Camille Rose Garcia Video Series
May 15th, 2007 to the Projects page.
Camille Rose Garcia, "Antarctic Suburban Outpost " 2006
Challenge: The Camille Rose Garcia: Live from Tragic Kingdom Video Series project had multiple challenges. The first and foremost, being that it was our first venture into video and we only had a budget of $250. Additionally, the videos created were supposed to both provide a tour and act as a promotional material for the exhibition. We felt at the museum that this series would be the perfect match for the YouTube/iPod demographic. By utilizing these platforms we would be able to spread the word on the exhibition with no budget whatsoever. Videos would be posted to our YouTube Channel, be available for download via RSS, and offered to visitors on iPods in the gallery. To make the videos “sing” we wanted to add cutting edge music to the videos while avoiding any copyright issues.
Action: A budget of $250 is not much, but it was enough for two airline tickets to Los Angeles where Camille’s studio was and a rental car for the day. My colleague Lucy Larson and I made the trip in one day leaving at 6:00 in the morning and arriving back in San Jose at 10:00 at night. We were armed with our camcorder, digital camera for still shots, and audio recording equipment. We shot video with Camille in her studio for about 4 to 5 hours. Most of this was in a sit down interview style format, but we also wandered around the studio filming her talking about her process and technique.
Once the video was shot it was brought back and edited in iMovie on my iBook laptop. Images of artwork were inserted into video of the interview to help support the ideas and discussion. During the editing process we scoured the web in search of indie music labels that made their music available free of copyright. We were able to find a lot of music that complimented the artwork and the artist while also appealing to our target demographic. At the end of each video we credited the band and music label and also offered a link to the website. The completed movies were then uploaded to YouTube, uploaded to our web server for the RSS feed and loaded onto iPods in the gallery.
Camille Rose Garcia on Boing Boing
Since we were new to the YouTube community we wanted to build subscribers. To accomplish this we initially offered 10 videos with the promise for more to come. By subscribing to the channel on YouTube or to the RSS feed our viewers were apprised of any additional videos when posted.
Results: The Camille Rose Garcia video project was a success. To date we have had 45,955 views across 15 videos with the most views (12,675) on the promo video. The return on investment for that many views is staggering. Our salaries aside, the cost for each view was .005¢. The videos were embedded on blogs and websites such as Boing Boing, Drawn, and Last Gasp Comics. Looking at our subscriber profiles we were able to accertain that our target demographic had been hit.
