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| The New Smyrna Museum of History had a grand opening on November 11, 2006. The museum was completely redesigned from the ground up with a new exhibit on the Andrew Turnbull Settlement. Silver Image Interactive, Inc. was responsible for all of the media associated with the new exhibit. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| After nine months of research, scripting and production, Silver Image Interactive, Inc. gave the story life with eight videos and an interactive touch screen program. Newly acquired research materials updated older information and brought the historical interpretation into greater accuracy. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| The interpretation begins with a video introduction presented on a 42" plasma display. Visitors sit while they are introduced to the largest British attempt to colonize North America at any one time. A brief history of the political climate at that time (1763) helps set the stage for the rest of the story. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| As the visitors walk farther into the exhibit, another video describes how settlers were gathered from Greece, Italy and Minorca. They left their countries, their homes and families to begin an adventure in the New World. Eight ships crossed the stormy Atlantic with 1403 settlers. They arrived with 1,255 people. Silver Image used digital state of the art players to visualize story. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Visitors see a representation of the ships as they arrive in New Smyrna in 1768. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Interactive station allows visitors to interact, read and hear in detail different elements of the story. Visitors can spend up to thirty minutes with the touch screen program that describes “Life, Labor and the Land” that the settlers experienced at the New Smyrna site. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| The next program is a fourteen-minute video presented on a 42" plasma display and synchronized with lights on a fourteen-foot, three-dimensional map of the original site. This interpretation allows visitors to see the complexities and the amounting problems facing the settlers and their leader, Dr. Andrew Turnbull. The series of programs help provide a look at the conditions of weather, harsh living conditions, lack of food, political unrest and the settlers’ difficulties in taming this wild Florida land. | ||||||||||||||||||
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The next video program is displayed on an LCD monitor from a digital player that provides the audio portion to handsets or, if desired, speakers for group tours. It is the culmination and realization that all of the efforts and work spent over eight years was soon coming to an unhappy end with the few remaining settlers eventually leaving New Smyrna and moving to St. Augustine. Through all of the hardships, the people were resilient and the series of programs brings that fact to life. Once filled with hope and promise of a New World, they left their unfortunate circumstances, only to find that their destination would also be filled with struggles. Yet, they worked as indentured servants, trying to make a success out of this land. They learned new trades, learned to live in harsh conditions and found that they were a strong and determined people. |
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The final video kiosk has three different sets of video interviews with over forty minutes of interviews from local descendants of the original settlers. This exhibit brings the story of the settlers from the Mediterranean to a level where visitors can see and hear, to the best of history’s resources, the most up-to-date and accurate account of the life and fate of the New Smyrna settlers. The fate of the Minorcan settlers may have had an unfortunate outcome, but their descendants continue to live on in St. Augustine and some in New Smyrna. A Minorcan proverb that survived over these last three hundred years states, “In darkness God gives you strength. In light, you have your own.” |
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| Merrily Miller and David Rosenblatt of Silver Image Interactive, Inc took the media portion of this exhibit from concept to final form in a little over six months.
For more information contact Merrily or David at 727-251-4114 or info@silverimageinteractive.com |
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