Cinebar Productions

11/10/2023

It's pretty amazing how time flies when you're busy. We have constantly been working on the oral history project for the Virginia War Memorial. We are on the downhill hump, but there's still at least a few more months until we are totally finished converting, transcribing and duplicating the first 600 interviews. The group we're working in now is predominately World War II. A lot of fascinating little tidbits that don't make it in the history book. Did you know the battle cry of the men at HIckam Air Force Base in Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor was, "Remember the Snake Bar," after the watering hole was destroyed by a Japanese bomb. As we get ready to leave for the SEMC meeting in Louisville, Sherri is transcribing the story of a female resistance fighter in Belgium. Oh, one more note about SEMC. We'll be introducing our capability to do 360-degree virtual tours. More to come.

05/23/2023

News from the front... First off, we just received word that our two submissions to the Telly Awards both won prizes. A Bronze Telly in the Non-Broadcast History category for "Known But to God: The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Turns 100," and a Silver Telly in the Fund-raising category for "Green Spaces." Both projects were produced for the Virginia War Memorial Foundation, our current client for the oral history project with which we've been in knee deep for some time. Speaking of oral history, that's what we did last week for the Virginia Humanities webinar. They had 163 people sign up, of which 60 logged in to the actual event. It was a little disconcerting talking to a blank laptop screen for an hour, but hopefully, something intelligible came out of it.

05/14/2023

Here is the official announcement at the Virginia Humanities website. Join us if you can.

Virginia Humanities Grants staff invite you to join us for a free virtual worksho with Rich Borenstein and Sherri Staples of Cinebar Productions.

04/28/2023

Couldn't let April slip by without at least one update... yes, we're still knee deep in transcripts for the VA War Memorial Foundation Oral History Project. At times, it has been a challenge fighting through some of the accents to determine the spelling of the multitude locations the veterans were at during World War 2, Korea and Vietnam. Every story has been unique and in many cases, just amazing. The reason we've posted the Virginia Humanities logo is that they have asked us to conduct a webinar on best practices for oral histories on Tuesday, May 16 at 1-2 PM EST. Details and registration will be available at the Virginia Humanities website. We're very excited to be able to share our decades-long experience (geez, we're getting old) on practical methods to acquire useful oral histories. If you know any organizations or groups interested in this, please let them know. Stay tuned for updates.

03/20/2023

As is our usual practice, here are the fellow road warriors from the exhibit hall at VAM. A few veterans, but many new faces.

03/15/2023

Just back from VAM 2023. Yes, we did have a scaled down version of our traditional Hospitality Suite, and everyone who attended had a good time... including watching the Academy Awards. This seemed to be consistent with the rest of the conference, scaled down, but still a good networking forum. The exhibit hall only had half the normal vendors and the overall attendance was also at about half the usual amount, but we still made some new contacts with the prospect of some future work.

03/09/2023

So, we will be exhibiting at the VAM Annual Conference in Harrisonburg this weekend. It will actually be a welcome break from transcribing oral histories... not that we haven't dealt with many fantastic veterans' stories, but it's always good to reconnect with our museum friends.

02/15/2023

Yes, we're still plugging away with transcribing oral histories (more on that later), but we wanted to share a little corporate tale of woe. Last Friday (Feb 10) we were cut off from our Gmail account. Turns out that a year ago Google decided that .com would pay for emails this year... okay, problem was they notified our domain administrator of this and after an interminable time on hold with Google, which by the way, has the worst on-hold music on the planet, we come to find that our administrator is not associated with Cinebar. So after contacting the company that assigned our domain name (located in Melbourne, Australia), the company that hosts the domain (in Reston, VA), we tracked down our administrator in Denver at the company that had originally created our long defunct website nearly 20 years ago. We got the whole thing sorted out in about ten minutes and our email is up and running again after a four-day suspension. Moral of the story: keeping saying, "Talk to a human" when dealing with Google's automated customer service.

01/18/2023

To our many VAM friends… we’ve just been notified by the VAM board that after more than 20 years they want to put an end to the sanctioned Cinebar Hospitality Suite at the annual conference. As it was put to us, it was time to “retire that component.” Evidently, socializing among fellow museum professionals is no longer in vogue, although it was the epitome of diversity, inclusion and equity. All were welcome. All were served. All were kicked out at midnight. Of course, this is a free country, so it is possible that something unsanctioned may occur… stay tuned for developments.