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Left to right, Hal Taylor, Gil Grosvenor and Harley Bragg
Hal made the rocking chair, Gil shot the video and Harley made sure everything was in the right place and that Gil and I were both working.
I had the good fortune to run into Gil about three years ago when he gave me a call expressing an interest in making a rocking chair. We talked it over several times and finally Gil came for a seminar. After he had been in the shop for several days he said, "You know we should do a video of this whole process." I told him I thought it was a good idea and did he know anybody that shot video. "I can do it" he said.
It was then that he told me that he was the Chairman of the Board of National Geographic and had been the editor and then president for much of his working life. His Father had been president of National Geographic as was his grandfather, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor who is regarded as the father of photojournalism. Gil's great grandfather was Alexander Graham Bell.
I said to myself, "I bet this guy knows how to operate a video camera!" As it turns out, I was right. We took three weeks to shoot the video and did not do any re-shooting, we just went straight through the process with Gil on the camera every day. Then I sat down with 26 long hours of video and worked it down to just under ten hours of "How to Make a Rocking Chair"
Harley Bragg is a retired dentist who moved from California to Virginia to be closer to his daughter. He had taken a seminar from me a month or so before I met Gil and when I asked him if he would be interested in helping he said sure. I have been teaching the art of making rocking chairs now for almost 13 years (as of 2009) and I can tell you that dentists make great rocking chair makers.
The video is not perfect but has some of the best detailed video of how to make a rocking chair that you will ever find. I bought some Adobe video editing software and figured out most of it but some of it remains a mystery and some features just did not work the way they were suppose to. The Audio is a little too loud for my taste, make sure you have the volume turned down on your TV before you plug it in! The video is 10 hours long and comes as a 3 DVD set. Each video is menu driven so you do not have to slog through the entire thing looking for the bits you are interested in.
The most important thing, I suppose, is that the three of us had a great time making this video and hope you enjoy watching it half as much as we did making it