Paintings Alive: An Interactive Film for Young Museum Visitors

Abstract

To reach younger audiences, museums worldwide have incorporated interactive and hands-on activities, while some venues specialise in children as their main audience. Videos, in particular, can be easily integrated into the museum space and provide a variety of application possibilities. Their use creates a hybrid experience for the visitor in which the interaction between physical and digital elements transforms and enriches their experience of the exhibits. Furthermore, interactive technologies have been proven to increase visitor numbers and interactions on-and off-site. In this context, our practice-based research focuses on the use of interactive video technologies and factors that can lead to the design of engaging and user-friendly museum experiences for children to investigate their application through the production of a new interactive film for young museum visitors. A museum was chosen as a case study, and a survey was conducted to achieve this. The results indicated that creating an interactive video could benefit the areas that were visited less; the preferable length is relatively short, while hands-on and video installations promote and prolong the engagement of young visitors and are favoured by both younger and older children. Additionally, fictional or dramatised stories are attractive to children compared to documentaries; accessing the interactive content on their mobile devices would be preferable. These have led to the production of Paintings Alive, an interactive film for children, featuring and reenacting the paintings in the museum’s art gallery and accessible on the visitors’ mobile devices. Our article also discusses the project's findings, alongside the challenges and limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and offers recommendations for future work.