Bringing propaganda posters alive

So the Eleven-Eleven-Eleven project is going great, and the opening of our exhibition (26th July at Nottingham Castle) is in sight! The Exhibition Design team has created a really cool design for the touring display that will be visiting community venues around the city from August onwards; and the Events and Marketing team are pulling together a great set of events. Meanwhile we (the Film and Audio team) have been making the films that we've been planning and developing for so long!

Here we are in rehearsal, getting ready to film some recreations of WW1 propaganda posters. (Check out that genuine 1917 Enfield rifle!)


Propaganda was a fairly new thing during WW1, and some commentators in the 1920s and 1930s felt that Britain and America's enthusiastic embracing of it was actually the thing that made all the difference and won the war. Germany in 1914-18 was quite reluctant to use too much propaganda, seeing it all as a bit vulgar... (that all changed during WW2!)





WW1 posters tell us a bit more about the society that created them than perhaps the makers intended. As well as the overt "Join the Army" messages, there are all sorts of other messages about the roles of women and men, the idea of nationhood, and the question of what is worth fighting for.







When filming, we found that the trick was to keep our scripts short and to the point, and to try to unpick the image and get at the central message at the heart of each poster - "what's it really saying?". It's almost enough simply to present that, without irony - a modern audience can instantly see how much times have changed since 1914. But it's interesting that some of the emotions that these posters play on - guilt, patriotism, fear of not being "man enough" - are exactly the things that modern-day advertising and propaganda draw on as well. There's nothing new under the sun!

Learning about Interview skills

Session on 15th January

Maria Erskin talked us through a basic plan of what the Trent to Trenches exhibition will look like, it looks really exciting and sounds like there is lots of room for Illuminate to play with. Then Vanessa talked to us about interview techniques and we tried out some questioning methods, we found that closed questions, ones that give a yes or no answer, were quite restrictive and the interviewee can get frustrated because they feel they can't elaborate on their answer. We found that asking about someones feelings, like how did that make you feel or how do you think your mother felt telling you that, gave us some more detailed and sometimes surprising results. If a question was directly followed by another question it could confuse the interviewee or it could lead them to answer the question in a certain way. We tried a few spontaneous follow up questions and found out that you should not try and second guess what the participant was going to say, they could say something totally different! We also learnt that we should be clear on what it is we want to learn from the person we are interviewing so that we can ask some specific questions. We discussed that it might be useful to let the interviewee chat first about the story they want to tell and rehearse it a little before recording so that they can get across everything they want to convey.

We also talked about metadata which is what we might record for our records such as the persons name, the interviewers name, the date, what project it is for etc. Also important to consider are the ethical implications of the recordings and how we must inform the people taking part what the data will be used for and ask them to sign consent forms after the interview when they have had a chance to listen back to their interviews and tell us if they are unhappy with anything they have said.

Helen