An array of native plants “sets the stage” for KNME’s evocation of New Mexico's landscape. (Image: KNME.)

Expanded museum comes back for more KNME history videos

Published in Current, Aug. 24, 2009

On top of making five videos for permanent exhibition in the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, Albuquerque’s KNME-TV has won a $147,000 federal grant to make 15 more videos to be shared by museum-goers and TV viewers.

The high-def exhibition videos are part of the museum’s new building, opened in May, that’s far larger than the ancient Palace of the Governors, which previously housed the museum.

One of the five high-def videos, about the Santa Fe Trail, is projected inside the cloth top of a pioneer wagon. Another, filling a 25-foot screen, sets the stage with a video tone-poem on New Mexico’s spectacular landscape. Others document New Mexicans’ role in World War II; demonstrate Los Matachines, a Spanish storytelling dance adopted by the Indians; and show how nuclear scientists, hippies and Route 66 contributed to the state’s boom, says KNME Executive Producer Michael Kamins.

Like everything else produced at KNME in the past year, Kamins says, the exhibition videos were made in high-definition, but the screen shape was even wider than usual HD. Producers used Adobe AfterEffects to combine multiple videos to fill the projection screens' extra-wide aspect ratios.

Frances Levine, the museum’s director, asked to use more video from KNME’s ongoing history-and-culture series Colores!, Kamins says, and he suggested that they go grant-hunting to create new shorts. He wrote the successful grant request that will go largely to make 15 minidocs, three to five minutes each, for the museum and websites and packaged in groups for broadcast.

The grant was one of 167 dispensed to museum projects this summer, worth a total of $19 million, by the federal Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, a little sister of the arts and humanities endowments.       

Moon rises and sun sets in a widescreen KNME video for new state history museum.

Web page posted Aug. 26, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC

LINKS

New Mexico History Museum is located on the historic plaza in Santa Fe, next to the Palace of the Governors. Until its new building was opened in May, it was housed in the palace. News release.

Pieces of the KNME-produced videos, including one on hippies as a historic force, were used in TV promos for the museum and New Mexico history.

An episode of KNME's Colores! takes a Christmas tour of northern New Mexico's old adobe churches.

U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services has a Nov. 2 deadline for Museums for America grant applications for community engagement, new technologies and more. Other deadlines ahead. Recent Museums for America grants news release.