| Description |
Stockham: The Father of Digital Audio Recording is a mid-length documentary film that celebrates the life and achievements of former University of Utah professor Thomas Greenway Stockham, Jr. Despite Dr. Stockham's many accomplishments, his story remains relatively unknown outside of the audio engineering world, even at the University of Utah and in Salt Lake City, where much of his pioneering work was done. Various articles exist which document Stockham's achievements, but they do not capture his personality, his exceptional teaching abilities, or his perseverance to change the way we listen to music in the face of controversy. This film seeks to fill these gaps and to bring well-deserved attention to Dr. Stockham's story. Using Michel Chion's concept of "audio-vision" as a theoretical basis, I set out to create a film that would interest and engage audio aficionados as well as the general public. I researched my subject as thoroughly as possible by searching online, poring through library archives, and pre-interviewing Stockham's family, friends, and coworkers. I sought and successfully raised limited funds for travel, crew, equipment, and other expenses. I then traveled to Moab, Lake Powell, and Seattle to conduct roughly a dozen video interviews with many of the people I had pre-interviewed. I collected and digitized a wealth of archival photos, videos, and audio examples of Stockham's sound experiments. Finally, I edited together a rough cut of the film. A final cut was not achieved, however, I was offered a summer internship with KUED and a partnership with the Utah Film Center that will provide the time and resources necessary to polish the film for wider distribution. It is my hope that Stockham: The Father of Digital Audio iii Recording will be distributed in the film festival circuit or on public television, but ultimately, the film will be made publically available online for use as an educational and historical resource. It will help to preserve and disseminate a heretofore untold story of great relevance to the history of modern audio recording, Salt Lake City, and the University of Utah. |
