Partisan Pictures production company films an interview at West Virginia Community Care in Green Bank. From left, Dr. Jennifer Beverage and Rachel Taylor, PA, discuss working in the National Radio Quiet Zone as the crew – Andrew Scott Webster, Emily Harrold and Peter Schnall capture the moment.
MARLINTON, W.Va. — When New York production company Partisan Pictures was given the task to film and produce a three-part series about technology and the Internet, the crew searched for interesting stories to include and came across Green Bank – the small town at the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone.
It didn’t take long for Partisan Pictures president, producer, director and cinema- tographer Peter Schnall to decide Green Bank needed to be part of the project.
“As we were looking around for really cool and interesting and unusual stories about technology, we bumped into a story – online, of course – about Green Bank, and we thought, ‘how interesting,’” Schnall said. “What a sort of opposite tale to the rapid and sort of pell mell pace and changes in technology, and how it affects us on a daily basis – from cellphones to the Internet to just our daily lives inundated more and more with technological marvels and wonders to the point where, to a certain extent, it impedes on our daily life.
“We spend so much time staring down at these tablets and phones, and yet, here’s a story about a place in a very quiet, rural small town, and it’s not that life has stood still – life is very much moving in a normal pace here,” he continued. “Green Bank is not much different than anywhere else in America but there is a very sort of slower technological journey all having to do with the Green Bank Telescope.”
Schnall, along with producer Emily Harrold, cameraman Reuben Pacheco and sound editor Aaron Scott Webster, came to Green Bank last week to meet with and interview residents about life without cellphones and constant connectivity…
