I’m getting ready to head back to Austin after a few weeks in east Texas and I’m happy to report that I have what I need to work on the end credit sequence.

END CREDIT SEQUENCE

Recap from last time: Radio show voice over (VO) will carry forward after the picture fades out. Audio and visual elements must remain true to the fictional world. Film is a visual medium so we’ll need visual elements to augment the audio and help to provide some additional context. The creation of these last new elements involves capturing still images to cut together while the radio station audio plays.

Before the trip, I had poured through all of the archives at the local history room at the local library.  These were articles that had been pulled from local newspapers over the last 40 or so years, a treasure trove of information.  I did all of that before Covid and it’s a good thing I did because when I returned in 2023, all of those documents had been thrown out!!!  I asked the librarian about it and he said that all libraries have to deal with the problem of limited space and were constantly having to decide what to keep and what to throw out.  He also said that they determine this based on what people use. 

So, what if I had started my project in 2023 and no one else had accessed those documents in recent years?  Well, based on their archive methodology, we would be up a creek, no paddle. The librarian then said, “not to worry, it was all anecdotal.”  I told him, in fact the deletions were more comprehensive, everything from the beginning of the recorded  era in the 1970’s up to about 2012.  He postured a little and replied that everything they had tossed was still available through other archive sources such as newspapers.com.  I made the point, “that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”  The locally curated vertical file was more like looking for a needle of a certain color in a pile of needles that had already been pulled from 40 years worth of haystacks.

This is something that any librarian should understand because it’s the core issue of the information age.  It’s the A-B-C’s of the postmodern problematic in a democratic society. Anyone who makes their living in this public knowledge industry should have read the Lyotard essay entitled, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” published in 1979.  I was required to read it with my BS degree and I’m not even in the library services industry.  In it, Lyotard notes that as society cuts funding for libraries and turns to computers to solve the problem of holding vast volumes of information, searchable from your own personal computer, the problem is that your search is only as good as your search terms and how they match up with the keywords encoded by the person doing the archiving.  What if I were looking for information on a subject but didn’t know who the authors were or was unfamiliar with their specialized lexicon (which is typically the case when you are doing research)?  I’d search using the wrong words.  In contrast, a librarian can, through dialogue, point you in the right direction in a fraction of the time, or in this case, hand you a three foot thick vertical file of articles that your city services people had been building for longer than you’ve been alive.

This was clearly an oversight.  Surely the head librarian would not allow information on our local law enforcement agencies to be erased with full knowledge of the loss of such a valuable public resource. She would know that a selective memory would serve to rewrite history, wouldn’t she. My sarcasm is probably making me sound paranoid  but these are the fears and anxieties that drove academia at the dawn of the information age to posit what the future might hold for our future society.

Sorry for the rant. On to good news! I was able to dig through the entire multi-decade record prior to the burning of the library of Alexandria 2.0.  My work here over the last few weeks was to take my typed research, find and make copies of the microfiche archives for use in the film.  I’ve now completed.the task, and the next step is to start popping them on the timeline. (Video Link)

VFX

Before my trip, I was able to reach substantial completion of the VFX!  There’s a little tweaking I need to do before I can check off on it but we’re pretty much there!  I’ll be working on this throughout July which is fine with me because it’s looking to be a hot one back there in central Texas. I don’t plan on going outside much, lol.

DISTRIBUTION / FESTIVALS
Now’s the time to look much closer at the festival list that we’ve curated thus far and pick out the upcoming major festivals and plan the submissions.  More on that later!

*** Thanks for your continued support.