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Agricultural oral history program I worked on
by Mark Suszko
on
Nov 4, 2009 at 3:34:10 pm |
I am very proud to have been a part of this project, working with several teams all collecting oral histories on video of various farmers and growers in Illinois. The clips have been put into an online accessible database, which should make it easier for documentarians to locate footage for any agriculture-related story they want to tell. The interviews run the gamut from centennial farmers (have held the land in the family for over 100 years) to modern entrepreneurs raising tilapia industrially. We have the guy who basically invented modern hog raising, as well as a former US Ag secretary under Reagan. Beekeepers and orchard growers. A little bit of everything. We also got two days worth of one on ones with the legendary Orion Samuelson, who has seen and reported on a LOT of ag history himself. We shot interviews in the studio, and on location at their homes and in the fields and barns, corrals and sheds.
Anyway, here's a newspaper article about it:
http://www.sj-r.com/news/x933815773/Two-museums-unveil-oral-histories-of-Il...'>
http://www.sj-r.com/news/x933815773/Two-museums-unveil-oral-histories-of-Il...
and here is just a direct link to the site that hosts the clips:
http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/welcome'>
http://avbarn.museum.state.il.us/welcome
If you find clips you like for making a documentary, you can use the contact page to get in touch with the curators and get a DVD of all the footage. The stuff I shot was all done two-camera, to give you flexibility in your edit. I expect that if your project goes further based on the DVD footage, the archivists will then do a clone of the footage to tape for you. I think eventually they will dub to bluray but for now it is still tape.
The stories all have some Illinois perspective but many are of unversal utility for scholarly research endeavors or, if you want to tell stories about how we grew our food, how we do it now, and how that has changed and changed us over time... or what the food future holds for us. Many sets include useful b-roll of things like harvesting and processing various crops and feeding animals, etc.
If you wind up using any of this for a project, I would sure like to hear from you. Consult the site curators as to fees, though my impression is that at the moment it is being provided as public domain footage except for incidental dub/ship costs and use may require a screen credit. Confirm such things directly with the curators, as that is not my area of expertise.
Hope you find something interesting there, my favorite may be the tilapia fish farm. How they keep the combine from rusting is amazing:-)
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