“This Happened Here”

In January of 2015, I was contacted by a producer with the Digital Discovery Networks out of San Francisco CA, inquiring if I would be willing to be a part of a documentary they were gearing up to produce on Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain in Niland CA. They were reaching out to me after coming across images on my Flickr account of Leonard and Salvation Mountain that I took when visited there Sept. of 2009.

Digital Discovery Networks is a multi-channel Internet television and digital cable network that creates, produces and distributes Web television shows on niche topics. The documentary was for their Seeker network and was to be featured in the This Happened Here series.

They sent me a link to another documentary they had produced and I felt it would be a cool project to be involved in.

They emailed all the release forms, along with a series of questions they wanted me to answer which would be used in the episode.

I wrote out a script which at first was challenging, because at times, I tend to be long winded.  I realized I couldn’t go through every detail of the day in the story telling, so I had to edit it down.

Once I was comfortable with the script, I then had to record it. The producers were keen on me just speaking into my cellphone and they would edit it from there once I sent them the files.

This whole process was an exercise in just letting go. I must have attempted to record the script at least 30 times. After first, I would stumble a few words in, then I would stumble half way through, towards the the end,  it was just as I was about finished.  I was getting sick of the whole process!!  Knowing that there were stumbles in the recording, I thought ‘oh fuck it” and just sent the recording in.

Last week, I was looking over my Flickr stats and I saw that Laughing Squid out of NYC was linking to my page, I clicked the link and found the video and article about the episode.

Later that day, I received an email from from the producer informing me the episode had been released and where I could find it on YouTube, where it currently has just over 6,900 views.

Here is the original episode of This Happened Here

The episode has been featured on Laughing Squid,   DesignTaxi,  The Omaha-Advertising Agency,

API-Nuzzel,  Gizmodo,  and Museperk.

I still think I sound like a knob and my stumbles are all too obvious. Still, I like the way the folks at Discovery Digital Networks wove their narration, together with my telling of the storyline along with my photographs to create this.

I guess if/when there is a next time, I’ll try to minimize the fuck it’s and work on a smoother delivery of my narration.