WWII Veteran Video completed
I finally completed the video I made as a gift for a local WWII veteran. I shot it waaayy back in March ‘05, after meeting “my” veteran at a production I was doing for Dar’s Credit Union (he was one of the founding members). The man, Bill Herring, was in the storied Tenth Mountain Division, seeing combat as a rifleman, helping his Division break through the Wehrmacht’s Gothic Line in Italy, 1945.
Mr. Herring was a delight to interview, his memories still tack-sharp, providing vivid details from exactly 60 years prior to the interview. Along with 70 minutes or so of interview captured during one very long night of shooting, he provided me with several mementos from his scrapbook to photograph or scan to include in the piece… snapshots, newspaper clippings, drawings, postcards, even actual shrapnel pieces from German artillery. Regrettably, he never showed me his most-prized possession: a German Luger pistol, although I did scan the requisition papers for it.
Along with what he provided, I was able to download hundreds of images from the Tenth Mountain Division photographic archive on the Denver Public Library’s Western History Collection. I also combed the photo archives of the online National Archives and the Library of Congress Veteran’s History Project site, among others. I also found some old newsreel footage, and purchased some others as a DVD box set off of eBay.
We will contribute the interview portion of the piece to the Veteran’s History Project for safekeeping and witness to future generations this one man’s story… among millions.
Our whole family presented the finished piece to Mr. Herring on Christmas Eve, and we watched it all, along with his wife, and daughter who was visiting him from Iowa. The kids made him “Thank You for Serving” cards, which will no doubt join the clippings in his “Soldier’s Scrapbook”.
I have a few DVD copies of the piece available, free for the asking. As a WWII buff, I find all of this fascinating… someone else might take a few sittings to get through the whole thing. For the “Reader’s Digest condensed” types: here’s a ~9 minute piece of snippets from the DVD (Windows Media ~40MB).