Solution #912:

Home of American Rights

Featuring: George Mason’s Gunston Hall

Client: Gunston Hall and the Regents of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America

The Idea:

With COVID-19 closing down museums among other historic places, Gunston Hall needed a way to show visitors and virtual visitors George Mason’s Home and the newly renovated gardens to keep people engaged with their mission. This would be used on their website or with one-on-one lecturers/presentations. The debut of this program was to be at the Washington Winter Show in January, as part of their virtual antiques show event to provide historic content of interest.

The Challenge:

Really, there were two big challenges for this production. One was the house garden had just been renovated after a multi-year construction phase and the timing of our filming was in November. As a result there were not a lot of plantings to give the full effect of how the garden would look, since everything had been harvested for the approaching winter months.

The second was in how to capture the rich beauty of this historical home as many of the rooms were dark, despite the large windows full of sunshine, which can be hard to photograph depending upon time of day, let alone capture on video.

The Solution:

The VIDSOL team consulted on how to create a virtual tour and to try to include as many of the important aspects of their regular, in-person tours as possible. It was also agreed that we needed to showcase the newly renovated garden, despite being in the off-season. This program turned out to be more of a long-format documentary-style presentation of 25 minutes, which actually, proved to be quite entertaining and interesting for viewers.

What would make this tour even more realistic and personable was having specific staff members appear as on-camera hosts – being the tour guides – showing their areas of interest and expertise on the property. This allowed museum staff to prepare their own remarks and determine what artifacts or items to feature during their walk-and-talk segment.

In featuring the house, we worked with mother nature and shot half the house in the morning and the other half in the afternoon – to allow the sun to work with us in lighting the first-floor rooms. We still implemented some of our lighting to make some of the intricate wood carvings, moldings and house details standout. Keep in mind that given the colonial era in which the house was built and lived in, there would have only been candlelight. Some of the same techniques were used in filming in the colonial kitchen.

To better understand the new gardens, we employed a drone camera to capture bird’s eye view, sweeping shots from the Potomac Riverfront right up to the main house; tour the new land terraces that were still being built at the time; and a true view of the magnitude of this new space. In addition, we incorporated architectural renderings to show what future plantings will look like. A garden of this size will take several years to re-establish its full glory and this was replacing a very old, boxwood maze garden that was determined to not be of the period.

Due to the COVID mandates, we limited our production to a three-person crew (fully masked) who spent a day and a half filming the entire house, kitchen, garden and grounds. Additionally, by using the 4K Raw format, we were able to also adjust exposure and color temperature to get the best possible image, as well as, be able to further adjust it to perfection in post-production.

This documentary-style approach made for a wonderful virtual tour, and gave viewers a wonderful sense of this historic home, garden and museum – just south of George Mason’s other neighbor at Mt. Vernon.