gems” around campus that they remembered from their time here. It was also creepily amusing to be able to tweet about a human skin-covered book :) We obviously added the video to our campus tour page and are highlighting it on our homepage for a few days. The goal of the video was two-fold: one is obviously to make our library look sexy to prospective students and showcase that we have some unique stuff. Secondly, the library will be pushing the video out to incoming Freshman as an orientation piece – maybe students will even want to go there now!
3) What kind of feedback did you receive? Did the video meet its goals?
So far, we’ve had over 400 people view the video. In and of itself, that’s not a big deal, but we’re concurrently running a FB ad to increase our number of likes to the fan page – and during the time the video was shown, we averaged 75 new fans a day. This drastically exceeds our usual trickle by something like 1000% :)
4) Is it really human skin? Can you tell us a bit more about this book?
The book is the “Biblioteca Politica” – essays on political theory – it is bound in human skin as far as we know, and there is documentation within the book that makes that claim. It was given to us by a donor along with many other rare books. The author is William Tyrrell, an English political writer and theorist who was a contemporary and acquaintance of John Locke in the late 17th century.
Didn’t you mean to say it “piqued” your interest?
Indeed. Thanks for catching the typo. I’ve fixed it.
Nice video for a library promotion=)
A lot of Tarantino tricks are used. Cool trivia about the book.