Project Title: Images that Connect Us - Doon Heritage Village Orientation Video
Museum/ Institution: Waterloo Region Museum
Program Created: 2010
Media Category: Video
Program URL (if available): Web address for Waterloo Region Museum http://www.waterlooregionmuseum.com/
Project Image(s) and/or Video http://www.waterlooregionmuseum.com/videos/doon-heritage-village-orientation/
http://www.waterlooregionmuseum.com/
Media Source(s)/Credit(s): Still Images - http://www.chron.com/life/gallery/American-life-in-1914-How-we-lived-a-century-ago-76364/photo-5616103.php
Program Description: (150-250 words)
The Waterloo Region Museum's, Doon Heritage Village Orientation Video is a compelling video that seeks to take the visitor through a tour of the year 1914 in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. As the video begins, it appears that an old fashioned scrapbook is being opened. As each page of the scrapbook turns, a different slice of 1914 life is revealed. Using archival, predominantly black and white photographic images garnered from newspapers, silent film, advertising, personal snapshots reflecting life in Canada and the United States, they are presented in the panning manner made famous by Ken Burns in his seminal series, The Civil War. Each slide in the ten minute video is narrated by historical text garnered from diaries, journals and local newspapers and publications of the day. Some of the narration is presented as text overlaid on the images, but most is read by a wide variety of different voices "of the time." The video brings a by gone era to life and effectively sets the stage for a visit to the Historical Village.
This engaging video presentation, copyrighted in 2010, merges century old images with contemporary creativity and video technology to educate and inspire interest in the past. The museum's staff recognized that the life of a rural 1914 citizen could be unfamiliar to a millennial visitor and the orientation video serves to provide an anchoring sense of time and place. The result is a more meaningful and educationally relevant experience for visitors of all ages and historical awareness.
Firsthand or secondary review/critique: (150-250 words)
Doon Heritage Village is a picturesque 60 acre living history village that shows visitors, through the use of costumed actors, what life was like in the Waterloo Region of Ontario in the year 1914. The Waterloo Region Museum is the entrance to Doon Heritage Village. The village has live and well informed guides dressed in authentic period clothing and engaged in the daily tasks of the time in a rural area of Ontario. The Village also has pastures full of farm animals, historic buildings, tools and implements appropriate to the time portrayed.
For many of today's visitors, life in 1914 is totally foreign. The span of 100 years has seen technology to go from the dawn of flight to the International Space Station. Even older visitors, are only passingly familiar with daily life as the world teetered on the edge of World War I. Families who come to experience the Doon Heritage Village will have a more meaningful experience after watching the video. It is ten minutes long but the voice overs and the lively music keep the video from bogging down into mere photography. This program, really a glorified slide show, was dome on a budget and while not up to contemporary industry standards, it serves a vital purpose for the Doon visitor's experience.
While I have not personally visited the Doon Historical Village, I found the Orientation Video both informative entertaining. Working with a limited budget, it evoked a sense of nostalgia for my grandfather's stories of the time he "fought in the Great War" as well as his stories of his first car and my grandmother's fight for women's suffrage. Without a doubt, I would visit the Doon Historical Village if I was ever in the Waterloo Region of Ontario, Canada.
Technologies incorporated: Still photography, digital photography, and digital editing.
Internally or externally produced: Internally produced by the Waterloo Region Museum
Entry Contributor and Date: Kathleen P. Fredrick, February 4, 2015
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