We took a quick flight from Knoxville to Atlanta and there we caught a direct overnight flight to Prague. We were late out of Atlanta due to technical difficulties. When they disconnected the Plane from terminal power, the engines died. Not the best feeling in the world, but we were thankful it happened on the ground instead of in the air. They reconnected the plane and ran through the pre-flight check list again and this time things worked and we pushed back from the terminal and were soon in the air. We arrived in Prague at about 11:30 AM Monday, over an hour late. We had arranged a ride to pick us up and take us to our apartments, but they had given up waiting on us. There were several professional looking shuttle vans for hire so we decided to take a chance. Fortunately, most of the drivers spoke enough English and we had a map to the apartments which helped. By the time we made it to the apartments, the manager had gone to lunch and so we had to wait around on the side walk with our bags of gear. Fortunately it was a quite one-way street with little vehicle or pedestrian traffic. Eventually, the manager returned and we hauled the bags up to our apartments.
Ava flew from Washington DC to Stuttgart, Germany and took the train to Prague. She arrived just after lunch. We rented two apartments, one for mom and Ava, and one for Sandra and me. We took a quick nap then headed out for a short work to a nearby supermarket to stock up. We would later discover that we accidentally bought buttermilk for our breakfast cereal. The labels were not in English. We hung out in the apartments for a while, getting all of gear ready to go (charging batteries, labeling tapes, etc), unpacking our clothes, and just generally resting and trying to get used to the new time zone. We went over our filming plan, which was to travel to 3 to 4 different towns where mom grew up. We would attempt to hit this hard for the first 3 days. If the weather cooperated, and we completed our shot list, then we would have the remaining 3 - 4 days in Prague for site seeing. Later, that evening we went out to eat. Filming would start the next day. The video shows our apartments and the restuarant where we ate.
Prague - our first evening from Jim Walker on Vimeo.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Snow in Knoxville, TN
Here is a quick post about the weather in Knoxville. We had snow today, which rarely happens. Here are some photos and video that I shot at sunset today on the PSTCC campus. Both the video and the still photos were shot with Nikon D90.
Czech Republic Trip – The Back Story
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.
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.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Czech Republic Trip Starts Tomorrow
Tomorrow, I'll start a series of posts on our recent trip to the Czech Republic. In honor of the occasion, I changed my banner graphic at the top of the blog. Hope you like it. See you tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)