Approval to Film at Adams Homestede

Today i received approval from BLM to film in and on the Adams Home Stead.  We will be there on March 31st.  Im very excited.

It was a pretty easy getting the approval.  It took about a month.  3 weeks of that was waiting for a return phone call to initiate the process.  I wrote a proposal telling everything about the shoot.  The number of People involved, the equipment, how much time, who much damage we would do to the property...

Here is my letter:

There is HOPE

I was talking with a friend of mine who has vast experience with software and computer programing. Come to find out, his first real job after high school was forensic drive recovery.  He is going to take my hard drive and see what he can do... its a long shot, but what do I have to lose...  Right?

Switching My Tactics: Improving My State of Depression

I am really struggling lately with the loss of my interview footage ,  I feel my wind has been snatched out of my sail.  Its really hard to stay positive... so i have decided to switch my attention for a wile over to animation.  I plan to use a fair amount of animation in my project.

I watched a documentary called the missing piece and really liked the 2d animation he used and want to put use it in my project also

Im very excited about this project, it has a lot of potential.  There are even people who want to see it excepted it into DocUtah this year.


Another animation i plan to use in this, is a map of Silver Reef.  Which was plagued by fires.  We are going to burn the map to show where the fires were and the direction they spread.  Those are just a few i have planned!!! 

Lost Footage Update

No good news to report... we had an engineer here at the school attempt to recover the footage on the drive, but he was unsuccessful. It really looks like i am going to have to re film every interview from Saturday.

Disaster Strikes my project !!!

I went to upload my footage from the interviews yesterday before I left for the day... each drive holds 240 gigs of data.  That equates to about 7 hours of transfer time.   I figured I would start it and let it run over night... When I got to school today my heart sunk...

This is what i found!!!

Upon further investigation, i found that my hard drive had been erased. There was nothing left on it.  I am no computer expert and have no idea what happen... Sabotage you say? I don't think so, but never the less...It was blank.  To make matters worse, I only ran audio to one of the two cameras.  This drive was from the camera that captured audio too.  

I am sick right now. I don't know what I'm going to do. 

Interview Day!!!

I got to school at 07:30am this morning ready to begin a very long day of filming interviews.  My first interview was on time.  by noon i had competed half of my interview. I thought things were going very smooth... then I got a phone call telling me that my next interview was running about 4 hours late, and with him was the rest of the people i was going to interview that day.  SUCK!!!

While  I was sitting on my butt waiting for my interviewees, Ashley was on site at Silver Reef to get B-Roll and film a geologist presentation on the phenomena of silver being found in Sand Stone.  It was a really good presentation...she did AWESOME

They showed up around 5pm with them was a guest interviewee... The Mayor of Leeds.  It was almost 9pm when i was done filming the interviews... and 11pm by time i was ready to leave.

While i was cleaning up, i realized i had kept the overhead work light on for all the evening interview.  I don't know how that is going to effect the footage. We will have to just wait and see.  

Green Screen Setup

We are officially less then 24hrs away from Interview Day.   I guess its time to set up the green screen.  Its become the catch all area, so i will take a lot of work to get it ready.  With the help of Dave Harris, Marcus and my boys we were able to clear it out quickly.

THE TRANSITION 

Interview Day updates

Just confirmed all of my interviews for Saturday. WOW!!! Its going to be along day.  My first interview begins at 9am and they go straight through until after 8PM.


Today i got a phone call from Eric, the manager of the Silver Reef Museum, he gave the me number of a lady who played Mrs. Grams in a ghosts from the past exhibit they put on in Silver Reef.  She is very knowledgeable about Mrs. Grams the influence she carried in this town.  She has agreed to interview with me on Saturday.

We also got permission from Marc to film his presentation. Marc is a well known geologist who will be speaking at Silver Reef on Saturday. He is going to talk about the town and the geologic anomaly of silver in sandstone.  I am not sure how much of it will make it to the TV show, but it will be great to archive it for later usage.

I got the Music Blues

I am at a cross roads right now and I am not sure how to handle it.  I have very ambitious ideas of what i would like to do with the TV show. One things for sure, I am going to turn this project into a documentary. I would also like to submit to into some film festivals. 

The problem I foresee with this idea is the music i decide to use.  Under the license of Dixie State University, i can legally use almost any song i desire. However, once i show the film outside of the Collage I am no longer protected by the DSU umbrella. For that reason alone, i am tempted to produce an original score to circumvent this problem all together. 


I only have one question. How in the world do you go about creating an original score? 

Intervies are Scheduled

I am pleased to announce that we have all of our interviews scheduled!!!

This is not our green screen, but it looks very similar

We will be filming them on the Feb 22nd.  Its going to be a long day!!!!  I have scheduled back to back interviews in Studio B beginning at 9am and ending at 8pm. We are going to be filming on the green screen.  I am really excited about this. I have never really had a chance to work with the green screen before and we are donating all the footage to the Washington County Historical Society. Since it will be shot on a green screen, it can be used countless time by simply changing the background.

Cosmopolitan in Silver Reef

There will also be a geologist, Marc Deshowitz, speaking at the Cosmopolitan located at Silver Reef that morning.  My co producer Ashlee will be filming his speech and then filming an interview after. Here is a link from the spectrum about the event: http://www.thespectrum.com/article/20140212/NEWS01/302120011/Learn-about-geology-old-mining-area

Jerry Anderson

 We are also planning on her conducting an interview with Jerry Anderson, who lives in Silver Reef and is well known for is sculptures and artwork of Silver Reef. While she is there she will also be filming b-roll of Silver Reef, china town, The cemetery, The land scape, and the old mining equipment that is scattered about.

The Wells Fargo Stage Coach

I have an opportunity to possibly get the Wells Fargo Stage coach to use during one of our shoots. I am very excited about this. We have a lot of ideas on how we will utilize the footage.

We are hopping to use the stage coach, first and foremost, as part of the Charlie Parkhurst story. We would also like to get some footage of the coach being pulled through the desert by horses and driven by an actor dressed in costume similar to what a stage coach driver would have looked like in the late 1800's. 

Some other ideas we entertaining are using the coach as a prop when we talk about the Wells Fargo Building, and in the opening introduction of the TV show. If used in the introduction, we would have our narrator in the coach. The coach being pulled by horse. The coach would pull up in front of the wells fargo building and stop. The narrator would then get out of the coach to begin the introduction. 

Interview with Karen Kondazian, The author of "The Whip"

Lady Luck is shining on us!!! Karen Kondazian, author of The Whip, has agreed to film an interview in LA and send it to us for the TV Show.
   

Charlie Parkhurst and The Whip

CHARLIE PARKHURST 

The Story of Charlie Parkhurst, a very famous stage coach driver for Wells Fargo. This story quickly emerged as on of the signature stories for the show. During the Silver Reef tour we learned of a book about Charlie and then advised to contact the author for an interview.







The Book was called "The Whip" written by Karen Kondazian's.  This sounded simple enough, until we learned that Karen lived in the L.A. area. (Did i mention that our budget for this TV show is practically zero)  

A BIG thanks to Washington County Historical Society for all thier help

Today i was invited by Dick Kohler, to attended the Washington County Historical Society's monthly ‎  The society consists of people in the community who maintain historical sites for county and/or are local historian. During the meeting, i was able to speak with the committee members about the Silver Reef TV Project. They were very receptive of it and are willing to help out as much as possible.

Their website is: www.wchsmn.org/

I THINK I FOUND MY INTERVIEWEES!!! YEAH 

After the meeting, I was given then names of 10 people the society considered experts on the Folklore and History of Silver Reef.   I was also told about an interview Dixie State University filmed of a Archeologist Professor at Penn who has studied Silver Reef for over 30 year, and has performed numerous digs in Silver Reef.  That interview plus Karen's gives me 12 interviews I will have to choose from for our one hour show...

This was by far my biggest worry so far.  I was afraid i was not going to have enough variety in my interviewees.  I have watched historical documentary before where they only interview two or three experts. Then use multiple clips the same people... I didn't want this show to be like that.  I believe that variety will not only substantiate the folklore, but move the show along at a much faster pace. 

This month has been AWESOME: we were able to 

• get approval for the TV show, 
• lock down the topics, 
• create a list of potential interviewees 
• gain access to all pictures, papers, documents and oral interviews collected by the WCHS and affiliated resources.

Goal for February:  

1. Schedule and film all interviews 
2. begin using the interviews to piece together a working story line for the Show
3. Begin collecting

• Music
• Sound effects
• B-roll 
• VO material.

Field Trip to Silver Reef

Headed out to Silver Reef to film a tour of the museum and snap some pictures of the local scenery.  our idea was two fold, It was to get a better understanding of the Silver Reef and the material we truly had to work with.  and get a feel for what challenges we would face producing this show.  So I and my co producer Ashlee set out to explore silver reef.

We really didn't know what to expect. Neither of us had ever really explored Silver Reef before. I remember eating at the Cosmopolitan when it was a restaurant a few years ago, but other then that, I had a goal but no real expectations for the day. 

Our goal: Identify 7 or 8 of the most interesting and attention grabbing folk, history stories that could capture the interest of our audience. Our audience:  First and for most it is Washington and Iron County. Then Utah and Victorian era historians.

 After all, they would be the ones watching the TV show. We will use those stories as the outline to basis TV show on. 

SUCCESS: 

 To day was great.  Ashlee took about 50 really good pictures of the area and i filmed a 3.5 hours interview on Silver Reef.  We were able to sift through about 30 or 40 topics and narrow them down to 7 or 8.  Here are the stories we selected.

Next Step: Research and Interviews.

An Introduction to Folklore and Silver Reef

Eric Fleming
(Resident Hebestorian)

Silver Reef Museum
Wells Fargo Express Building

"I'm not a historian but rather a hebestorian" 

-Eric Fleming

                                                          (Hebestorian: He be tellin' stories)

We had two visitors come to our Television Production Class today to pitch an idea for possible television show.  Eric Fleming - who heads up the Silver Reef Museum and Dick Kohler - Chairman for the Washington County Historical Society (http://wchsutah.org)

John Kemple

Their idea was to produce a TV show that focuses on local folklore for of a ghost town called Silver Reef.  Silver Reef is particularly interesting because it is one of the few places in the world where silver was discovered in sandstone by John Kemple in 1886.  By 1878 Silver Reef was booming. The desire to strike it rich attracted many  Irish, Cornish and Chinese immigrants, referred to my the Mormons as "gentiles", into an already heavily influenced Mormon culture

Silver Reef 1880's

At on time, Silver Reef was the largest town in Washington County.  At it's
height, Silver Reef boasted nearly a dozen mines, six ore processing mills, retail stores, 16 saloons, hotels, banks, a school, Wells Fargo express office and other such amenities.

It was also unquestionably the liveliest town in Washington County.  There were lynchings, murders, gambling fights and anything else you might read about in great western novels.   Despite great differences between the Mormons and the gentiles they formed mutually dependent relationships. The Mormons had fresh produce and live stock and the minors had cash.

Bart Anderson aka "Ranger

The other reason they wanted us to produce this this TV show was partly pay homage to a local celebrity story teller and Park Ranger Bart Anderson aka "Ranger Bart." Bart was a story teller. Bart became an expert on the history of Southern Utah. His stores have become legendary.  "Ranger Bart passed away on  March 23.  They felt that a television show about the folk history and stories would be a great way to pay homage to the man who, for Decades keep these very stores alive.

I was quickly moved by their presentation and the idea of preserving folklore. I immediately started thinking of ways we could pull this project off.  Since that meeting, I have taken on a producer roll for this show.

Together, with the help of my co producer Ashlee Freer are cooking up something spectacular....