VT Film Festival – Jim W. Dean Vimeo Picks

More HD finds from the Jim’s Gems Collection

This week’s theme…the Old Time Pride in One’s Work

[ Note: I first ran this in February 2012, when we eased off our regular VT schedule for some entertainment material on the weekends. I enjoyed spending hours looking for real video and music gems to sharing while sipping a few brews and nibbling a desktop buffet.

Only the best of the best went up, and the general theme was to have a wide diversity of material. I knew that we could reuse the material for new readers coming down the road.

Vimeo was doing pretty much all HD even back then, and had the biggest stable of independent filmmakers, too big really. It really took a lot time to sift through them, so my plan was to save busy readers from that duplicative effort.

The film and video production biz is extremely time intensive, so I had not been able to do much since my Heritage TV days, other than a few interviews now and then.

The Vimeo cruising kept me up on what people were doing with all the new equipment and software. If you don’t have time to do it, one can at least enjoy someone else’s good work and get an artistic fix to boot.

I got a special one of those today, getting out to do a rare historic house tour, the pre-Civil War Bulloch House just north of Atlanta in Roswell. I stood in the dining room where Teddy Roosevelt’s father married his mother Mittie (Martha), and got a pile of wonderful photos. These historic houses are just wonderful places to shoot.

It was like being in a time machine with all the period memorabilia they had, and old photos galore. I did not know that for these historic displays they have fake food now that you would would pick up and take a bite; it looks so realistic.

So enjoy this now bygone pasttime of small town folks hanging out at the barber shop to shoot the breeze and in this case, enjoy some fabulous jam sessions. JD ]

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       … by  Jim W. Dean, VT Editor

– First published  … February 12 , 2012 –

I have a gem for you today… a time machine trip really. During one of my weekend cruises of Vimeo, I ran across this fabulous old time barbershop film called ‘Pickin and Trimmin’. I have no idea why I clicked on it, but got captivated right from the beginning.

It was probably my love for the old On the Road with Charles Kuralt CBS TV show that you age 50’s and 60’s folks might remember. That is one reason why I am here at VT, as part of my magical mystery tour.

Even as a young boy I spotted right away that he had what I thought was the best job in the world, traveling around in the camper he had, visiting lots of neat places and meeting folks with all their Americana stories.

And with the pot belly that he had, I suspect that the local folks fed him real well. You could tell he loved the work, was a great TV writer and had a hell of a delivery. I will dedicate one weekend to him soon, as he is the Godfather of wandering.

Gordon may not know it, but he has some Charles Kuralt in his veins. If we put his thousands of world-wandering photos up here, we would have no room for anything else. He and Carol do share some from time to time, though.

The music part of Pickin really came as a surprise, and I was astounded at how good the barbershop jam bands were. So that Vimeo click led me to a piece of living history. That’s part of the fun in looking for these and being able to spread them around.

Remember when viewing these you can watch the embed video size on VT, or to get full screen HD click on the ‘Vimeo’ on the video player control line on the right, and then again when you get there.

Computer monitors are all HD anyway and the Vimeo material usually looks great in HD full screen.

From Vimeo: At The Barbershop in Drexel, NC, the atmosphere is laid back, the conversation free, and the music a cut above the rest. Emmy® nominee, Official Selection of over 60 film festivals, and Best Documentary Short Film winner at the Florida Film Festival and Woodstock Film Festival.

Matt Morris has a preservation fund set up at his website. The old barber has passed on, and his last wish was to try to keep the weekend Jam session going. This is a longer Jim’s Gems than usual at 20 minutes, but a lot of it is the music, and it would have been cruel to cut that out.

It is my pleasure to start this weekend’s VT Film Festival out with ‘Pickin and Trimmin’.

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Jim W. Dean

Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus.  He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022.  He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews.  He now writes and posts periodically for VT.

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