Heritage can be a significant source of inspiration, especially when you feel, smell, explore and discover it. Our video shows how heritage can help people, especially teenagers discover their skills like photography, drawing, fashion designing etc.
Persona & Brainstorming
Our persona was a girl named Farah as a target audience. She is an Egyptian teenager visiting Memphis with her parents. Our challenge was to make her interested in her heritage, feel excited about archaeology and how to have fun with it. So we had to think like teenagers, and ask ourselves about their hobbies and interests. We then came up with the idea about how hobbies can be further inspired by heritage to become careers. To illustrate this we chose four hobbies that could become careers; photography, fashion, engineering, and tour guide.
For photography, the role would be acted by Amira, a girl who loves photography and visualizing her life with photos. Hana, who loves design, jewelry, and fashion. Mona, loves engineering and technical drawing, and Mohamed who has a passion for adventures and travelling.
As a way of representing all teenagers across Egypt and the World we decided to make the ‘hand’ the hero of the video. By doing this, the viewer could also imagine them self in the video.
After long discussions in the brain storming session (which felt like we had put our brains in a mixer to make sweet juice of our ideas!), we poured our ideas onto storyboards which expressing our imagination about the shots for the videos, who will play the roles, the duration of each shot, music, and camera angles.
Putting our brains into the mixer.
We chose as the scene for our video the Memphis Open-Air Museum with its wonderful displays surrounded by beautiful palm trees and flowers. This setting would be our inspiration for producing a successful video. First we shot in front of the amazing Sphinx because we noticed that a lot of people take photos there. Then we shot inside the shelter of the museum in front of the statue of a princess or queen and the colossal statue of Ramesses II. This part of the process took quite a bit of time because the museum was crowded and we were still learning. We decided to delay the recording inside the shelter to another day when we also did the shooting at the Hathor Temple and the AERA Egypt Center.
In order to make our video we used free programs like Movie Maker which was used to edit shots that were taken by the camera and arrange it according to its sequence in the storyboard sheet. For the audio, we used a program called Audacity which recorded the narrative for the video and the music we decided to use. The narrative for the video was in Arabic and we added English subtitles using a program called Aegisub for the final stage of our work, video effects, credits and so on.
What made this a brilliant experience to live through was the team spirit. Working together, facing the challenges of acting, photographing, narration writing, recording, and sequencing shots. We learnt to be flexible with our ideas and accept that all ideas were valid. We are all for one and one for all!
We learnt a lot of skills like photographing, acting, writing narration, and editing the video which allowed us to make a connection between archaeologists and the teenagers.
Filming fun at the Memphis Open-Air Museum.
We have a high expectation for our video to get thousands of ‘likes’, comments and shares.
The video we believe presents a different view of Egyptian heritage for teenagers, as well as adults and parents to inspire them to unlock and discover their hobbies and create a different view of the heritage as something that can be part of their lives.