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ADAMSTAR PICTURES
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The making of A Look Back At NatureScene
NatureScene was a very successful series produced by South Carolina ETV from 1978 to 2003. The premise of the show was very simple; Naturalist Rudy Mancke took a host (and thanks to the camera, the viewers) on a field trip to various locations in nature and not only talked about the plant and animal life, but through his own knowledge and enthusiasm showed how exciting and fun such an experience can be. "NatureScene to me is a 30 minute field trip experience, as if I'm leading a walk in the woods...and maybe the camera was the other person eavesdropping. But it's a field trip experience - never knowing for sure what you'll see until you get there." - Rudy Mancke
"NatureScene is a tribute to my mother who was a high school science teacher. When I worked in a commercial television station, she always said I underused the resource. That if she had the opportunity what she'd do is take the camera out into the field so people could really experience things first hand. " - Beryl Dakers For the first several years NatureScene visited locations all over the state of South Carolina with the creator and original host, Beryl Dakers joining Naturalist Rudy Mancke. When the decision was made to go national with the series, and they wanted to film in all 50 states, Jim Welch took over the hosting duties as he and Rudy traveled not only across America but to Canada, Costa Rica and even Russia. "NatureScene combines (Rudy's) words and my pictures...so it's a very visual program. It's a program that can be informative and entertaining." - Allen Sharpe Allen Sharpe was the key person behind the camera, serving as Producer, Director, Director of Photography/Camera Operator, and Editor of the entire series. The last two seasons of NatureScene were shot in High Definition (HD), but since ETV did not have any HD editing equipment yet at that time the shows were edited in Standard Definition (SD) and only existed as letterboxed 16x9 Masters for 4x3 broadcast. NatureScene (For some reason they made it one word, so this is not a typographical error) was a legendary show when I started working at ETV in 2004, and the first episode that caught my eye was one of the last shows they produced - a 2003 special about Chernobyl and how nature has made a comeback around the site of the world's worst nuclear reactor accident in April of 1986.
During the filming of ETV's live show PROJECT DISCOVERY for Earth Day of 2009, I was talking to Rudy Mancke and Allen Sharpe about NatureScene. Rudy had just narrated my shrimp documentary CAROLINA CAUGHT and was appearing on the PROJECT DISCOVERY show, and Allen was taking photos of the event. That's when they told me how the last two seasons of NatureScene were shot in HD but edited in SD, and no one has ever seen the original HD footage. That's when I got the idea to make a 'NatureScene Retrospective' as a Carolina Stories documentary highlighting the legendary series, and showcasing the HD footage, since they wanted all new documentaries to be shot and edited in HD. The 'Great Recession' of 2008 and 2009 (and beyond) had hit while I was editing CAROLINA CAUGHT, and money for documentaries was even more scarce. But in the ETV vaults were hours and hours of beautiful HD footage of local and national parks, monuments and wildlife refuges. I would only need to shoot new interviews, thus saving ETV a lot of money to produce a full 1080i HD program, and giving a well-loved series a tribute it deserves. My original title was "NatureScene Revisited", but I quickly found out there had already been a highlights show called that. My Executive Producer, Amy Shumaker, came up with it's final title; "Carolina Stories: A Look Back At NatureScene" (2010).
"Rudy's contribution was enormous. I don't think we could have had a better guide or naturalist. Rudy has an insatiable appetite for information and an incurable love of nature, and an enthusiasm that's unparalleled. And that's what you got - you got the best of his knowledge, but more than that. You got the love and the willingness to share that love and excitement with every show. So in many ways Rudy and NatureScene are synonymous." - Beryl Dakers "Rudy brought the passion and the excitement to nature, and all the discoveries that we had in it...but walking with Rudy was one of my greatest adventures though those 40 years of television." - Jim Welch
"Jim loved it and I could tell he enjoyed it from the beginning. Allen Sharpe enjoyed what he was doing. I mean, Jim just got in this! For the run of NatureScene that was his baby!" - Rudy Mancke "I worked for 40 years (in television)...but NatureScene is the pinnacle. That, of course, is something I'll take to my grave - all of those great memories of those wonderful 20 years (with NatureScene)." - Jim Welch
"Allen is the unsung hero of the group." - Jim Welch "You saw (Allen) in every shot when you looked at a NatureScene program. To be able to capture a butterfly in that moment when it sits on your fingertip, or to follow that single bird in flight knowing you only had one shot at doing it - that was a challenge for him and it's one that he perfected over the years. " - Beryl Dakers "Without Beryl Dakers, there never would have been a program. That's how important she is to the whole thing...that was one thing that impressed me about Beryl early on - she was asking questions that the general public would be asking if they were standing there. And that makes a field trip experience work! And again I always thought the camera was just the person at home eavesdropping; 'This is kind of neat! Wow! What a good question!'" - Rudy Mancke "NatureScene for me was an opportunity to know that I too can create television programming that was meaningful and lasting...and to know that I had something to do with creating this lasting treasure is special." - Beryl Dakers
I wanted this to be a more personal look at NatureScene, and focus on interviewing the four main principles of the show; Naturalist Rudy Mancke, Hosts Beryl Dakers and Jim Welch, and Producer/Director Allen Sharpe. I wanted to find out not only the fun and interesting stories about how the show got started and developed throughout the years, but what did the show mean to them. Normally I would shoot the interviews first to get the information and plan out what footage I needed to shoot/obtain. But it just worked out that the interviews were the last things I got - In fact I recorded them at the last minute when I started editing the show. The majority of the time during the months before editing was spent watching NatureScene shows and finding the raw/unedited HD footage in the ETV vault. Allen Sharpe had retired from ETV, and although I was still in contact with him he didn't keep track of any scripts/logs/notes that could help me in my pre-production process. It was like an archeological dig in the ETV vault room - trying to go through hundreds and hundreds of DVCPRO tapes to find the NatureScene HD footage. I had a few tape numbers as leads, but ultimately what worked was inspecting every tape in the vault and looking for hand written numbers on the tape cases. Allen was the only producer at ETV who apparently wrote the tape numbers on the spine of the tape cases - such as tape 1, 2, 3, etc. Those hand-written numbers meant that they were NatureScene tapes, and I was able to find almost all of the HD tapes this way. For most of the summer of 2009 I spent watching and logging the raw/unedited HD footage, and formulating ideas that would eventually be the script. This was only going to be a 30-minute documentary, so there was no time to go into detail about the various subjects I wanted to cover. A lot of times the discussion would be about NatureScene in general, and this would allow more of the HD footage from the last two seasons to be used as the B-Roll rather than the older 4x3 SD footage.
"I want people to genuinely realize they're part of something bigger than themselves, and that natural world is pretty impressive and we're at home out there! It's not alien to us - we're a part of that system, and we're suppose to take good care of it." - Rudy Mancke
"NatureScene has given me a great feeling of accomplishment, if you will. We did something that no one else was doing and because nature doesn't change a lot in our lifetime, we've left a lot of good information...a lot of programs that may have been done 20 years ago but the information is just as good now as when we did it." - Allen Sharpe
"I think NatureScene is a real gift to the people of South Carolina...to the rest of the nation, later. But I think it's real value lay in the fact that NatureScene exposed South Carolinians to the wonderful treasure that is our state. It gave us a new sense of pride, a new sense of awareness, and most of all a new sense of appreciation for what we have here and what we enjoy by just looking at our natural resources - and that I think is a real treasure." - Beryl Dakers
When people heard I was going to interview Rudy Mancke and the others, the response was always "you've got to interview them out in a park or a forest!" It made sense; interview them in a natural setting to match the footage from the original show. But from the start I wanted to do something different. For one thing, I had already done all but one of the interviews for CAROLINA CAUGHT outdoors. This looked great, of course, but I wanted to have a more personal and dramatic look for the NatureScene interviews - since I wanted to ask more personal questions about a show that was no longer being produced, and was therefore something in the past. So I wanted to record these interviews in the studio where I had more control over the lighting, rather than the high key look of the outdoors. Luckily since I wasn't able to record the interviews until the last minute, in December of 2009, I didn't want to film them out in the cold with brown grass and dead looking leaves on the trees anyway. I had to shoot them in the studio, and Arthur Joseph and Mike Miller helped me record the four interviews.
"NatureScene was intended to bring understanding and awareness, so it was our hope that people would have a greater respect for nature and a greater love for nature, and want to take their families to enjoy - and at the same time help protect - what is out there." - Jim Welch
"My life would not have been as rich as it would have been if it had not been for this network, for NatureScene specifically, and for all the folks who had a hand in making that possible. I have lived a richer life than I would have otherwise because of this program and because of this network, and because of this state supporting it...I feel richer than anybody that I know, and it has nothing to do with money! It has to do with those wonderful experiences that I had a chance to have myself and share it with other people. Wouldn't trade places with anybody in the world!" - Rudy Mancke
Although I had editing time scheduled in December, January and February I was becoming concerned about having enough time to finish the project. Several things were beginning to hamper my editing. Since I was also working in the EFP department and was essentially part of the crew of videographers for other ETV projects, I started loosing my editing days when I would be pulled from NatureScene to shoot something since we were short handed. I also not only made the 30-minute documentary "A Look Back At NatureScene", but what they call a 'Pledge Version' of the show to run during the infamous pledge breaks months on PBS. This meant they needed the show to be cut in the middle to allow for a live pledge break during which they would ask the viewers to become a member and send in money. Also I edited two 'DVD extras', which were portions of the 30-minute show I had to cut out; a section about bloopers (which they wanted to also air during the pledge breaks) and a section about the former SCETV President Henry Cauthen. (I was able to interview Henry Cauthen for this documentary, only to have to cut him out.) I also discovered among the NatureScene HD tapes an edited show done as a test in a post-production facility in Atlanta; Denali National Park in Alaska, which is considered one of the best shows ever done for NatureScene. I just needed to go in and clean it up a little to get it ready for air.
There was one other NatureScene project I was assigned to do. When it was discovered I was making this NatureScene documentary, I was also given the assignment of producing a highlights show that Rudy Mancke had been wanting to do for a long time. He wanted to go back to the HD footage and put together a 30-minute show on just the butterflies they had seen. So in September of 2009, Xavier Blake and I took Rudy to Congaree National Park near Columbia, South Carolina, and filmed his on-camera introductions and wrap-arounds in a field near the swamp. Later Rudy sat down and recorded his voice over narration to the footage of the butterflies that I edited together, and we had an all-new program "NatureScene Butterflies" (2010).
"Carolina Stories: A Look Back At NatureScene" and "NatureScene Butterflies" premiered on March 11, 2010 as pledge shows - before, during and after each show there were live pledge breaks where ETV would "beg for money", as some people here explain it. March is one of the months PBS have pledges to raise money by asking people to become members and donate money. The hosts the night of the NatureScene premieres were Rudy Mancke and Beryl Dakers, and I happened to be assigned to work that night in the studio as Floor Manager. In the end my two NatureScene shows were in the top 10 of money donations for March of 2010.
Carolina Stories: A Look Back At NatureScene
Produced,
Written, Directed & Edited by For NATURESCENE Executive
Producer/Naturalist Rudy
Mancke Producer/Director/DP Allen
Sharpe Hosts Jim
Welch
For A
LOOK BACK AT NATURESCENE EFP
Crew for Interviews Special
Research Consultant Post
Production Engineer Production
Manager Executive
Producer
Kerry
Feduk ETV
President David
Crouch Additional
Video “The
Scene Behind Nature Scene” Producer/Director Special
thanks to Rudy
Mancke Allen
Sharpe Jim
Welch
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