Electronic Field Productions

06/05/2026

05/27/2026

🔗 https://l.nyup.com/i3bb8i

A new Netflix series is seeking actors from Upstate New York who have a North Country accent.

Netflix and Sony Pictures Television are adapting Liz Moore’s 2024 book “The God of the Woods” for a TV show set in the Adirondacks. According to a casting call, the project is specifically looking for actors with "accents native to the North Country region." Tap the link above for the full story.

05/27/2026

Luna loves the camera. Steve and I have shot her before. ❤️

04/01/2026

🔗 https://l.nyup.com/dubpvy

The corsets are coming back to Upstate New York.

HBO’s lavish period drama “The Gilded Age,” is gearing up to film Season 4 in the Capital Region. With the announcement comes another call for fresh faces to step into the glittering world of 1880s New York. Tap the link above for more details.

03/27/2026

Six weeks after September 11, 2001, twelve American soldiers were quietly loaded onto a helicopter in Uzbekistan and flown over the Hindu Kush mountains in the dead of night.
No tanks. No armored vehicles. No air support waiting on the ground.
Just twelve Green Berets, over a hundred pounds of gear each, and a mission that their own commanders privately doubted any of them would survive.
They landed in a remote Afghan village called Dehi, in the pitch black, surrounded by a country they barely had maps for.
And then someone handed them horses.
Not metaphorically. Actual horses — Afghan stallions, tough as nails and famously difficult to control. Wooden saddles covered in carpet scraps. Stirrups so short their knees rode up around their ears.
Captain Mark Nutsch, who'd grown up on a cattle ranch in Kansas and competed in collegiate rodeos, became trail boss on the spot. For the other ten men on his team — Operational Detachment Alpha 595 of the 5th Special Forces Group — the learning curve was immediate and unforgiving. The first words one of his sergeants learned in Dari were: "How do you make him stop?"
They had linked up with General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a Northern Alliance warlord who controlled thousands of fighters and knew this territory like the back of his hand. The deal was simple: the Americans would call in precision airstrikes from horseback. Dostum's cavalry would do the charging. Together, they would take Mazar-i-Sharif — a Taliban stronghold of 250,000 people — and crack open northern Afghanistan.
Military planners had estimated it would take two years.
Task Force Dagger gave ODA 595 three weeks.
For 23 days of nearly continuous combat, the Horse Soldiers lived like men from a different century. They ate what the Afghans ate. They slept on the ground in freezing mountain passes. They rode trails so narrow and sheer that one wrong step meant a thousand-foot drop. Staff Sergeant Will Summers started the mission at 185 pounds. He left Afghanistan five weeks later weighing 143.
The Taliban had tanks. Soviet-era armor, antiaircraft guns, fortified positions dug into the mountains. Against this, twelve Americans on horseback radioed coordinates to aircraft circling invisibly above, and watched the positions erupt.
On November 9, 2001, they rode into the kind of moment that people are not supposed to experience in the modern world.
Nutsch and his team joined hundreds of Dostum's horsemen in a thundering cavalry charge across an open plain — directly into entrenched Taliban lines. Under fire. At a gallop. Calling in close air support between strides.
It was the first cavalry charge of the 21st century.
It was also the last.
The next day, Mazar-i-Sharif fell. The Taliban's northern stronghold collapsed. Within weeks, the regime itself began to unravel — a domino effect that started with twelve men and borrowed horses in the mountains.
All twelve of them came home.
Zero American fatalities. Against a fortified enemy that outnumbered and outgunned them at every turn.
Today, across from Ground Zero in New York City, there is a bronze statue — sixteen feet tall — of a Special Forces soldier on horseback, rifle across his lap, looking west. It honors ODA 595 and the teams who rode with them.
Most Americans walk past it every day without knowing the story.
Now you do.

02/15/2026

The nation mourns the passing of John Kinsel Sr., a significant historical figure and one of the last Navajo Code Talkers to serve. He reached the remarkable age of 107, carrying with him nearly a century of memory and service. As part of the most important communications unit of WWII, Kinsel delivered messages that Japanese intelligence never managed to decipher, codes that became a key element in Pacific operations. On Iwo Jima, he moved under enemy fire, an act of bravery that earned him the Purple Heart.
His life is a priceless legacy: a voice that once saved lives is now an enduring part of our nation's history.

01/13/2026

Antiques Roadshow l PBS is coming to Mumford. The popular PBS series — where people can find out if their attic junk is actually a gem — will be in town on June 17. You might be able to score tickets -- get more info in the link below. 🔗⬇️

01/10/2026

The 2026 Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta extends a warm welcome back to the legendary 72 foot ketch Ticonderoga of Greenwich. Known affectionately as The Mighty Ti, she is a vessel of unrivaled beauty and timeless style.
Designed by L. Francis Herreshoff, son of the famed “Wizard of Bristol,” Nathanael Herreshoff, she was built in 1936 for prominent American yachtsman and businessman Harry Noyes at the Quincy Adams Boatyard in Massachusetts. Launched originally as Tioga II of Marblehead, she was conceived as a large but relatively simple day sailor.
That simplicity did not last long. During construction, Noyes, who owned the yard, made extensive modifications, frequently clashing with Herreshoff. A generator, bronze radiators, a boiler fired heating system, two showers, a cast iron bathtub, large refrigeration, and substantial fuel and water tanks were added. The disagreements were so significant that Herreshoff either was not invited to, or did not attend, her launch.
Although Noyes had not planned to race her, Tioga II quickly proved herself a formidable ocean racer. She set a course record in the 1940 Miami to Nassau Cup Race and finished first in 24 of her first 37 races.
Sold after World War II without the rights to her original name, her new owner found inspiration in a familiar Ticonderoga pencil, and a legend was reborn. Through a succession of owners, one thing never changed, her success on the racecourse. Ticonderoga won major races and set course records across the Atlantic, Pacific, Caribbean, and Mediterranean well into the 1970s.
Her most famous victory came in the 1965 Transpac, where she set the elapsed time course record in one of the greatest duels in Transpac history, finishing the 2,200 mile race from Los Angeles to Honolulu just over five minutes ahead of Cornelius Bruynzeel’s Stormvogel.
A longtime favorite at the Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta, Ticonderoga boasts multiple class wins, and we can’t wait to welcome her back to Nelson’s Dockyard for the 2026 Classics.

01/10/2026

She was 23 years old when they dressed her as a child and sent her to die.

The men who went before her never came back.

June 6, 1944. Five days before the largest invasion in human history. The door of an American bomber opened over occupied France, and cold air rushed in like a warning. Below her lay Normandy, tightly clenched in N**i hands.

Her name was Phyllis Latour Doyle.

She stood at the edge of the aircraft, heart steady, fear acknowledged but ignored. She knew exactly what waited on the ground. Capture. Torture. Ex*****on. That had been the fate of every male agent sent before her.

So the Special Operations Executive made a final calculation.

Send a woman.

The N**is did not fear young women. They underestimated them. And Phyllis would not just be a woman. She would become a child.

For months in the Scottish Highlands, she was remade into something lethal. Morse code until her fingers ached. Wireless radio operation until her hands moved without thought. Interrogation resistance. Weapons. Hand to hand combat. Silent movement. One instructor, a former cat burglar, taught her how to scale walls and vanish into darkness.

This was not abstract bravery. The N**is had killed her godfather. This war already lived inside her.

Her cover was cruelly brilliant.

A fourteen year old French peasant girl. Poor. Uneducated. Naive. Harmless.

They gave her shabby clothes. Taught her to giggle. To ask foolish questions. To let herself be dismissed. The men before her had died because they looked dangerous.

She would survive by looking invisible.

That night, she jumped.

She parachuted into N**i occupied Normandy, buried her chute and British clothing, and stepped into a new life as a French teenager. By daylight, she was riding a battered bicycle through the countryside, supposedly selling soap.

Every mile was reconnaissance.

Every conversation was a report.

At checkpoints, she smiled at German soldiers, asking childish questions, admiring uniforms. While they laughed at her innocence, she memorized everything. Troop counts. Equipment. Road usage. Defensive positions.

Then she disappeared.

In forests and abandoned buildings, she assembled her wireless radio and transmitted coded messages to London. German signal detectors could locate transmissions, so she never stayed in one place. She slept in barns, fields, woods. Hunger and fear were constant companions.

Her codes were written on silk. Light. Silent. Easy to hide.

After each transmission, she pierced the code with a pin so she would never repeat a sequence. The silk stayed concealed inside her hair ribbon.

One day, at a checkpoint, German soldiers stopped her.

They searched her bicycle. Her bag. Her clothes.

Then one of them pointed at her hair ribbon.

Show me that.

Phyllis did not hesitate.

She untied the ribbon, letting her hair fall loose around her shoulders. She smiled, open and harmless. The silk with every secret she carried hung plainly in her hand.

The soldier glanced at it.

Then waved her through.

For four months, she lived this way. Cycling occupied Normandy. Talking. Listening. Remembering. Transmitting.

She sent 135 coded messages to London. More than any other female SOE agent in France.

Those messages guided Allied bombers. Shaped invasion plans. Saved lives.

They helped make D-Day possible.

On August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated. Her mission was complete.

She had survived behind enemy lines longer than most male agents survived weeks.

And then she vanished again.

After the war, she did not seek recognition. She married. Moved to New Zealand. Raised four children. Said almost nothing. Her family knew she had been in the war, but never how.

Not until the year 2000 did her eldest son discover the truth online. When he asked her, she simply confirmed it. Yes. She had been a spy. Yes. She had jumped into France. Yes. She had sent the messages.

To her, it was just what needed to be done.

In 2014, on the seventieth anniversary of D Day, France awarded her the Légion d'honneur. She was 93. She accepted quietly.

Phyllis Latour Doyle died on October 7, 2023, at the age of 102.

She outlived the N**i regime by nearly eight decades. She outlived almost everyone who knew what she had done.

Most people never heard her name. Never knew about the woman who pretended to be a child, sold soap, hid codes in her hair, and sent 135 messages that helped free Europe.

But some soldiers who landed on those beaches lived because of her.

Some families reclaimed their homes because of her.

World War II was changed by countless small acts of courage.

Including a girl on a bicycle who jumped anyway, even after being told the men before her were all killed.

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Thank you for being here.
Thank you for remembering.
And thank you for honoring the women who came before us—and the legacy they continue to build.

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