Here’s more on our Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer theme with some behind the scenes ‘gossip’ on the making of the digital film trail for S.J. Phillips, the world famous antique silver dealers, at Preston Park Museum, Stockton-on-Tees – here’s the finished film on the YoD website.
The films we made at Preston Park Museum were amongst the most complicated of all five museum digital film trails. Mainly because the Year of the Dealer project took so long to complete that by the time we launched all the films in June 2026 Preston Park Museum had undergone a major refurbishment of its displays. As a consequence, six of the ten objects we focused on in the films had been moved to museum storage and were no longer on display. This meant that we couldn’t use floorplans to locate the objects for viewers that wished to go to see the objects in real life at the museums (as we did in the other four museums) – you may have noticed that there are no floorplans in the Preston Park Museum digital film trails?
As a result of the refurbishment at Preston Park Museum we also decided we should only use the photographs we took of the interior displays at Preston Park prior to refurbishment in a very limited way so as not to confuse the viewers watching the films, (and any subsequent museum visitors).
This photograph (above) for example, was initially going to feature prominently in the main introductory film for Preston Park Museum, as well as in the S. J. Phillips and Law, Foulsham & Cole films, but we felt we couldn’t really highlight the image as much as we initially planned, due to the display being remodelled during the Preston Park Museum refurbishment.
The photograph shows the silver powder flask highlighted in the S. J. Phillips film (top middle) as well as the small 18th century snuff box featured in the Law, Foulsham & Cole film at Preston Park Museum (righthand side, 3rd row down, the yellow coloured oval box) – both objects are now in storage at Preston Park Museum along with the majority of the other objects on display in the glass case and we only used close-up versions of the photograph in the S.J. Phillips and Law, Foulsham & Cole films.
This small detail is hardly noticeable in the actual films of course, but it reminded us a lot about how long the project took to complete and how complicated projects can be – but also how important it is to be flexible when working with partners!
Mark
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