Cinebar Productions

11/10/2023

It's pretty amazing how time flies when you're busy. We have constantly been working on the oral history project for the Virginia War Memorial. We are on the downhill hump, but there's still at least a few more months until we are totally finished converting, transcribing and duplicating the first 600 interviews. The group we're working in now is predominately World War II. A lot of fascinating little tidbits that don't make it in the history book. Did you know the battle cry of the men at HIckam Air Force Base in Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor was, "Remember the Snake Bar," after the watering hole was destroyed by a Japanese bomb. As we get ready to leave for the SEMC meeting in Louisville, Sherri is transcribing the story of a female resistance fighter in Belgium. Oh, one more note about SEMC. We'll be introducing our capability to do 360-degree virtual tours. More to come.

05/23/2023

News from the front... First off, we just received word that our two submissions to the Telly Awards both won prizes. A Bronze Telly in the Non-Broadcast History category for "Known But to God: The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Turns 100," and a Silver Telly in the Fund-raising category for "Green Spaces." Both projects were produced for the Virginia War Memorial Foundation, our current client for the oral history project with which we've been in knee deep for some time. Speaking of oral history, that's what we did last week for the Virginia Humanities webinar. They had 163 people sign up, of which 60 logged in to the actual event. It was a little disconcerting talking to a blank laptop screen for an hour, but hopefully, something intelligible came out of it.

05/14/2023

Here is the official announcement at the Virginia Humanities website. Join us if you can.

Virginia Humanities Grants staff invite you to join us for a free virtual worksho with Rich Borenstein and Sherri Staples of Cinebar Productions.

04/28/2023

Couldn't let April slip by without at least one update... yes, we're still knee deep in transcripts for the VA War Memorial Foundation Oral History Project. At times, it has been a challenge fighting through some of the accents to determine the spelling of the multitude locations the veterans were at during World War 2, Korea and Vietnam. Every story has been unique and in many cases, just amazing. The reason we've posted the Virginia Humanities logo is that they have asked us to conduct a webinar on best practices for oral histories on Tuesday, May 16 at 1-2 PM EST. Details and registration will be available at the Virginia Humanities website. We're very excited to be able to share our decades-long experience (geez, we're getting old) on practical methods to acquire useful oral histories. If you know any organizations or groups interested in this, please let them know. Stay tuned for updates.

03/20/2023

As is our usual practice, here are the fellow road warriors from the exhibit hall at VAM. A few veterans, but many new faces.

03/15/2023

Just back from VAM 2023. Yes, we did have a scaled down version of our traditional Hospitality Suite, and everyone who attended had a good time... including watching the Academy Awards. This seemed to be consistent with the rest of the conference, scaled down, but still a good networking forum. The exhibit hall only had half the normal vendors and the overall attendance was also at about half the usual amount, but we still made some new contacts with the prospect of some future work.

03/09/2023

So, we will be exhibiting at the VAM Annual Conference in Harrisonburg this weekend. It will actually be a welcome break from transcribing oral histories... not that we haven't dealt with many fantastic veterans' stories, but it's always good to reconnect with our museum friends.

02/15/2023

Yes, we're still plugging away with transcribing oral histories (more on that later), but we wanted to share a little corporate tale of woe. Last Friday (Feb 10) we were cut off from our Gmail account. Turns out that a year ago Google decided that .com would pay for emails this year... okay, problem was they notified our domain administrator of this and after an interminable time on hold with Google, which by the way, has the worst on-hold music on the planet, we come to find that our administrator is not associated with Cinebar. So after contacting the company that assigned our domain name (located in Melbourne, Australia), the company that hosts the domain (in Reston, VA), we tracked down our administrator in Denver at the company that had originally created our long defunct website nearly 20 years ago. We got the whole thing sorted out in about ten minutes and our email is up and running again after a four-day suspension. Moral of the story: keeping saying, "Talk to a human" when dealing with Google's automated customer service.

01/18/2023

To our many VAM friends… we’ve just been notified by the VAM board that after more than 20 years they want to put an end to the sanctioned Cinebar Hospitality Suite at the annual conference. As it was put to us, it was time to “retire that component.” Evidently, socializing among fellow museum professionals is no longer in vogue, although it was the epitome of diversity, inclusion and equity. All were welcome. All were served. All were kicked out at midnight. Of course, this is a free country, so it is possible that something unsanctioned may occur… stay tuned for developments.

01/03/2023

It's 2023 and we're back! Back to the VA War Memorial Oral History project. Just to provide some frame of reference, to date we have taken 407 video interviews, converted them all to an .mp4 format, created .mp3 audio files for each, have used a computer transcription service to create "rough" transcriptions. We have edited more than 100 into final form (formatted in both Word and as .pdfs) and when we're finished, produce individual DVD copies of each interviewee' (.mp4, .mp3, and transcriptions) for submission to the Library of Congress and National Archives. If all goes to plan we'll be done this summer... a year sooner than the grant anticipated. Now it's back to work.

12/22/2022

Well, 2022 is coming to a crashing end, and as the saying goes, any landing you can walk away from was a good one. We've had an intersting mix of projects this past year, from theTomb of the Unknown Soldier to Transportation Corps Officer Candidate training during Vietnam to an overview of the First Colony Foundation to our marathon (and ongoing) oral history transcription project for the Virginia War Memorial Foundation. Wondering what 2023 might bring? Here's looking to a happy holiday season a great new year.

11/11/2022

This Veteran's Day we're still vigorously transcribing oral histories for the Va War Memorial Foundation, which currently ranges from World War II to what is referred to as the Global War on Terror. We've dealt with some amazing stories including a survivor from the cruiser Indianapolis (think Jaws), to POWs of both the Germans and Japanese (including a Marine captured on Wake Island), to men who fought at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, first advisors into Vietnam, and a Marine in Iraq whose platoon discovered the location of Jessica Lynch (the Army POW, later rescued). And that just scratches the surface. The pictures are from our visit to Northwest Arkansas to attend the Southeastern Museum Conference a couple of weeks ago and feature our fellow road warriors in the exhibit hall. Got preoccupied with the transcripts or they would have been posted sooner.

09/22/2022

As previously mentioned, the second video project we were working on was for the First Colony Foundation. Well, it's done too. It's an overview about their search for the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke Island in North Carolina. It was a bit of a challenge cobbling footage from past documentary shoots into more of a promotional piece. Take a look. Meanwhile, back to transcribing more veteran's oral histories. We've come across some really incredible stories.

An overview of the First Colony Foundation's ongoing efforts to discover the fate of the "Lost Colony" in North Carolina.

09/13/2022

Thought we'd share the recently completed "Green Space" video, which was produced for the Virginia War Memorial Foundation in Richmond, Va. It will be used as part of their campaign to raise money to create a new green space at the VA War Memorial site.

https://youtu.be/lZIyIxdC1MI

08/24/2022

Just taking a slight pause from our video projects and transcriptions to post that we finally loaded the full "Evolution of America: 1619 to Today" to our YouTube channel. Previously, it was only available for viewing from the PBS website, but our broadcast agreement with them has been expired. Just one of those things it took a while to do. The show is still very relevant, especially since "1619" is now a highly charged year, despite being very obscure when this show first aired. We think you will find our take on the subject very objective. If you haven't had the pleasure yet... enjoy.

https://youtu.be/HmC0ulF9Qm8

The story of how four pivotal events that occurred in 1619 Virginia impacted the development of the United States. Originally produced for the 2019 Commemora...

08/09/2022

You might be wondering what's going on at Cinebar... funny you should ask... quite a bit actually. We had mentioned earlier that we were working on a short piece for the First Colony Foundation as an overview of their recent work in the search for the "lost colony" on Roanoke Island and the surrounding area. That will be done in mid-September. We've also picked up two jobs for the Virginia War Memorial Foundation in Richmond. The first is a fund-raising video for a "green space" initiative at their 5-acre location along the James River. That's coming out at the end of this month. The second project is much more intensive. We're transcribing more than 500 oral histories recorded by the War Memorial, which also includes reformatting old video files to the .mp4 standard and creating sets of individual oral histories on DVD for submission to the Library of Congress and National Archives. This is anticipated to be a 9 month project. Of course, that represents less than half of the oral histories in their collection, so there's the possibility this will continue for some time.

05/31/2022

Yesterday, "Known but to God" premiered at the Virginia War Memorial for memorial Day (the first showing at the Army Transportation Museum was essentially rained out due to a tropical downpour). The program is now available publicly at:

https://youtu.be/72cghKaJl4A

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and its continued significance.

05/12/2022

As the image indicates, our "Known but to God" documentary is going to premiere at the US Army Transportation Museum on May 24th. A bit of serendipity played a role in this as I was delivering the final videos for the Museum's Officer Candidate School exhibit and I showed its director the opening of "Known" that I had on my phone. It so happened that their scheduled speaker for one of their Remembrance Week events needed to reschedule, leaving a hole in the program. A quick check with the VA War Memorial Foundation approved this first showing. The Foundation will have its first showing at a Memorial Day breakfast in Richmond. We'll be making it public on YouTube the following day.