Hero content is designed to reach your largest possible audience. These films should inspire, entertain and attract new visitors or customers. This is content that stands out – promo videos can bring your brand to life like never before.
Galleries approach hero video content in different ways – chief among them with online video created specifically for galleries and museums. At the heart of it, this film should be a representation of the personality of your gallery, and hint at the content on display. Here are some ways that galleries have successfully filmed their hero content.
Online Video For Galleries: How Video Content Can Help You Reach and Inspire Your Audience
1. The Mini-Tour
What better way to introduce an audience to your gallery than to show it to them, using beautiful gliding imagery? Done well, this will be the taster encouraging audiences to visit.
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This approach works best if the spaces are amazing in themselves, and if there are works that are immediately recognisable. Renowned museums like the Louvre (Paris), the Mauritshuis (The Hague) and the Musee Rodin (Paris) have approached their HERO films this way. But a HERO film can also be a mini-tour of a temporary exhibition. Recently Chocolate Films used this approach to showcase the Tacita Dean exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (London).
2. Celebrity presenters and interviewees
A well-known advocate immediately sets the tone for a gallery. Many galleries have supporters, patrons or stakeholders who are happy to help. For example, The Broad museum (Los Angeles) interviewed Adele about her love of the artist Yayoi Kusama in their HERO film and Chocolate Films worked with actor Bill Nighy for London’s The Courtauld Gallery. Bill Nighy’s tour through the gallery highlighting some of its most well-known works has been viewed over 750,000 times across YouTube and Facebook and has contributed to positive visitor figures and a rise in friends Membership.
3. Looking at the gallery in a different way
Hero content is driven by a bold creative approach. The Mauritshuis in The Hague has some of the most loved paintings in the world on its walls, including The Goldfinch (Carel Fabritius) and Girl with a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer). In this HERO film series, they acknowledge that many people will have the same images on their walls and that one of the key drivers for people to visit the gallery is to see the original work itself:
4. Animating the collection
Video animation is increasingly being used to take audiences inside work. This can be achieved in a very high-end way, such as in this film by Sotheby’s, narrated by actor Steven Berkoff. But equally, this approach can be used more simply, on museum-friendly budgets. The Musee D’Orsay (Paris) has a track record of using animation in interesting ways, such as this film for their exhibition Âmes sauvages. Le symbolisme dans les pays baltes. And the Grand Palais, again in Paris, has animated their collection to recontextualise it in the era in which it was created for their exhibition of the work Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha.
For more on this, here are 7 reasons your business should invest in animation.
LOOKING TO FILM YOUR OWN HERO VIDEO CONTENT?
If you’re based in London, Glasgow or Berlin and are looking at getting your own hero films produced, we’d love to hear from you. Our team has decades of experience shooting high-profile hero content for our clients.
Get in touch with us today to find out more.
