Making and watching videos have become a way of life for most people. According to YouTube, individuals around the world watch more than six billion hours of videos each month adding up to about an hour per each person on earth. Every minute approximately 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site. If you have an interest in dollhouses you can watch people put them together and even take you on tours of their completed dollhouses complete with music and lights. In addition to YouTube there are other sites that have both fun and informative videos on dollhouses and miniatures. On the Travelchannel.com website you can find videos showing you the interiors of dollhouse museums, and miniature collections, and videos highlighting places around the world where you can find miniatures.
The Great American Dollhouse Museum in Danville, Kentucky rates two well done dollhouse videos. One is called Life inside a Dollhouse and the other is called Danville’s Miniature World. In Life inside a Dollhouse, we see a nanny so overwhelmed with her charges that she has lost total control of the household. There is a dog eating pancakes out of pan on the kitchen floor and as the video moves through the dollhouse you can track the trail of disaster of one of the children who we find calmly coloring eggs on his parent’s carpet after painting the cat in multicolor. In Danville’s Miniature World we meet Museum Curator Lauri Kagan Moore who explains how each dollhouse is set up to tell a story through the vignettes she created.
If you love miniatures and model trains take a look at the video of Northlandz – a museum dedicated to model trains. The video entitled The Small World of Northlandz takes you through the museum located in Flemington, New Jersey and introduces you to the General Manager Jason Yard who discusses the highlights of the of the train collection and its miniature settings.
For a complete change of pace you might try the video The Mother of CSI which is part
of the Travel Channel’s series Mysteries at the Museum, for an historical look at the use of miniatures and dollhouse settings to solve crime. The detailed dollhouse scenes now known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death were created by Frances Glessner Lee in 1943. These dollhouse shadow boxes were used to teach crime investigators how to approach crime scenes. The shadow boxes are credited with helping to improve the skills of countless investigators and Frances Glessner Lee became the inspiration for the popular TV series Murder She Wrote. The dioramas are on permanent display at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore, Maryland.