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


Young's Paraffin Lamps
Young's Paraffin Light & Mineral Oil Co was the only one of the Scottiah shale oil companies to make its own lamps. Young's operated a lamp works in Edinburgh until the 1880s when a new factory was opened in Birmingham. Production continued into the 1920s. Young's put on a lavish display of lamps, candles and oils for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition. At the top right of this page you can see Almoind Valley's replica case which houses a range of lamps and candles by Young's. Young's Paraffin Light & Mineral Oil Company Ltd., Birmingham were the first manufacturers of lamps suitable for burning paraffin oil and petrolium. For over 60 years the quality of their goods enjoyed a high reputation. All the Lamps and Burners were made from the best materials and were of the finest workmanship. Lamp bases were made from cast iron. This was designed with safety in mind to prevent the lamp from tipping over easily and causing a fire in the home. The burner contains the wick (or if it has 2 flat wicks it is called a duplex). Wicks are made of woven cotton fibres. The wick is dipped in the the oil reservoir and the fibres absorb the oil. The wheels at the side control each wick in the burner and the reservoir chamber contains the oil.		How we made the advert
		Imagine yourself as a sales representative. You have a choice to sell either insurance or a beautiful pieces of artwork. Which would you rather sell? We bet that most of our visitors would rather sell artworks. In our collection at Almond Valley we have many beautifully crafted oil lamps. If you have a look at the picture at the bottom of this page, we're sure you would agree that our lamps are undoubtedly splendid 'artworks'. So, for this advert, we figured that we hardly needed to do anything too clever to 'sell' something as beautiful as these lamps. We thought their inherent beauty was a selling point in itself and all we wanted to do in this advert was put together a little sequence to show the attention to detail, beauty and delicacy in the crafting of the lamps. So the advert opens with a vey agitated and angry pair of brothers - that's Scott (9) and Robbie (7) who appear in our star-studded cast to the left. They took pictures of each other and some of the lamps that appear in the advert and in the picture at the bottom of the page. Scott and Robbie appear again at the end of the advert looking so much happier for having been lifted out of their 'darkness' by appreciating how beautiful Young's Lamps really are. Ah! the power of all good art. Claire (6)and Daniel (9) helped take some more lamp photographs with our digital camera and Daniel wrote out the captions that weave in and out of the advert. We then spent some time scanning in Daniel's writing so that we had it on the computer and could squash and alter it to fit in neatly with the advert. Kevin (8) and Richard (9) contributed their very professional voice overs. Christopher (11) added the finishing touches with his latest composition 'Charlie's Angels' which he debuts here on this advert. Ok, now have a look at the advert. If we had the technology to produce an advert like this at the end of C19 we could have made Mr James 'Paraffin' Young a very wealthy man! Beauty sells itself and we don't think you would say that about insurance.