| Reston
Man Finishes Documentary on Planned Community |
| Film
Covers Area Timeline, Future |
By Erick Soricelli
Observer Staff Writer |
| There's a small television in a white-painted room inside
Steve Resz's condominium, but it's not for channel surfing. |
| The TV is used to play back original or edited tape. To
its right is a large silver Apple computer and monitor with
a stack of white bars on the screen, part of an editing program.
Turning around, one sees a wall of digital videotapes stretched
to the corner of the room. |
| Standing in between the doorway to his studio and the living
room are two black tripod-mounted videocameras, which Resz,
59, used to film his upcoming two-hour documentary, "Reston:
Past, Present and Future." It's slated for tentative release
on DVD in October. |
| "The idea was to point a camera at the community and hope
to come back with the essence of the place," Resz said. "What
I wanted to do was cover one year in time, not just from 2002
to 2003, but the course of a year." |
| This is Resz's first documentary and he's been working on
it since leaving his job at British Telecom to concentrate
fully on it in 2002. He's just about done editing and wrapped
up filming in June on a topic of current interest in Reston:
the idea of incorporating into a town. |
| "It'll speculate about its future," he said about the ending.
"I go back to the fact that it was a town." |
| The documentary goes far beyond the planned community's
founding in 1964 by Robert E. Simon, Jr. |
| It traces back to the Potomac Indians, the Fairfax family,
and to the turn of the 20th century, when Dr. Carl Adolph
Max Wiehle had a charter and a town for a brief period. |
| In 1923, the A. Smith Bowman family bought the land 22 years
after Wiehle died. This time period is also covered since
much of the Bowman land was purchased by Simon in 1961 to
found Reston. |
| From there, the documentary covers the years when the Gulf
Oil and Mobil Oil companies took over the land in the 1960s
and 1970s and up to the present day. |
| For current segments, Resz drove all around the area, filming
at the Walker Nature Education Center, various Reston pools,
picnic pavilion, summer camps, sports leagues and around its
neighborhoods. |
| He also filmed two Reston Festivals, a Reston Multicultural
Festival, a Reston Grand Prix and a Pet Fiesta. |
| For the documentary, Resz interviewed Simon, Tracey White,
president and CEO of the Greater Reston Chamber of Commerce,
outgoing Reston Community Center executive director Dennis
Kern and former Reston Association executive vice president
Jerry Volloy. |
| "I'm pleased with the nearly-finished end product," he said.
"Does that mean I'm disappointed in some respects? Yeah." |
| An idea Resz had to leave on the cutting room floor include
"man-on-the-street" interviews where he'd film at Reston Town
Center asking passersby, "is Reston special, and if so, why?" |
| But he had to abandon the idea, realizing "that could turn
into eight hours of tape," he said. |
| Resz also wanted to try more than simply pointing and shooting
for his footage. He recalled once standing up in the middle
of a moving car with his camera on while someone else drove. |
| Wind resistance, however, had other plans. "I didn't really
stop to think what 55 mile per hour wind was with a 15 pound
camera, so it wasn't successful," he said. |
| By the time he was finished, Resz had collected over 130
hours of tape, which he's now editing for two hours as a self-imposed
limit. "You can't tell this kind of story in 10 minutes,"
he said. |
| As a first-time filmmaker, Resz bought his camera as a sort
of self-reward. "I quit smoking cigarettes," he said. "Part
of the gimmick is buying a present you wouldn't normally buy.
I bought a camera and I loved it." |
| Resz is looking to use this as a launching point for his
new career and his company, Impact Video. "What I get out
of this is I would get experience and what the trade calls
my ‘demo reel,'" he said. "The camera work three years ago
was far inferior to what I do today." |
| Once he's done with the Reston documentary, Resz will turn
his camera lens west into Loudoun County. "I like history,"
he said. "That's probably why I want to do history." |
