My French Easel: How to take your art to the Big Screen

Monday 9 March 2009

How to take your art to the Big Screen

In my previous post, Making it to the Big Screen , I told you about the slideshow of my paintings currently showing on the Big Screen in Swindon. In this post, I share with you how I did it.

I first pitched the idea around a slideshow “Painting Wiltshire” in a letter to the BBC Big Screen producer. I enclosed my portfolio (Print-out of paintings, artist statement, resume, press clippings, presentation of my website and blog) and a CD with a selection of JPEG images and a PowerPoint slideshow to give a better feel of how it would look like.

The producer expressed his interest and asked me to do several things:

To be more focussed and create a “Painting Swindon” slideshow, rather than doing one on Wiltshire

To indicate the location in each image

To change the format to an MPEG film with a length of 2 mins to 2 mins 20 seconds, so that it would fit into the peak lunchtime viewing segment at the screen.

To put music on it if possible

The common theme around these requests was to make the material more relevant to the audience and more condensed (features on TV are much shorter than in other media).

This part presented several challenges as I did not have any software to create a MPEG film and did not know where to find music I could use.

After some searches, I stumbled upon an excellent site for music called Jamendo and selected a track named Life’s Things from the album Life's Path by Mindthings. I found that the electronic music worked well with my paintings and made the slideshow more dynamic.

For the visual part, I used Photoshop Elements 6 (PC) to add the location on each painting and to create the title page and the credit page for the slideshow. With the same software, I created the sleeve and label for the DVD.

To create a DVD with the slideshow in MPEG format, I used a software called QR Photo DVD Slideshow. It is really simple to use, intuitive and gives a professional look with sleek transitions. In four simple steps you can organise your pictures, select the time for the transition you want and the timing for each slide, add music and burn the film onto a DVD.

One more thing…

Why sharing this with you? Because I want to see more art in the streets, more art in people’s life… because art is about sharing and everyone will benefit.

So, if you live in the UK, why not try to get your art on one of the BBC Big Screens?