MA student makes films for Science Museum
Bruce Eadie, former student on our MA Museum Cultures, describes how the course led him to make two documentaries for the Science Museum.
Bruce Eadie, former student on our MA Museum Cultures, describes how the course led him to make two documentaries for the Science Museum.
In September 2013, I handed in my dissertation having finished the Museum Cultures MA which I took over two years as a part-time student. I have really got a kick out of being able to do some serious academic research again as well as finding a rewarding new career.
I have had three careers: briefly, in academic publishing; a main career as a documentary film maker; and finally a spell as a self-employed derivatives trader, chosen as a way of spending more time at home when my two sons were young. With one boy now taller than me and the other one nearly there, the moment had come when I needed to decide what I wanted to do next. I thought that some sort of work in museums would be both intellectually stimulating and a continuation by other means of my first two careers, which were essentially exercises in public history.
I began the MA in autumn 2011 and by summer of 2012 I had completed two modules assessed by essay, and had to choose between an independent research project and a work placement. I chose the placement, mindful that my pragmatic reason for embarking on the course was to find a new career. I fixed up a placement at The Science Museum in Kensington and started work in the Research & Public History department.
I was assigned to the Family History Project which aims to open up the museum’s collections to amateur family historians researching the lives of their ancestors. I wrote some blogs for the museum’s website but soon became intrigued by work the museum had undertaken for an exhibition on genealogy which had to be abandoned when funding was withdrawn. I picked out the stories of two amateur genealogists and suggested that I could make two short films about them for a fraction of the cost of the ill-fated exhibition. So at the beginning of 2013, several months after my internship had formally ended, I set about making the films.
At this point I was lucky enough to find two fellow Birkbeck students - Bartek Dziadosz and Paul Craddock - who kindly agreed to work with me on the project to a rather tight budget. At the time, Bartek and Paul were both PhD candidates at the London Consortium and are now running Birkbeck’s exciting, new film initiative, The Derek Jarman Lab.
Together we produced two films for The Science Museum: Straight Flush, the story of a family genealogist whose ancestor designed the first, successful, flushing lavatory; and The House of Usher about another genealogist whose ancestor built a rather unsuccessful steam plough that frequently got stuck in the mud. You can see both films on the Science Museum website here.
So what did I get out of my Museum Cultures MA? Well, the chance to do a really stimulating degree and the space to think about a career change which, eventually, led to a conclusion I had not been expecting. I have finished the MA wanting to return to my old career making films including, now, films for museums. I also met new colleagues who have become friends, with whom I am pursuing a number of film and documentary ideas which - you never know - might just end up at a screen near you.