Building the Story

For the last few days I have been working on the storyline of the documentary. Currently it seems to make the clearest story to break it into four pieces:

• The intro: Puget Sound Music Culture and History.
• The middle: what is a pipe organ.
• The surprise: what are organ builders making in Parkland and Roy?
• The organists: Training the new generation on how to handle a tracker

For the next several months we will be re-working this storyline, and perhaps throwing stuff out and re-aranging it until we have a compeling story.

Here is a sample of the inro thus far:

"Seattle’s greater metro area has become iconic for rock and roll music with legendary lates like Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. "Hype" about Grunge and ROCKRGRL are also rooted here. The next best thing to the rock and roll hall of fame is the Experience Music Project. It sits at the foot of the Space Needle. Bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, Heart and Alice and Chains come from Seattle. Jazz singer Diane Schuur and Robert Cray come from Tacoma and saxophone ace Kenny G also calls the Puget Sound home.

"But long before Jimi Hendrix strapped on an electric guitar, this Pacific Northwest region was already well known for its cutting edge music.

"Here at 1st and Pike in 1914, the Liberty Theater was being built. It was one of the first theaters built just for movies. Up till this time movies were shown in remodeled vaudeville theaters which would have had a stage and orchestra pit. Movies of these days were silent and needed music to help the plot. The versatility and many voices of pipe organs was perfect for this setting."