Here’s some more behind the scenes ‘gossip’ from The Year of the Dealer – this one is on the making of the digital film trail at Temple Newsam for H. Blairman & Sons sale of the famous library desk made in c.1770 by Thomas Chippendale for Harewood House – here’s the finished film on the YoD website
This was quite a complicated film to make as we had to go to London to create a filmed interview with Martin Levy (current owner/director of H. Blairman & Sons) for the Temple Newsam film; we also used extracts from the interview with Martin in the other H. Blairman & Sons films for Bowes Museum and V&A.
We spent quite a lot of time at Temple Newsam working with the amazing front of house team and Adam Toole, curator, Temple Newsam and Decorative Art, making the introductory pieces to camera and photographing the desk etc. It was a lot of work, but we had a lot of fun too.
Viewers may notice when you watch all the films there is a repetitive rhythm to the piece to camera that introduces each of the museum objects – we wanted ‘antique’ and ‘antique dealer’ to be constant phrases in all the introductory pieces in all the films to emphasize these key ideas throughout the project. But this ‘script’ was often surprisingly easy to trip up on – here’s Adrian Thompson, one of the visitor assistants at Temple Newsam, trying to nail his introduction to the Harewood House library desk – Adrian very generously agreed to let us all see one of his (multiple) attempts!…many thanks to Adrian for allowing us to show this.
Like in many of the other films, there were numerous images/photographs that we could have used in creating the films but we could not really find the space in the time limits we had placed on the length of the films. In the Temple Newsam H. Blairman & Sons film we had photographs of the various reports on the sale of the desk in national and local newspapers (the sale of the desk featured in reports in The Guardian (Sept 1965) and thee Yorkshire Post (Nov 1965) and several others), but could not find space for the images. We also thought about including a few images of the Christie’s auction catalogue (1st July 1965) – (see below) but could not find space for this in the film without the images appearing and disappearing too rapidly. The catalogue is interesting though, as it highlights the importance of the desk – it had a colour photo fold out of the desk as the frontispiece.
There were some other ideas we tested in the drafts for the film – one of which was that we might include speech bubbles to coincide with the avatar’s audio (see below – this is what the Mo avatar says in the script). This looked so bad though, so we decided to drop it; plus all the films have hard of hearing subtitles embedded as part of the software which viewers can turn on if they need to.
One of the other things that we noticed in the early drafts of the Temple Newsam YoD film was that in the first drafts of this shot (above) of the ‘Gothic Room’ at Temple Newsam viewers could see Patrick (the film maker) taking the film reflected in the cheval mirror at the back of the room on the left side – we could not film this all over again as it would mean having to book time to go to Temple Newsam again…so Patrick rather cleverly cut and pasted a reflection of what could be seem in the mirror if we were not there into this section of the film…..the devil is in the detail!
We’ll have another Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer next week.
Mark
antiquedealersblog 
Leave a comment