Today is Friday
Aug 29, 2008
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Local documentary wins award |
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 03, 2008 | | | By Joel Keller
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE
About a year and a half ago, Doris Sinofsky, who lives at Cedar Crest, wanted to honor the World War II and Korean War veterans who live at the retirement community in Pompton Plains. At the same time, Jay Buettner, who runs the on-campus TV studio and production class, was looking for a documentary project for his students.
When the two learned of each other’s interests, a project was born. The result is Our Heroes: The Veterans of Cedar Crest, a documentary that has been winning awards and plaudits ever since it first aired on Channel 6, Cedar Crest’s local television station, on Veterans Day 2007. In March, the documentary won a bronze Telly Award, an industry award that honors the best in local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs.
An exercise in how to make TV
Buettner’s idea behind the project was to give his class, which meets twice a week in the community’s TV studio, the experience of making a documentary that was to air on a cable network. He took submission guidelines from Retirement Living TV, a cable network that’s fully funded by a foundation owned by Erickson, and told the class to follow those rules.
“The point was to show them how complex it is,” he says. “It’s amazing to me that people don’t know how much goes into TV production.” He instructed Sinofsky, who wrote and produced the documentary, and her classmates to consider factors like a specific time limit, copyright-free photos and music, and strong narrative thread.
In fact, the narrative thread was the most important part of the process, according to Sinofsky. Through methods like notices on Channel 6, in the resident newsletter, and by word of mouth, she managed to get 16 men and women to tell their stories about World War II and the Korean War to the cameras. | |
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Recruiting vets all over again
“I went to every table at dinner and asked everyone” if they wanted to tell their stories, she says. Five hours of tape had to be winnowed to a coherent 50-minute documentary, and emphasizing story helped that process along. “Jay’s whole philosophy was (to concentrate on) the story,” said Sinofsky. The editing process took the better part of a year to complete.
Stories run the gamut
The stories ranged from the harrowing to the uplifiting. For instance, the late Tom Lauria was stationed in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese bombed it on December 7, 1941. “His story was one of the most pivotal of the whole show,” says Sinofsky. In fact, Channel 6 featured a separate broadcast with his unedited story on Pearl Harbor Day in 2007.
Carl Ficke, who was in a tank group in Europe, told one of the other pivotal stories. He recalled his “longest day” when he encountered German soldiers while hiding in a farmhouse. “These are movie-type stories,”Sinofsky says. “They all know them so vividly.”
On the opposite end of the war, there was Ed Richards, who was on the U.S.S. Missouri when the Japanese signed the terms of surrender. Richards and two other participants in the documentary, Ed Zuchowski and Tom Cuffari, spoke to a group of high school students from Kinnelon, N.J. on April 10. All three of them are happy they participated in the documentary.
“I felt I did something good for the country, and if I had to do it again, I would,” Zuchowski says of his Pacific tour, which included surviving a torpedo attack on his ship.
Cuffari was in a topsecret “ghost army,” whose job was to fool German forces into believing troops were massing where they were not. “My kids were glad to see the movie,” he says.
Buettner submitted Our Heroes for Telly Award consideration because “I was very proud of Doris and the work she put in” to the documentary. The Telly Award committee considers each entrant on its own merits, not in competition with others, scoring them on a ten-point scale. Our Heroes received between a 7.0 and an 8.9, earning it a Bronze award.
When Sinofsky heard about the award, she was “overwhelmed.” She plans on putting her Telly “right on top of my entertainment center where I can see it every single day.
“My children and grandchildren can’t believe it,” she continues. “One day they’re showing you a camera and editing equipment, then (eventually) you have a finished product you’re proud of. It’s an amazing, amazing thing.”
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