San Antonio Project-A Look at the first day

July 8, 2007 This is the first production blog for what I call "The San Antonio Project". This project is headed by my friend Mark Sanderson, and we are making a documentary about the history of the LDS Church in the San Antonio area. So after church ended in Austin, Mark, Tony Lewis, and myself met at Rodd Simonsens house. After eating Rodd's homemade tator-tot casserole (the tots were still cold, and the hamburger wasn't cooked all the way, but we still ate it cause we were hungry). We were running a little late because Rodd had to make one last minute trip to RadioShack to pick up another lavalier mic. The ride down to San An was fairly uneventful except for the part where this guy preceded to flip us off multiple times, always driving up to the side of us, flipped the bird, fell back, speed up to the side of us, repeat . . . oh wait, again . . . I found it rather humorous, I tried to get it on my camcorder put it turned out to be in vain. We got to San An, and one restaurant that we have already made plans to eat at was "Henry's Puffy Taco" Why, you may ask, because its a restaurant called "Henry's Puffy Taco"!!!
The people we were interviewing were Sis. Norman, and her sister Sis. Thompson, who were daughters of the first stake president of San Antonio. Set up took about 45 minutes, we had worked the setup and experimented with lighting the day before, having to make trips to Wal-Mart and Home Depot. We came up with a good set up but we didn't know how it would look in the Norman's home. Lighting consisted of a few reading lamps from Wal-Mart clipped on mic stands with gels and diffusion paper taped onto them. The miracle about it was that I checked the monitor after we set it up and the lighting looked beautiful! I was pleasantly surprised . . .
The interview went really well, I manned the camera, Rodd monitored the audio, Tony took photographs when he could, Ashley supervised as production manager, and Mark interviewed. The interview went really well, and at the end the two sisters bore their testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel. The Spirit was very strong in the home, and we stayed after we took everything down and hung out with the family for a little bit. We ate sandwiches at Rodd's brother's house and then we headed back for Austin after a triumphant day of filming . . .