MC Trailer from Sara Kelly on Vimeo.
Check this out, someone is doing a documentary on model railroaders. Actor Michael Gross (“Family Ties”) is prefacing this trailer. For more on the movie, visit: http://modelcitizensmovie.com/
Our club layout has hosted Sara for a couple of her shoots on this project. She is doing a great job and I highly recommend that if you’ve got a layout worthy of a visit, you should contact her.
Michael Gross is on some VCR or DVD I have on model railroading. Looks like it could be a nice thing to see when they get it finished
Hope someone keeps us posted so we can all watch it when it comes out.
Thanks for sharing
Richard
Michael Gross has narrated several videos for the NMRA. He is very active in the hobbly and he shows up at quite a few events in the Southern California region when he isn’t working at his day job.
Sara Kelly will be at the NMRA Convention next month and has plans to also visit Pennsylvania and shoot some layouts there along with the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum. It sounds like she might be doing a crowd sourcing fund raising program to raise capital for the finished project. I will put out the word on this thread once she has the details nailed down.
Does anyone have cntact info for Sara Kelly? I would like to recommend she include a friend’s layout.
Just sent you a PM.
I remember one “Family Ties” episode where his character had this small N-scale layout in his bedroom.
Probably just me, but I can’t get the video to play – and I belong to Vimeo. Will keep trying, as it sounds interesting.
If she’s going to the RR Museum of PA, she absolutely needs to do it this coming week, to see the huge layout of the Reading Company Technical and Historical Society.
–Randy
I interviewed Sara about her interesting project last week. The interview is posted on my blog at http://cprailmmsub.blogspot.ca/2014/07/i-recently-became-awareof-model.html
John Longhurst, Winnipeg
Wanted to note the video is working for me now, just in case anyone else ran into that problem. Give it another try.
Great trailer, looking forward to the rest of it. I’m a passing acquantiance of Steve Harris and looking forward to seeing what he has to see and show beyond the brief comment in the trailer with his layout behind him… Only met him in person once at the 98(?) NNGC in Colo. Springs. Used to be on the same email lists, but haven’t seen his name lately. His layout is narrowgauge and has an elevator (written up in MR several years back). Great guy to chat with and I’ll bet I’m not the only one here who’ll be vicariously catching up with folks we know to a greater or lesser degree.
John, Good interview. This sounds like a great project.
Do we know how long the documentary will run? Is it a short documentary or fairly long?
Rich
Rich,
They’re still filming. I may have missed where that was indicated, but my guess is between an hour and 90 minutes. It’s too complex a topic to render in a half hour, given the work so far. Most documentaries don’t run exceptionally long, unlike some movies.
Mike, 60 to 90 minutes would be great. That would be enough time to do the subject justice.
My fear is that if it turned out to be 20 or 30 minutes, it would be much too superficial.
So, I hope that you are right.
Rich
The “Model Citizens” is still very much a work in progress. Sara is in the process of “peeling the onion” and discovering more about the hobby of model railroading and rail fanning in general as she gets more leads and talks to more people. From what I’ve seen so far, and my personal experience communicating with her, she will have multiple opportunities to utilize the material she is in the process of gathering.
Heck, maybe she will have enough material to produce a series.
Something like that could really re-invigorate the hobby.
Rich
Rich,
I agree, she’s offering a fresh perspective by looking at the people in the hobby and why they find it rewarding. I really liked her comment about being an outsider and seeing things in ways that we typiclly don’t when we make videos about ourselves. She isn’t dissing railroad hobbiest productions, just noting the the outsider perspective she brings is something new. I also suspect having an “outsider” tell our stories will make them much more accessible than things we create for oustsiders as insiders within the hobby.
I agree about the value of an outsider’s perspective for this type of documentary. When people who are outsiders to the hobby see my layout (very much in progress) or the things I have built, I am often struck by the things that impress or interest them first – things we seemingly become nearly blind to ourselves, and which never draw comment from fellow modelers. Some of them can’t stop looking at the backdrop for example; they take the weathered rail and painstakingly ballasted turnouts for granted. A scratchbuilt four unit apartment building that some local modelers have praised gets fewer comments than the Preiser figure of a woman pushing a lawn mower that I have near it.
Dave Nelson
Sara Kelly’s project has now gone to the crowd funding stage. She has started a Kickstarter Project for it.