September 11, 2009

We are working towards having everything ready for the broadcast premiere on KQED Thursday evenings October 8 and 15 from 8-10pm.  The final tape masters are done and only the DVD offer and closed captioning remain — both of which are scheduled to be done the week of September 14.  Our newest underwriters include the Environmental Protection Agency, Region IX and First Republic Bank, as we continue to raise the completion funding for educational outreach, a rebuilt and soon to be greatly expanded website and post-production.  This includes making a five minute teaser for the series to run on kiosks at the Embarcadero BART station and Ferry Building, a 23 minute video for the Caltrans public information center at the foot of the Bay Bridge in Oakland and 60 minute highlight versions for use at public presentations around the Bay Area.

The Rolling Orange team was over Friday putting finishing touches on the updated website, which now includes five video segments from the series, although a few formatting issues remain to be straightened out.  We also discussed ideas for the next phase of the website upgrade which is focused on educational outreach and will include downloadable curriculum material and video segments for teachers.  It is also planned to be an interactive site, with provisions for the public to send in comments, pictures and video about their relationship with San Francisco Bay.

Plans for the manufacturing and distribution of the Saving the Bay DVD were also finalized Friday and there should be a link for pre-orders on the website by next Friday September 18th.  It will be a two disc set.

The public relations effort led by Scott, Meredith and Yoon at KQED is in full force and hundreds of colorful Saving the Bay posters are being put up around the Bay Area.  There are also postcards — electronic and paper — being widely distributed.  The first promos are running on KQED and several ads are in the works.  A two minute tape is also being distributed nationwide to run on the banks of HDTV screens found in electronics retailers such as Best Buy, Costco and WalMart.

One last post late this evening:  the new Saving the Bay Facebook page is now up and we hope to have well over 1,000 fans by the first air date.  If you’re on Facebook, please join in and become a fan!

The California Hornblower embarked from Pier 3 carrying over 240 Saving the Bay supporters on April 20 for a Bay Cruise and sneak preview of the series.  The event was very successful because of the the energy and enthusiasm exhibited by the environmental consulting firm ESA, who combined financial support for the project with a celebration of their 40 years of service.

A big thank you is also due Hornblower Cruises & Events, who made the evening possible by largely contributing the boat and helping with logistics.  Wine was provided courtesy of Keith Rutz and Rutz Cellars (www.rutzcellars.com).  Food was generously donated by several of San Francisco’s leading restaurants:

Enjoy some pictures from the cruise — it was a balmy 80* on the Bay that evening.

ESA, along with our partners, KQED and Hornblower Cruises and Events, hosted a fund raising event for Saving the Bay and to mark ESA’s 40 Years in restoring and balancing the environmental and community values of the Bay. Passengers watch the 17 minute preview as the cruise gets underway!

Heading into a beautiful Golden Gate sunset…

Fresh cebiche courtesy of La Mar Cebicheria, one of 11 contributing restaurants

Executive Producer Ron Blatman with ESA president Gary Oates

The California Hornblower courtesy of Hornblower Yachts & Cruises.

Some of the over 200 guests enjoying food, drink and the preview of the film.

ESA SF Bay regional vice president Ellen Cross.

BCDC Executive Director Will Travis kidding about standing in for Robert Redford.

Shimmering San Francisco skyline on a spectacular 80 degree evening on the Bay.

Actor, and Academy Award winning Director, Robert Redford came to Command Productions in Sausalito to continue narration work on the series on March 25. Meeting and working alongside him were Executive Producer Ron Blatman, Writer and Producer Miles Saunders, Editor Blair Gershkow, and Composer Mitchell Covington (photographs by Internet Content Specialist Christopher MacDonald).

Redford settles in for work at Command Studios.

Ron Blatman and Blair Gershkow review and make changes to scripting.

Robert Redford working directly with Command Production’s Rob Dickson (L) and Saving the Bay’s Miles Saunders (R) in the sound booth.

Photographer Morgan Schmidt-Feng shoots at Mission Dolores in San Francisco.

Aerial Photographer Robert Campbell and Executive Producer Ron Blatman in Sonoma, January 2009.

Photographer John Kabalkalis and crew at home of Catherine and Clark Kerr, El Cerrito, February 2009.

As we move towards completion, we recently brought the editing suite down to San Francisco to expedite the editing process. Expert editor Jim Joy has been working diligently to transfer the legion of media files from our Media 100 system to a new Avid system. This dovetails with KQED’s equipment, ultimately saving us time, money and most importantly, possible headaches. Jim is being assisted by a team of technical wizards — most notably Steve Ireland as well as Steve McConnell, John DeGroot and the people at Cutting Edge in SF.

We now have an 8 minute video preview from the first part of the first episode on about 20 websites thanks to Christopher MacDonald at Azotus Cafe (http://www.azotuscafe.com). Christopher is working to increase our visibility on the web and the preview can be found on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0sY37CUK1k&feature=related.

Meanwhile, we keep layering visual material into the programs. A special thank you goes to photographer Dennis Anderson who is generously letting us use several colorful underwater shots he took for his book Hidden Treasures of San Francisco Bay (Heyday Books, 2003). Dennis even offered to scout the Bay for underwater video shooting locations but his stills are so visually arresting we decided they would work as well if not better than difficult to get video. He has about 500 copies of Treasures left and can be reached at www.bluewaterpictures.com or www.dandersonphoto.com.

Mitchell Covington has just about completed the music score and Richard Tsai at Field of Vision continues creating late graphic additions (mostly maps and vanished landscapes) as well as rendering more involved photo-realistic animations of the Bay’s formation approximately 10,000 years ago.

Thanks also to Veronica Sanchez, who arranged our most recent shoot aboard the ferry boat Peralta running between San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda. We interviewed Captain Dushawn Crawford as he piloted the ferry back and forth across the Bay in a short segment to complement our existing piece on the 1920s heyday of Bay ferries.

Now that the skies are clearing for winter and the first rains have helped turn Bay Area hills green, we are planning another round of aerial photography from both a helicopter, and for higher altitude shots, a DC-3. We also have a few targeted shoots around the Bay left to complete.

And yet one more thank you, this time to Brian Fisher at DVD Copycat for donating duplicates of our rough cuts. Brian, who has helped us since making duplicates of our trailer back in 2005, can be found at www.dvdcopycat.com.

We just completed a successful shoot aboard the Alma, an 1891 scow schooner still plying the Bay, this time for the San Francisco National Maritime Historic Park. Captain Al Lutz told great stories about the history of the Alma, which worked commercially until 1957. This complements our earlier shoot of the Grace Quan, a newly built redwood junk of the kind used by Chinese shrimpers in the very late 1800s and also sailing the Bay under the stewardship of the National Maritime Park.

Coming up are photo essays of old growth redwoods and scenes from the houses of two of the three women in the East Bay hills who began the Save the Bay movement in 1961. We also got a great colorized photo of former SF Chronicle environmental writer Harold Gilliam from his 1939 UCLA yearbook. In addition to appearing several times in the program as an eyewitness chronicler of the Save the Bay campaign, Harold also helps open our World War II segment by describing the atmosphere on the UC Berkeley campus in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Mitchell Covington, our music maestro, is just about done scoring the third of four programs and graphics guru Richard Tsai is busy working on a bevy of “extra” graphics we have added because they 1) help explain the narrative well and 2) they look good.

We continue editing and acquiring high resolution images to fill holes in the story line. We also continue to diligently seek completion funding.

In July, we successfully completed our second recording with narrator Robert Redford in Santa Monica. All four programs have their complete narration added and we continue to add music sections as they are being scored — we’re well into the third hour of music now. Editing of photos, maps and drawings continues as we are almost done acquiring high resolution images to be put into the production timeline. As we continue towards completion, we decided to upgrade our already extensive graphics palette — over a dozen new 2D and 3D animations and maps are in the process of being added.

While we wait for the skies to clear for the aerial shots still needed, several other shoots have occurred or have been scheduled including at two houses in the East Bay hills central to the Saving the Bay story of the 1960s, aboard the SF National Maritime Historic Park’s Alma scow schooner (dating back to 1891) and at Missions Dolores and San Jose as part of a photo essay in our Missions section of the first program. Another upcoming shoot is at the South Bay Salt Ponds restoration, where activity is planned to begin sometime in September.

New underwriters include Forest City Development as we continue to seek completion funding. Please go to the Donate button on the left side of the website’s navigation bar or send a check to KQED referencing Saving the Bay — all contributions are tax deductible.

We are working feverishly on refining all four hours of programs at once — adding yet more pictures, film footage, motion and still graphics and sound effects. The fifth round of cuts will be available for review the first week of July. We are also evaluating all the script changes as Robert Redford is scheduled to record the final narration tracks in Santa Monica also in July. While all the above preparation continues, Mitchell Covington is turning out volumes of music for the series score. Many of our planned shoots the past week have been affected by the smoky haze that has engulfed the entire Bay Area. We were also hoping to go up for higher altitude aerial shots in a DC-3 but the smoky skies have put that on hold.

As for content, late additions to the script include a segment on Delta salmon runs, a brief look at the refurbished Ferry Building and ferry service, coverage of the recent oil spill and enhanced pieces on Indian shellmounds, invasive species and oaks.

A new addition to the team is Christopher MacDonald, who is working on this website and starting a viral marketing campaign as we continue to seek completion funds — please help support the project either by going to the Donate page or through KQED (please make sure to note Saving the Bay). New underwriters include environmental consulting firm ESA, the Koret Foundation, Potrero Nuevo Fund and Laura and John Fisher.

We’ve just completed our third round of rough cuts for all four one hour programs and have clearly identified the remaining “holes” still in need of images. The past 90 days have seen the insertion of hundreds of still images (photos, drawings, lithographs, maps), several minutes of color and black/white historic film footage (from newsreels, news programs, independent films) and animated graphics (created by our graphics guru Richard Tsai). Our sources include institutions around the country — from the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and the Theodore Roosevelt Association on Long Island to the National Archives and Library of Congress in Washington to the Society of California Pioneers, California Historical Society and National Maritime Museum in San Francisco. A full listing of all our generous image providers will be available upon completion this fall.

Additional aerial shooting was completed — some of it covering the Central Valley — although we still need to go up at least one more time. We are also working on sound design and sound effects which are being added as needed. KQED has begun testing the interfaces between our respective editing systems as we move closer to delivering edited programs for them to engineer for broadcast.

Due to the scope of the project, we are still raising completion funding so please help support completion of Saving the Bay by going to the Donate button on the left side of the navigation bar. All funds go through KQED/Northern California Public Broadcasting and are tax-deductible charitable donations.

We continue in post-production and are working to refine four hours of rough cuts completed in November. Several pieces are moving ahead at once including music scoring, animated graphics and acquisition and insertion of hundreds of still images as well as lots of historic film footage. We also recorded two more actors’ voices in Sacramento for readings of journals, diaries and book passages and have begun adding natural sound to the four programs.

The Bancroft Library in Berkeley has been heroic in helping us identify hundreds of historic images – photos, prints, paintings, drawings, maps and journals – being used in the programs. And all of this with smiles!

After a final review the script underwent some last minute tweaks: The first section of Episode 4, focusing on threats to the Bay during the post World War II boom years, is now the last section of Episode 3 (its original location). Episode 4 opens with the Bay in peril around 1960 due to seemingly unlimited development potential and increased fouling of the waters from raw sewage, expansive garbage dumps and industrial pollution. We also added a section in Episode 3 about how the Port of Oakland is largely a man-made creation going back to the late 19th century.

Among our recent film shoots the Army Corps of Engineers arranged for an excellent tour of the Port of Oakland dredging project where shipping channels are being dug to 50 feet to accommodate the latest container ships. The dredge material is then loaded onto huge barges which head up to a pumping station in the middle of San Pablo Bay. The material is then offloaded into a pipeline running seven miles to shore at the former Hamilton Field where it is being used to re-create tidal wetlands on what were recently airport runways. Completing the circle, the runways were originally built over diked wetlands.

We are still raising completion funding so please help support completion of Saving the Bay by going to the Donate button on the left side of the navigation bar. All funds go through KQED/Northern California Public Broadcasting and are tax-deductible charitable donations.