Holiday Break Brings Trip to USHMM
Post date: Jan 3, 2011 3:29:18 PM
My name is Andrew Valentino. I am a film major at Temple University and a former student of Sean Gaston. I got involved in this project when Sean asked me if I would be interested in helping out with the visual effects for the film (given the fact that I specialize in that area, I jumped at the chance.) Since then I have been primarily communicating with Sean via e-mail and doing test renderings of various effects for photos, maps, and other content from Temple. However, over the winter break, I was offered the chance to go with Sean and Jen to Washington D.C. to film at the Holocaust Museum
as well as going through the Steven Spielberg archive collection for period footage. As before, I jumped at the chance. We left from Berks county at the crack of dawn on December 28th and headed straight for D.C. The schedule was pretty simple: The first day we would tour the museum and assemble a list of what we wanted to film inside, and then spend the rest of the day perusing the archives for usable footage. And that's pretty much how it happened, though we ran into the typical complications like a GPS that didn't know which end was up, as well as a lack of available parking in most of the logical spots in the Capitol Mall. After we had our shot list, we ate in the cafeteria in the Department of Agriculture (which was a pretty appropriate spot in my opinion) then headed for the fifth floor archives. While
Sean and I scanned the footage, Jen was over in another part of the building searching for period photos. The second day was the more stressful one, for the singular reason that we were granted special access by the museum to film before the doors were open to the public, but only had an hour to do so. Not wanting to send the school's camera equipment through the metal detector for fear that the magnetic fields would erase any stored data, we had our equipment sniffed out by a K-9 explosives dog before entering the building. Thanks to the shot list we had compiled the day before, we worked with machine-like efficiency for the next hour. When all was said and done, we had filmed
everything we needed to film within the time limit without sacrificing the quality of cinematography. Then we headed right back upstairs to continue looking for appropriate World War II era footage. All in all, it was a very productive trip. Though we did hit a couple problems regarding ambiguous copyright information for some of the footage we found, it is something I am confident we can resolve. We gathered a good deal of valuable b-roll visuals from both our own filming and from the archives that will be an invaluable asset to telling the story of Misa's Fugue.
