To Artifact of the Month Index To PAF Home ~~~ ~~~ STORYBOARDING ARCHAEOLOGY MONTH IN PHILADELPHIA This month’s featured object is a modern-day artifact — a newly created storyboard that plots out a scene about archaeological evidence buried beneath the city of Philadelphia. Storyboards are a sequence of drawings that unfold, graphic-by-graphic, ‘pre-visualizing’ a proposed project such as a movie, a theater production, or a novel. This particular storyboard is one step in the production of a set of Public Service Announcement videos (PSAs) being designed and created by Drexel University Digital Media researchers and the Philadelphia Archaeological Forum. The PSAs are intended to help promote archaeology in Philadelphia as part of a Pennsylvania Archaeology Month (October) awareness campaign. It is an ‘artifact’ of the field of archaeological research known as ‘Digital Public Archaeology’. The storyboard was created by Ryan Rasing, a Drexel University undergraduate in the Students Tracking Advanced Research (STAR) Scholars Program (and was updated for 2016 by Brendan Luu). Ryan’s efforts represent an early step in the production of a 30-second long, 3D-animated, Public Service Announcement video (PSA) promoting Philadelphia’s annual Archaeology Month event, Explore Philly’s Buried Past!. The storyboard is a required element for proposing the archaeology-themed Public Service announcement videos for use on the EXELON/PECO Headquarters ‘Crown Light’s’ marquee which projects 40 foot high messages by community and non-profit organizations from the 27th story of a downtown Philadelphia skyscraper. According to PECO (the Pennsylvania Electric Company), as many as 100,000 people see the messages broadcast … Continue reading September 2015 – Artifact of the Month