Category: TV and Film

More than a Dodo1 Comment

‘Welcome to My Museum’

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I’ve been to see the dinosaurs at the Pitt Rivers Museum!

It’s a common exclamation, but alas, there are no dinos in the Pitt Rivers, nor totem poles in the Museum of Natural History. Rather, there are two museums with a shared front door, and a fair amount of confusion.

To address this perpetual museum muddle we present a short play, Welcome to My Museum, where the Victorian founders of each institution come to life to discuss ‘two marvellous museums under one roof’.

A small grant from the Oxford University Museums Partnership allowed a collaboration between us, the Pitt Rivers Museum, Pegasus Theatre, and Film Oxford to produce two versions of the play – one for public performance and another for a film adaptation, which is the one you can watch below.

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Ciaran Murtagh (left) as General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers and Andrew Jones as Henry Acland

Working with Pegasus Theatre, Rachel Barnett scripted an imagined conversation between the founders of the two museums, Henry Acland and General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers. Pegasus helped to source actors and costumes and even a prop-maker for Pitt Rivers’s fine pufferfish helmet.

Film Oxford spent several late nights with a very patient rent-a-crowd, immortalising their adaptation of the play on film. The public performance was well attended, with over 250 visitors dropping in to watch General Pitt Rivers rudely interrupt Henry Acland’s speech welcoming visitors to his museum. Pitt Rivers rightly points out that there must be two museums as the building has two gift shops and even two differently-branded pencil sharpeners for sale in them – ‘scientifically incontrovertible’ proof!

So if you think that you have ever been to the Pitt Rivers Museum to see the dinosaurs, or the Museum of Natural History to look at the totem-pole, watch the film below and you will discover that our building is actually ‘two sublime museums under one roof’.

Chris Jarvis – Education officer

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A drone’s eye view

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If you saw our recent day-in-the-life film you may have noticed the lovely opening shot, where the camera swoops down from above the Museum’s tall tower and comes to a rest directly outside the main doors. In the photo above you can see the impressive drone that captured this footage.

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The drone checks out our Iguanodon
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Mark Wynne, director and pilot at SkyQuad, keeps his eye on the drone

The drone was operated by Mark Wynne of SkyQuad, a specialist aerial photography and video company. The sequence in the film is just one snippet of a bunch of footage that we shot for a digital project that we’re working on with Hunts and Oakley Mobile. The project is to develop new mobile app content for the Museum, revealing more about our collections and building. More on that to come later, including some amazing flybys of the T. rex inside the main court.

In the meantime we thought you might like to see a few shots of the two drones in action. The larger drone captures 4K, or ultra high-definition video, while the small drone was more maneuverable and safer to use inside. Here’s a little clip of the bigger one hovering around outside the Museum.

 

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Dinosaurs amongst us

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Earlier this year we had the pleasure of hosting the BBC iWonder team and evolutionary biologist and presenter Ben Garrod for a filming session all about the evolution of birds. BBC iWonder is a growing series of short but rich guides to subjects as wide-ranging as salt in your diet, the World Cup, and the holocaust, each designed to pique people’s interest and curiosity.

Ben Garrod filming with the Archaeopteryx cast
Ben Garrod filming with the Archaeopteryx cast

Ben’s guide is titled ‘Do Dinosaurs Still Live Among Us?’. This is a good question indeed and the answer is (sort of) ‘yes’. You can find out a lot more in the guide itself, which has just been launched here and features some lovely footage of the Museum and our cast of the famous Archaeopteryx fossil, the first found to show the traces of feathers on a dinosaur.

Needless to say we were very pleased when the iWonder team contacted us about their idea to look at the evolution of birds from dinosaurs using specimens in the Museum. The guide’s producer and director Ben Aviss explains how it came about:

We brainstorm ideas for new content for the guides and one of those was to look at dinosaurs, but what question might we ask? The idea of dinosaurs and birds sharing a common ancestry is something that not everyone may know about so we decided to look at that.

Ben Aviss had already seen the Museum on Ben Garrod’s BBC4 series Secrets of Bones and thought it looked great. “The more we chatted about the things we might want access to, the more we realised you offered everything we needed,” he adds.

Ben Garrod tracks along the Iguanodon tail.
Ben Garrod tracks along the Iguanodon tail

It was a third return to the Museum for Ben Garrod who, as well as filming sequences for Secrets of Bones, had also run our Capybara Construction special event earlier in the year. He explains the appeal of returning for the iWonder guide:

This iWonder guide represents a new and fun way to retell a key moment in evolutionary history – the transition from dinosaurs into modern birds and I’m pleased with the final result. It’s informative and interesting but more than that, it looks good and that is in no small part down to the setting in which we filmed.

I keep coming back again and again because I genuinely love the Museum. The collection is laid out in a way that gives the visitor lots of time and space to explore and the specimens themselves are great – I’m still finding new things every time I visit.

There are plans for further iWonder guides that go richer and deeper, with greater interactivity and content. Let’s hope the collections – and Ben’s enthusiasm – brings the team back to tell another story here soon.

Scott Billings – Communications officer