The Great War In The Air

rainbase · 6 August 2006, 08:04 AM

Hi folks. A couple years ago, I wrote and produced a four-plus hour documentary with the above title. By trade, I'm a bassplayer and restaurant/nightclub owner, but like so many of you, have been fascinated by this subject since I was very young.

My film project was written and produced over a period of nine months and I held a public premier in my club. At the event I showed selections from the film which I introduced and there followed a lively Q&A with the audience. A couple of the regional newspapers covered the event.

Now, here's the cool part. I'd expected maybe a handful of people to actually show up at my restaurant for this. Instead, what happened absolutely floored me. More than 100 people turned up to see my work. There were men and women, young people and old timers. It really warmed my heart how much interest there semed to be up here in northeastern Connecticut about the aces of the first worldwar. When it was over, virtually everyone bought a copy of the two dvd set. For months afterwards, people wandered in to buy a copy of the film they'd heard about.

Anyways, now I'm onto other projects and am giving my film away for free to anyone who's interested. I've begun uploading segments to www.youtube.com and if you run a search on "Great War In The Air" my film selections will be turning up. Eventually the entire film will be posted, so please help yourself...

While my movie was designed to work for the layman, I'd certainly be interested in getting any feedback from you folks who share this passion. I'm pretty comfortable with my research and facts, but know there's always room for a mistake to slip through my QC'ing.... so please let me know if you find anything glaringly wrong. Although I only joined here today, I've been coming to read the messege boards for ages.. I LOVE this place.

So thanks for you time... Peace!

- Jan Goldstein

6 August 2006, 12:45 PM

I only watched

the segment about the last days of the Baron

. It was good. I didn't notice any historical errors, but there are a couple little 'artistic' things that I'll point out if I may:

Tone of voice: it was a little 'two-toned', with each sentence seemingly ending in either of two tones, though the content of the video was written pretty well.

Music: That music was a little over-used I thought, and would have been better if you had read some lines as the music played in the background, and then silence as the music played and the camera slowly panned a picture. Maybe a little bit more variety in the musical realm as well.

Pronunciation of Richthofen: I'm used to 'Rik-tawfin', though that is probably incorrect. Rish-tawfin wasn't as much to my liking, though that is quite subjective.

But other than that, well done I thought. Great pictures. Definitely a great thing for a rainy day (don't mean that in a bad way).

Overall it was good, and I'd like to own the whole 4 hour history of the air war one day.

rainbase · 6 August 2006, 01:20 PM

Yeah, I got stuck into doing the narration myself. I'd hoped to have someone with a really good voice do it, but since all the audio was recorded in the soundbooth of my restaurant it had to be done late night when the club was quiet. In the end it was either do it myself or not get it done. While not talking in a monotone I tried to be a "neutral" sounding as I could.

The music throughout the whole series comes from classical recordings. Ever section has different music. I opted not to use period music as most of that has vocals and the quality can be really sketchy. I love your idea about artistic pauses. I actually made the choice to not use to much of that. There was just to much material to cover that I really felt I didn't have that luxery. I joke that my film is like a British documentary; it's very dense with information and I don't backtrack (like in many american films where they give you far less facts and repeat them over and over).

The Richthofen pronounciation... a hard or soft "ch"? In Germany, as a rule of thumb, go north and the sounds harden; go south and they soften. As an american I had to decide which way to go... and headed so I south, heh heh. For the french pronounciations I consulted a french-speaking Danish buddy who was visiting and then wrote them all out phonetically. We'll see how that flys with the folks in the know....

A quick note on the pictures. These almost all come from books in my personal library. Ive amassed a pretty good collection in recent years and made about 1500 scans while doing this project. I really strove to be as painstaking as I could in matching them to the story. Obviously,there's no way to have an actual picture about every event described, but I think I did a pretty good job "faking it". (there are a couple blunders I've since caught: the distinct line of a Spad fuselage in a hanger in the background BERFORE I've introduced this type, and a Neiuport 17 on a flight line when we're still on "Bebes"... oh well... I usually worked pretty late at night).

Anyways, thanks again for responding. I hope you'll watch more of my film when you have the time. I appreciate it. Peace.

6 August 2006, 05:25 PM

Will do.

And Magee is the name of the WW11 pilot who wrote that poem.

Polovski · 10 August 2006, 10:51 AM

Thanks for posting the movie rainbase. Looks good. Anyone know what codecs your tube uses, I get video but no sound from there on IE or Firefox. Other sites etc play fine, I have allowed java scripts on there etc?

rainbase · 13 August 2006, 05:05 AM

All the videos I've posted seem to be running great for me. Sorry you're not getting the sound.

Since I've started putting this film up, I've gotten a good amount of messeges and requests for more of it. As of today I've uploaded another 10 sequences of "The Great War In The Air". All of the video to Part @ (1916) is now online. Peace.

Polovski · 13 August 2006, 04:41 PM

Thanks rainbase, I found a fix for no sound in Flash movies.. using K-Lite codecs there's a config tool - this has an option to fix "no sound" problems and it worked

Now I can enjoy your movie clips.

One thing, is it possible to rename the movies with the part number so I can watch them in order? Or post a list somewhere of the correct order to watch - just a thought. Once again thanks for your work on the documentary and for posting it!

rainbase · 14 August 2006, 03:07 AM

..I'm delighted that you figured out how to fix your sound problems. This will be really helpful should the problem occur with others. I appreciate it.

When I came in last night and read your suggestion about numbering my segments it really put a big smile on my face. I actually did that yesterday morning when I'd uploaded the new pieces. I've added the numbering system I originally used to put this all together. It was designed as four approximately 1 hour segments (I've done a lot of public access TV programming here and figured it would format nicely that way) : 1914/1915, 1916, 1917 & 1918. All of 1916 is posted online now and is numbered 201-216.

I've noticed that when I upload to youtube.com it takes about a day for the pieces to show up in search, including any changes I make. I'm happy to report that as of this morning all the clips I've posted are showing up and numbered!

The only thing that's a little annoying is that I can't change the order they appear in search, so you do have to bounce around a bit to view them in sequence. If I was on the ball I would have posted the whole damn movie sequencially from back to front and it would have come up in search perfectly in order. Oh well, live and learn. (I originally hadn't planned to show it all, just a few selected clips and was "bouncing around"). One nice thing about youtube is that they give me the code to embed on my own webpage so I can have this stuff streaming on my own site - www.raindesert.com Once I get it all up I can lay it out in order for easy viewing.

That said, I'll be adding new segments this morning. Thanks, Polovski. Enjoy!

GregorySharp · 14 August 2006, 08:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rainbase

I've noticed that when I upload to youtube.com it takes about a day for the pieces to show up in search, including any changes I make. I'm happy to report that as of this morning all the clips I've posted are showing up and numbered!

From what I read, what ever you upload is rendered again to youtube's preferred compression and resolution.

It seems they know what they are doing too, because everything I’ve watched there has played flawlessly.

Thank you for posting them on youtube, Rainbase.

Polovski · 14 August 2006, 11:32 AM

Great stuff rainbase thanks for the renaming, I'll enjoy going through that now in order without fear of missing things

YouTube is pretty smart really, just saw a TV news article on real TV, about the 78 year old posting his video blogs on there and being very popular.. people's TV has arrived