Look to Future Without Forgetting Past

On a recent trip to Chicago a couple of friends and I decided to visit the Museum of Science and Industry. If you’ve never been, I recommend checking it out. I spent four hours wandering around the different exhibits and only made it about three quarters of way through the museum. There is plenty of cool stuff to check out.

My favorite exhibit and the one that inspired this little blog post of mine was The U-505 Submarine Exhibit. It walks you through the American capture of the first German U-boat on June 4th, 1944 off the coast of West Africa.

Now, I have a pretty good handle on my World War II history so I found myself more interested in the presentation of the exhibit. What made it so great for me (besides actually seeing the German sub itself) is how the exhibit tells the story of the submarine’s capture. It’s done through a series of wall writings, videos and even a little old school hologram action.

Doing what I do for a living, the videos caught my eye. They might not be considered special by today’s standards. In fact, they were simple documentary style. They didn’t have any flashy graphics, the lighting wasn’t great and there weren’t any fancy editing tricks. They were just plain old black and white video with a voice over and a music pad underneath. I’m sure you can imagine what I’m talking about, but just in case you need a visual click here.

I guess I can’t say for sure why… but I was captivated by these videos. Perhaps it’s my love and fascination for stories and lifetimes that were before my own. It also may be that after years of working on different sides of video production where the goal is to stay ahead of the game and be on top of the next best thing to make your video look bigger and better I just wanted to be reminded of how easily a great story can be told.

It made me think about how easy it is to forget about the place where we came from when our sole view is continually on where we’re going.

Tags: Chicago, Documentary video, German U-Boat, Museum of Science and Industry, StoryTeller Media & Communications, U-505, Video Production