America's Mainstreets: Can We Make Travel Part of the Destination Again? from Erin Dorbin on Vimeo.
This documentary is the result of a collaborative student project undertaken by undergraduate and graduate students Erin Dorbin (M.A. History and Media), Eric LaGrange (M.A. Fine Arts), Dale Mattison and Greg Pruden at the University at Albany in the Spring of 2009.
The group set out to explore the histories of routes 20 & 9 in New York state as case studies to explain how America's changing travel patterns in the second half of the 20th century altered the landscapes along the country's two-lane highways. We were also interested in exploring how these changes in travel adversely impacted the small localized economies along these routes that had once been dependent on tourism dollars to sustain themselves.
Erin Dorbin and Eric LaGrange are responsible for the completion of the Route 20 portion of the project, while Dale Mattison and Greg Pruden completed the Route 9/Frontier Town section of the documentary. Erin and Eric also have plans to continue the Route 20 portion of the documentary over the coming year.
This video is our first edit at 22 minutes for the purposes of our final class assignment. Three of us in the group had never worked with Final Cut Pro before and one of us had no idea how to use a video camera, but we figured it out (for the most part) and made it happen! Enjoy!
7 comments:
i am excited to see this. i am currently at work so i can't watch the entire thing right now...will later tonite when i get home.
Hope you like it...it's just the first rough edit.
i want to see all of that cherry valley turnpike map...taht is amazing. all the old footage is great. i think you did a really good job if that's the first edit.
i kind of wish that you would linger longer on some of the old postcards...the edits are really fast...but it could be that my eyes are getting old.
i thought it was really engaging.
No, you are right, the edits are fast and that's something we need to slow down. The pacing of the music and narration at the beginning was so fast that I put the images accordingly and you only catch a glimpse of some of them as a result. Also, because of time constraints we REALLY compacted the history portion and relied a lot on narration to convey a large amount info to the view. That will be expanded and slowed down in the future too. Captions will also be added later for some images because they may not make sense to those who don't know the area. Thanks a lot for watching and for the feedback.
This was very well done, and I gave your video a feature on my US 20 blog, here:
http://usroutetwenty.blogspot.com/2009/06/us-route-20-americas-mainstreets-video.html
Thanks for giving me a heads up - there are lots of US 20 fans out there who will appreciate your work!
I noticed you are into Diners! And Route 20! Kindred Spirits! If you do not have a copy of the book, "Diners of New York" please send me a message at my guestbook at nydiners.com
You deserve a copy for what you have done with your blog!
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