Image of the week: April 11, 2012

We've been taking so many photos while working on the film, and we've acquired some great vintage photos of the fair, so we've decided to share them with you here each week. We'll begin with this great vintage slide from Alan Lovitch, showing the exterior of DuPont's World of Chemistry as it appeared at the fair in 1964. Inside, a show we would call multimedia, dazzled as live dancers interacted with projected dancers on a series of moving panels. But that's a story for another day. Note the light fixtures around the building, mimicking molecules:

Our first teaser trailer for After The Fair

I know many of you have waited a long time, but we can finally share our first short, or "teaser" trailer for the film. Let me know what you think:

The surprising challenge to making After The Fair

When you map out a project like this, you try to anticipate the challenges you could face. For this film, I assumed we would have a tough time finding people who would talk about the fair, and an even harder time getting permission to shoot at the dozens of fair-related sites around the country. It turns out, those things have been quite easy: everyone has been incredibly generous with sharing their time, and often providing us with more access than we could've hoped for to all of these treasures.

However, there's one thing that's proven far more difficult than I expected, and that's finding home movie footage of the fair. By my rough math, there should've been somewhere around 100,000 - 500,000 people with cameras at the fair over the two-year run. Granted that was 47 years ago, but let's assume 10% of the footage survives. That means there should still be 10,000 to 50,000 reels of footage out there somewhere. Unfortunately, most of it is probably withering away in attics, long forgotten, or perhaps without any way to watch it now.

Our challenge, and I hoping you can help, is to find those reels of film, and convert them for use in the film. If you (or your parents, or grandparents) attended the fair and shot footage, we would love to hear from you. Heck even if you weren't personally at the fair, I'd appreciate it if you could ask those you know who would've been the right age to attend.

Much like the relics of the fair themselves, we are slowly losing these films to heat, dust, and just plain old age. So please take a look, ask around, and let us know what you find.

Here's to a great 2012, and a quick look back at 2011

2011 was an amazing year for our project. As you can see on the map, we covered a lot of ground, with over a dozen sites visited around the eastern half of the country, including our two-week midwest road trip. Along the way, we met a lot of great people, many of which led us to even more people to interview, and even more fair-related sites to visit.

When I started on this documentary, I thought this would be just about the time we would be kicking back, and enjoying watching the final cut of the film. However, we've had so many fascinating additional paths to explore, that we now have most likely another 10 to 12 months of shooting. That's good news though, as it will give us the time to make a better, more fitting tribute to this fascinating event of American history.

Thank you to everyone who has visited the site, friended us on facebook, donated footage, pointed us to a great interview, and made donations to keep the project going. I'm looking forward to what is sure to be a challenging and ultimately enjoyable year of filming.

A World's Fair pavilion hides in plain sight

Spain Pavilion, 1964 Photo: Alan LovitchIf you're a baseball fan, you probably watched at least a portion of this year's World Series between the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals. If you also happen to be a fan of World's Fair relics (hey, you're on this site now, aren't you?) then you might not have known that you were occasionally seeing a pavilion from the fair, hidden in plain sight.

The Spain pavilion from the fair was re-located to St. Louis after the fair, with high hopes for it to be a tourism destination. Unfortunately, most people don't even know it is there. Today the pavilion, or more precisely, its exterior walls, serve as the lobby for the St. Louis Hilton. The hotel happens to be right next to Busch Stadium, with several rooms having views of the field. So in several of the wide, aerial shots of the stadium, millions of people were seeing a World's Fair pavilion, without even knowing it.

As a sidenote, along with the pavilion, a six-foot plus bronze sculpture of the first Queen of Spain also moved to St. Louis. If you go to the hotel hoping to see the Queen, you won't find her. She's in hiding right now, but we found her. Stay tuned...

St. Louis Hilton & Busch Stadium