History Detectives TV engraving gig

[Jroettger]

Here is a spoon I did a facsimile of for the PBS History Detectives show. It will be airing Monday this Aug. 18th, 2008. The feature is about this spoon and who engraved it. They filmed my hands putting the finishing touches on a facsimile of it. Unfortunately it is a gruesome and shameful image but TV gigs don't come along very often. The hanging happened in Mankato MN and they came here to Minnesota to film it. They ran out the door with the spoon right afterwards so I did not get a picture of my copy of the spoon.

[Roger Bleile]

Why did they have you engrave a replica of the spoon?

Roger

[SVD]

That's a heck of a detailed spoon!

I assume they wanted a replica because they couldn't use the actual one for their filming and they needed to show the engraving (so they couldn't just use a plain spoon).

I'll have to remember to set the DVR to catch the show.

[Jroettger]

They wanted some footage of it being engraved to recreate the image of the original spoon being made. When they arrived I had to use a weak #4 visor optivisor to keep the modern visor out of the camera way. I used a #10 visor to do most of the work prior to the filming but they couldn't show anything new. I did the final touches with a push graver and the weak visor. I'm really not sure exactly what they were up to as it it was done at the light speed of TV production. They filmed for about 30 minutes but my guess is it'll be about 20 seconds on the program. Watch for the vise that passed as old. They darkened down my whole studio to not show the background.

[Roger Bleile]

I just saw the History Detectives episode this past evening. It was a very interesting story. You were correct in that the part of you engraving was about 20 seconds. I wish they had shown more.

RB

[Daniel Houwer]

Hi Jroettger,
A pitty I can't see the show, but found about 1.5 seconds of your engraving on this preview. http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetect...deo/index.html
Must have been nice to do (even with the gruesome tale behind it) and even better to have been part of a historical show like that.

Greetings,

Daniel

[SVD]

I was flipping back and forth between that show and the Olympic Women's Beach Volleyball but I also saw your 3-5 seconds of fame! :thumbsup:

One thing I'll have to check when I watch the recording later (without distractions): several times when the investigator was talking to people about the spoon he handed 'it' to them for them to look at. At least a few of those times it looked to me like it could have been your spoon rather than the original. Either that or it just looked like parts of it gained and lost patinas and darkening between shots.

[Jroettger]

Thanks guys,
Andy Warhol predicted that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. In todays day and age it been reduced to 15 seconds.
The spoon shown on the show was always the original one. I am surprised they omitted some information they shared with me like the engraver who did the original got 3 to 5 cents and hour to do it.