The next day after the Concord Village film shoot, Sandra (my wife) and Jonne (my mom) boarded a plane in Knoxville to fly to Atlanta, then on to Prague in the Czech Republic (CZ). My Mom is from Czechoslovakia (which is what it was called back then). The following is short summary of how the trip came about.
Sandra and I have been working on a documentary/biography about mom. We have many good interviews shot on our back porch. While the storytelling is great, the video is all “talking head” which can be quite boring to watch even for nice looking lady like my mom. Sandra and I discussed how nice it would be to take Mom home and film some of the same story telling “on location” which would make for much better video. But Sandra was a school teacher and the new school year was about to begin, and taking off a week for trip to Europe, was not going to be possible until at least next summer. So we had pretty much given up on the idea. As the school year started, Sandra did not get called back for a teaching job. The budget cuts in Knox County schools had affected quite a few teachers. We waited for several weeks, thinking that eventually a slot would open up, but nothing happened. We enrolled in the film class at PSTCC and Sandra decided to work on the “Jonne Project” during the day while she waited for the phone to ring. And then one day, the phone rang.
It was my sister, Ava. She found out she was going to be in Germany for a work related conference for a week in October, and thought it would be a good idea to take mom back to her birthplace to visit. However, Mom didn’t want to go without Sandra and me. This turned out to be a huge blessing that we had actually dreamed about. The month of September was crazy. We had to figure out how to get all of our filming gear on a plane and through customs. We had to find a place to stay and plan out our day trips (what scenes would be shot where). Sandra is a tremendously talented producer. She did all the research of locations and hotels. She even had google maps for location in the CZ. She made several detailed checklists for packing gear and setting up for each shoot.
We bought special camera backpacks for carrying the most fragile gear. Other gear was stored in a big gym type bag. We hauled all this gear to the federal building in downtown Knoxville to the customs office where they meticulously logged each serial number of each piece of gear on a special form. We put copies of the form in each bag to hopefully avoid any problems with customs on either end of the trip. We bought lots of extra DV tapes. We carried 3 cameras (Panasonic DVX100B, Panasonic PVGS90, and a Nikon D90), 2 tri-pods and mono-pod, digital audio field recorder, microphones, head phones, portable video monitor, and the wall-wart chargers and extra batteries and misc. cables. Oh yeah, we took extra clothes too. On Sunday mom’s friend Virginia picked us up in her van and took us to the airport.
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