Am hard at work on THORIUM REMIX 2012, the working title of my upcoming thorium documentary. One cost came up I hadn’t prepared for, so I launched a new Kickstarter campaign to cover it.

As you can see, yes I will be traveling to Shanghai. I appreciate the continued support. If you’ve never heard of THORIUM REMIX but would like to help support my efforts, please feel free to pitch in some token amount. In return you get immediate access to THORIUM REMIX 2011 as a DRM-free download, and (for $3) receive access to THORIUM REMIX 2012 once an edit exists.

I’ve been sorting through shot footage since the conclusion of Thorium Energy Alliance Conference #4 (TEAC4). Up until recently this has been slow going, as different types of events consist of footage that might be easier or harder to edit.

TEAC4 was particularly difficult to organize. Many volunteers helped collect audio & video that would have otherwise been very difficult/expensive to capture. But sorting through multiple perspectives (including audio-only captures) and placing them on an 8-hour timeline was quite challenging.

In contrast, recording engineers who worked under Alvin Weinberg on the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, was very straight forward. Editing the footage? Very straight forward.

ORNL MSRE Engineers

Here Dick Engel, Syd Ball & James Crowley discuss their work on molten salt reactors with Kirk Sorensen and Baroness Bryony Worthington.

Kirk Sorensen Pre-Lunch Chroma-Key

Here’s another multi-cam shoot. But all the cameras and audio recorders started & stopped at the same time, so putting footage in sync was not a big deal.

Keeping at it

If you’re keen on seeing thorium developed as an energy resource, please consider backing my current kickstarter project. I am not hurting for funds, but even the smallest amount lets me ping you via Kickstarter, and ultimately helps us illustrate that this is a technology people care about.

I’ll keep you in the loop (certainly more than my rare updates to this blog will), and once an edit is crowdsourceable I do hope to leverage people’s skills. Volunteers were invaluable at TEAC4. Volunteers will again become invaluable as all this semi-raw footage is dropped into a narrative structure.

This process is very similar to the construction of THORIUM REMIX 2011. Lectures and technical exchanges were posted to YouTube for everyone to see. Then the raw footage was remixed into a single larger narrative structure.

If you compare my 2011 assets against 2012 assets, you’ll see I’ve got much greater flexibility to craft a narrative. Kickstarter funds will also help pay for post-production work such as CGI and music.

Update 2012-09-28

The embedded ORNL Th-MSR researcher video was updated to a tighter edit which incorporates dinner conversation (as well as interview footage). The original semi-raw interview footage can still be found here.