commercial breaks: involving kids in creating multimedia adverts for museum objects

gramt aided by Scottish Museums Council and Heritage Lottery Fund

This mucky old enameled tin advertises Bee Yeast, made in Bo'ness by James Calder and Company. Perhaps slabs of yeast were sold in tins like this or perhaps it was just a promotional item, reminding you to use Bee Yeast when you are baking. Certainly the dish seems to have been well used over the years.

We know that James Calder operated a large distillery in Bo'ness and other sites, so presumably the yeast was a by-product of the distilling process

Fresh, or compressed yeast was used in baking bread. Yeast is a fungus which breaks down some of the sugar in bread dough to produces Carbon Dioxide gas. Bubbles of this gas causes the dough to rise giving bread its texture and flavour. Few people bother to bake bread at home nowadays and most of those find it more convenient to use dried yeast which is easier to store.

Compressed yeast was sold by grocers shops, often kept cool on a marble slab. An old cookery book suggests that "Good yeast should be soft and crumbly and not hard or crusty, it should be pale fawn in colour and should cream quickly when pressed with a spoon."

How we made the advert

We talked about why the yeast company had chosen a bee as their logo. Bees are thought of as busy and "always working". Good yeast should work very hard (or be as busy as a bee) to make your bread rise.

Our first challenge was to reproduce the images from the old enameled tin and animate them in the computer.Eric and John took several photos of the tin and together with drawings we managed to recreate the crest and sack featured in the original advert Next we needed lots of bees to form the word “Bee”. We asked our visitors to draw us some bees of course we were overwhelmed by bees drawn by children of all ages. Unfortunately some of them were too small to be used as swarming bees but luckily one by Hannah age 11 was ideal and we reproduced this several times.

Next we needed a large bee that we could animate and would talk. Many bees fit the bill here including Emma aged 6,Alice 10,Katie 7, Rosie 5 but we chose the one drawn by Ewan age 6. Lots of visitors old and young had great fun recoding buzzzin bee sounds. Jordan7, Victoria aged 3 and Jonathan 2 gave us some excellent sounds for the swarming bees. Finally a big thank you to Sophie 9, Caitlin 7 and Rebecca 7 for the brilliant vocals and some very tuneful buzzing noises.