I had been doing a lot of videos for Jim Beam Brands prior to making this video in 1998. The video was made for the theater at the Jim Beam distillery in Bardstown Kentucky. Booker Noe was the Grandson of Jim Beam and the master distiller at the time. We became very friendly with Booker and his family and subsequently made many videos with him. I remember one time when we were just screwing around in Bookers basement and drinking some of his homemade moonshine whiskey and at other times Booker would take us into the rack house and pull some 100 year old Bourbon out of the barrel. I remember one night we had a campfire with Booker and his family. Good times, we really liked Booker. Booker was a great character and a terrific personality.
Our producers rented a helicopter to do all of the beautiful ariels right during the fall color change. As we were flying over the rolling hills in Kentucky we noticed a beautiful old trussel bridge with a gorgeous old train just about to go over it. We told the pilot to fly over there so we could get some shots, he reluctantly agreed. Just as we are shooting this amazing shot, the helicopter starts flying straight up (with our back towards the ground) and the pilot is screaming. He almost hit some power lines and informed us (in not so nice terms) that we can only do rehearsed shots.
We shot this video on mini dv (boy, would I have killed to do this with an HD camera but that wasn't even an idea at the time). Film was not in the budget because we literally shot this video over several weeks not including all of my footage I had done prior to this point for Jim Beam. The edit was done off-line by Lucyna Wojtas (now my wife) on a D-Vision NLE, one of the first NLE's. Then we re-edited the whole video in a machine to machine on-line room and mastered on 1" video.
I had created such a huge archive of Jim Beam and Booker footage (about 350 tapes) that I eventually sold my entire collection of footage to Jim Beam when Booker passed away. Always retain the rights to your footage when doing work for hire.
Creative Director: Rick Shaughnessy
Producer/Director: Steve Weiss
Assistant Producer: John Lenart
DP and Camera Operator: Jens Bogehegn
Creative Editor: Lucyna Wojtas
