Investing in Exhibition Films: It’s Worth It, If…

By Rachel Trinkley

How does a sculptor turn an initial idea into a finished work of marble?

And, how do we help visitors understand and engage with this complex creative process?

Canova: Sketching in Clay explores the first question through looking at Antonio Canova’s small clay models.

The second question is one that National Gallery staff answered by creating a higher price tag video that evaluation confirmed was worth the investment.

During exhibition planning, we discussed the need to engage visitors in Canova’s artistic process—but how might we best tell that story? Getting from clay model to marble statue involved multiple stages of creation, including making copies of plaster casts using a copying system known as pointing.
To explore what strategies might be successful, staff led a focus group with summer interns. The group responded to a series of questions and images, and watched Smithsonian American Art Museum’s fantastic video about pointing. The video prompted lots of wows, ah-has, and questions, suggesting video might be a great strategy for us.

Staff in the National Gallery’s Production Studio jumped on this opportunity. They envisioned a film internally titled “The Magic of Process.” They’d film a sculptor recreating a Canova work, from clay to marble, and use time-lapse to speed things up. The goal was to create a sense of wonder and engage viewers’ emotions about the process, using only imagery.

From an interpretation point of view, this was exciting. The video supported key visitor outcomes, and by not utilizing text, would be widely accessible.

Upon opening the exhibition, the video was a hit. Visitors consistently crowded the gallery where the film was projected. A moving soundtrack helped draw them in. And we included other interpretive elements in the room alongside it, including a mural of Canova’s studio and a wall panel that illustrated and lightly explained Canova’s process to complement the film. But what were visitors taking away from the video, and the room overall? Did we achieve what we hoped we would?

To answer these questions, staff conducted exit interviews with visitors, focusing on how the video enhanced their experience.

While we had a small sample group (27), we found that visitors’ overall experience in the exhibition varied greatly between respondents who watched the video and those who did not. Viewers were more likely to rate their visit as outstanding. Viewers had a deeper understanding of, greater appreciation for, and more emotional connection with the sculpting process. In fact, their learnings mapped to three categories of generic learning outcomes circled in the image below. And in general, viewers’ responses seemed more visceral, with echoes of surprise, awe, and admiration.

So, was the video worth it? Yes! Did we achieved what we hoped we would in the exhibition? Sort of.

The video was a clear success: it engaged emotions and was the right interpretive solution for this content challenge. It’s also now the most watched video on our YouTube and Instagram channels.

And yet, there were hints that we could have done things differently to support visitors. Many viewers didn’t have language to talk about what they learned from the video—most missed the wall panel explaining the process—and many had lingering questions. These results raised new questions that we look forward to answering with our colleagues in future projects: how might we successfully scaffold learning without compromising accessibility and emotional engagement? And how might we support a deeper dive or continued engagement for those who are interested?

With thanks to colleagues Carolyn Bevans, C.D. Dickerson III, Larry Hyman, Scott Keiner, and Paula Lynn.