Factory shoot at the De Young Museum

by Ewen Wright, Factory Assistant

For the past month or so, students from The Factory have been collaborating with Youth Ambassadors from the De Young Museum as part of a partnership facilitated between BAVC and KQED (did you get all that?  Talk about community partnerships!).

The students in The Factory were charged with producing a compelling video that the De Young can use to show other students who visit the museum what to expect and how to behave.  Museums have a number of very logical rules that are often overlooked - but if broken can result in the damage of some irreplaceable and incredibly valuable art and artifacts.

The Factory was enlisted in large part because: If the target audience is students, who better to come up with a compelling way to communicate these ideas than other students?

Factory participants knew they didn’t want to create a traditional ‘behavioral’ video.  It was also important though, to make sure that the rules came across loud and clear.  The biggest concern the students had was that a video overviewing rules could come across as cheesy.  The good news is that cheesy, which is bad, is only a degree (and a few special effects) away from campy, which in this case, is good.

The resulting script was inspired by pieces like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Zombieland - something self-aware that has fun with the form it’s best suited to.  The Youth Ambassadors were enlisted as actors and The Factory students got to work planning the shoot.

The story revolves around a heroic protagonist tour guide, who is supervising a museum visit of the super-villians of museum behavior.  Characters like “The Mouth,” who sneaks food in and “The Lost,” who wanders off and “Oily Hans,” who - actually, I probably don’t have to explain that one.

The challenge of the production though, was that Factory students had to show each of the characters breaking a rule and then learning a valuable lesson from the tour guide - all while the team of student producers and actors had to actually adhere to the rules because they were shooting in the museum around real art.  So, when the mouth gets caught eating in the museum - she can’t actually be eating in the museum.  Or when The Flash takes a picture of the art - she can’t actually be taking a picture of the art.

Together with supervisors from BAVC, KQED, and the De Young, The Factory students and De Young Youth Ambassadors did a great job.  Moving through the museum a gallery at a time they managed to shoot the entire piece in a single 8 hour block AND not break any rules or art (though we did break one prop, and learned hand the valuable lesson embedded in that rule).

Keep an eye out for the forthcoming finished product!