 There we go. All right. I've got everything having any kind of scenes. Hi everyone Sorry about that little delay. I'm Meredith and as Sarah said I work for the Nelson Provincial Museum And I also work for a virtual reality 360-degree photography company and Nelson as well The little tour program said I was going to be talking about making 3d models of collection objects I am I'm also talking about some other stuff as well. So you're gonna get more than you bargained for today So today, I'm going to do just a quick orientation of where Nelson Provincial Museum is Potted history of the murders. There's lots of people in here I guess you've got as twisted and gory a sense of history as me You won't be disappointed with this story and then the things that the museum staff did Around the content and unlike Gareth from Auckland Museum who's got how many six staff focused on digital technologies. We've got Zero so we did this all ourselves Learning as we went and so we did 3d modeling and 360-degree tours and then I'll just talk about a little bit of what we learned along the way So Nelson Provincial Museum is in the center of Nelson It's a fairly big museum for its size I picked them dark and spooky moody pictures to get you in the mood We've got a team of 13 full-time equivalent staff and we are spread out over three sites We've got the museum and central Nelson and off-site storage warehouse and research facility where staff work and then further south another 20 minutes workshop and Big off-site store where the technicians work. So not very many people and we're well spread out So we don't see each other very often Our collecting area is that yellow circle? It's the Nelson Tasman region the top of the South Island and if you can see that red dot there That is where the manga tapu murders happen So bear with me while I do a little bit of storytelling So 1866 is 150 years ago this year and the murders happened on the manga tapu track Which is a large walking track that runs between canvastown in the Marlborough sounds and Nelson It's a good full days walk. It was very well used in 1866 It traversed by lots of people the South Island at that time was full of gold mining that Otago gold fields were open the West Coast was all gold mines and over on the East Coast was gold as well That brought a lot of transient people a lot of gold miners looking for their future Publican storekeepers and it also brought some bandits and let's meet some bandits. Shall we? Right take a good look at these four gentlemen because we're going to be meeting them in a different way later on These four guys they're known as the Burgess gang They all came from London though Joseph Sullivan on the end was actually an Irishman But he was a prize fighter in London three of the men Richard Burgess who was the gang leader Thomas Kelly and Joseph Sullivan were convicts and sent on convict ships to Australia and made their way to New Zealand Where they caused a hang of a lot of havoc Philip Levy though was a bit less rough He was actually a gold trader and a merchant and he acted as the gangs off-seller of the stolen goods The two guys Richard Burgess and Thomas Kelly had known each other for six years down in Otago They'd worked as a tight tight unit They were also used Philip Levy's services for quite some time in 1866 the three of them moved up to Hockitika on the West Coast where they met up with Joseph Sullivan who just recently arrived in the country and they formed a gang of four and they set about Going across to Canvastown to see what havoc they could cause there because they were wanted on the West Coast for God knows what Canvastown don't know if any of you have been there It's pretty small today and as the name suggests in 1866 it wasn't much to write home about In Canvastown there was a French gentleman called Felix Mathew with a lovely little goatee and He owned the very optimistically named pub called Café du Paris in Canvastown Bless him and it was in the Café du Paris that Philip Levy went with his ears open to see if he could see who had money in the town Unfortunately for Felix that evening he announced to everyone that he was leaving the Café du Paris He was selling up shop and heading over in a few days time over the Mangatapa track With all his belongings along with two other storekeepers and a gold miner with all their stuff across the Mangatapa track and Philip Levy with his ears wagging ran back to the other three who were hiding in a distused farmhouse And they formed a plan to head up the Mangatapa track and ambush these four which they did On June 12th the team went up early They hid behind a big rock and as the four came with all of their goods and a pack horse They jumped out and they tied them up They robbed them and they then proceeded to kill them in any way you could imagine with a gun a knife a fist and a rock After all of that Bloody work was done. They hid the bodies in the bush and headed down to Nelson with their spoils When they got to Nelson, they made a bit of a scene of themselves They went shopping and bought beautiful fancy velvet coats and waistcoats for themselves Went drinking and when it became apparent that people were missing these four were quickly rounded up and arrested It was a long drawn-out trial in Nelson Richard Burgess who is a very charismatic character Represented himself in court all the words were recorded word-for-word in the newspaper, which is fantastic to read on papers past I'd recommend it Richard Burgess also wrote his memoirs while in prison and I've got to admit I've got a bit of a historical bad boy crush on him. He's very well-spoken Sullivan turned Queen's evidence and he dodged the other three in that was the Irish guy so he protected himself and The other three were sentenced to death by hanging Special gallows were made and in October 66. The three men were executed by hanging Joseph Sullivan had to leave the country as part of his plea bargain. He had to get to Australia No ship would take him because they were well recognized and these portraits were all over the media Everyone knew what they looked like so the New Zealand police came up with a clever ploy to disguise Joseph Sullivan as a policeman and which he was dressed and full policemen's uniform and escaped Well or and was transported to Australia unrecognized in with a flax moustache Which I believe is probably what did it? So that's not quite the end of the story because what happened after the Executions where the three men were cut down and there was a big story Or a big debate in the scientific community at the time as to whether hanging was Death by hanging was caused by strangulation or by severing of the spinal column this was very important question and many learned doctors were gathered after the Executions not just these two they were about five or six and they performed Autopsies on the bodies and they discovered that they were death was caused by strangulation now in the process of the autopsies the three convicts heads were severed and decapitated and Later on that day the local dentist dr. Tatton took possession of a sack of said heads Which he then proceeded to shave very carefully and make plaster casts of now They sent them to the dentist because it makes sense. He was used to making Plastic house of teeth. He knew what he was doing and the reason that they wanted to have these plaster casts was because at the time in the 1860s for knowledgy was a really hot topic Apparently you could know a lot about a person's personality and where they were going in life by carefully feeling the lumps and bumps in their heads So these three heads of these very very wicked men were well sought after and everyone wanted to have a touch So it was with these three heads in the museum has got three of these plastic cast heads the original ones That we started our first digital exploration into the topic We decided we were going to make 3d models of the death cast and we started with a trial with sheep skulls We took multiple photographs of a sheep skull Put it into software. This was photo scan, which we didn't end up using in the end and Ended up with a really beautiful model of a sheep skull that you could rotate on the screen and look in great detail So it was proof of concept. We decided we would do it with the heads I spent a whole day with our museum photographer Photographing the heads in great intimate detail each angle. So I know them very well now We fed that photographic data into these programs. They're all freeware except for cinema 4d And we ended up with this and now this is where I have to get out of here. Excuse me. Oh Wrong one. Sorry guys. Go got a preview. Where's it gone? Here we go. Alrighty So we've got these this file at the moment in the exhibition running on a big screen on a projection screen in the exhibition But the files themselves of each of the heads are Fully rotatable so you could look at them on a touchscreen and spin them all around All right, we'll get rid of those ugly mugs Okay Right the next thing we did. Oh Yeah, we'd hope to create 3d models of the heads Because the dentist did that 150 years ago He made multiple casts and we thought it would be quite fun to actually print a bunch of heads as an experiment But it was too expensive. So we just went analogue instead with the cast making That's the the boss's husband bless him Right the next thing we did was create 3d models of the heads Right the next thing that we chose to do was make 360 degree photograph of the place where the murders happened at murderers rock and I'll show you this in a bit so we've got a touchscreen in the gallery of this and Then My other my other hat is we went and did a 360 degree photographic tour of the exhibition space itself Once it was opened As an experiment to see what it was like. So we did a trial shoot That's Marcus my business partner doing a trial shoot to see where was the best place to place cameras and get the The sphere photography we did a high-resolution shoot Through those photographs into software then added content that was already existing from the museum's exhibition like Label texts and photos and things And we thought it would be a fairly easy easy thing to do and then we created Which one was it that one? Okay, so Here is what's the time here is just I'll just spin around. This is the exhibition space That's the way out that video. So we just checked a Checked a video on there so people don't feel like they're missing out and we threw in extra data and Content so we can zoom in on cases and close-up photography So this tour is not finished not finished yet. I was sort of rushing around to get it done. I thought all you guys will understand Let's go outside. I'll take you to where the touchscreen is and we can dive to the murderer's rock I'm just gonna go through All right So you can swivel around and have a look at the exhibition and looking close at everything all of those circles are Different places you can go to I'll take you outside All right, we should dive in Superman style soon. Here we go so this is murderers rock where the Murders happened and our photographer trekked with four hours with all his camera gear and a special rig up here I didn't think I don't think he thought it was going to be quite so far And we've got it's special embedded content that we put in there About the places specific places and maps views and different ways to interact with that content So that's available on a touchscreen in the gallery Right. Oh if anyone wants to see a bit more of this we can later But I'll just crack on to what we learned from doing all of this Okay, so why did we do this in the first place? We actually as a museum didn't set out Initially to create all of this digital content. It was just 150 years to the year of the murders We were just gonna do an exhibition and actually what ended up happening was staff themselves We're really enthusiastic about the content and the story and also a number of them were really quite digitally curious It's not our job But we wanted to give it a go So we had an exhibition technician who's also a sculptor in his free time and he really drove the 3d modeling side of it It was actually his son who ended up creating the final models. It was quite a far now affair There's our ex photographer who wanted to do the 360 degree panorama of murderers rock He self taught himself what to do and then there was me the registrar who Was interested in doing tours 360 degree tours of exhibitions with added content Because I'm interested in that on the side so we just did it and That meant that some staff like the graphic designer and the IT guy just kind of got dragged along for the ride It wasn't it wasn't a strategic thing. It just happened Things that were great about having keen staff was we put in stack loads of extra time We were really really enthusiastic weekends and evenings We weren't provided at work with the tech we needed the quality tech so staff often use their own tech at home That was cool Except when someone leaves and they've got the files on their computer and it's gone to another country So just something to just be aware of And that the digital content gathering wasn't quite timetabled into the exhibition schedule So we were sort of backtracking a bit Things that 3d modeling we learned was you don't actually need as many photos as you thought each of those heads actually got 50 photos that was all that was needed and that the backdrops have to be very very clean Any oddities or darkness in the backdrop confuses the software and it takes a long time to unpick where the problem is From the taking tour of photographs of the exhibition itself I'd recommend that you timetable it in or at least do it in part with The exhibition still not quite open to the public where the cases aren't closed with Perspects where you can get in and get some nice vignette shots of things set up as they'll appear in the exhibition and then do your Tour of the exhibition itself once the exhibition is fully open We thought we could just throw in the existing label graphics up onto our 360 tour But we had to do a bit of to-to-ing because things that look nice on a wall Don't fit so well on a screen So we had to do some cutting and pasting which was just time we hadn't Counted in and you have to be very ordered and organized because when you're making these 360 degree tours you're dealing with numerous spheres of Spaces in different rooms that have to go in different directions And if you're then adding content into those spheres Trying to explain that to someone else who is not familiar with the space or with the content It's complicated. So it was just lucky that I was the middle in the go-between in this case But I learned some really good lessons about just how to be very ordered and organized and named things very carefully And that is the end