Searching for Amelia Earhart

Peabody Award-winning director of photography Mark Smith is making his third voyage to the remote South Pacific island of Nikumaroro to document the Amelia Earhart Expeditions’ archeological research. Smith is part of a 16-member team that is traveling under the aegis of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery an organization that contends that famed aviator Earhart landed and ultimately died on Gardner Island – now known as Nikumaroro. He previously journeyed with the group in 2001 and 2007.

American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean during an attempt to make a circum-navigational flight in 1937.  Earhart was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, which she was awarded as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Intense public fascination with her life, career and disappearance continues to this day, as evidenced by the 2009 theatrical film release of Amelia, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere.
 
Nikumaroro, a small, deserted Pacific island located halfway between New Guinea and Hawaii, is known for its oppressive equatorial heat and humidity, razor-sharp coral, dense foliage, treacherous landing conditions and relentless lack of drinkable water. Abandoned remains of Nikumaroro Village, castaway campsites and various elements from an 800-foot freight shipwreck evidence the difficulties of accessing and sustaining life on the uninhabited island.

The mandate of 2007 16-day Nikumaroro expedition was to seek clues to Earhart’s presence there, and persuasive circumstantial evidence was uncovered at the ‘Seven Site,’ the ‘castaways’ campsite that TIGHAR began excavating in 2001. Artifacts included shards of a make-up mirror that matched up with compacts sold in the 1930s in New York City (where Earhart lived); the bottom of a broken hand lotion bottle embossed with a Corning Glass Works logo circa 1933; a Talon zipper pull manufactured in the U.S. in the mid-1930s; and, perhaps most dramatic, a well-used jack knife that was an exact match of the knife listed in the inventory of the plane Earhart flew on her failed 1936 circum-navigational attempt.


Participants on the 2010 expedition will clear the jungle for an intense study of the Seven Site; personnel will also operate a video-equipment ROV for an underwater search for traces of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.


Smith recently purchased Panasonic’s new AG-HPX370 P2 HD shoulder-mount camcorder to use as his primary camera. His equipment pack also includes an AG-HPX170 P2 HD handheld as his B camera, an AG-HPG20 P2 Portable HD recorder/player, an AG-HPG10 P2 Gear viewer/recorder, and an AJ-PCD2 P2 solid-state memory card drive.
  

“The ability of the HPX370 to shoot full raster HD and record in AVC-Intra, the highest-quality origination codec available for an in-camera recording system, coupled with the flexibility of the camcorder for either handheld or tripod-style shooting, made my choice of a main camera easy,” Smith says. “I wanted to select the best-quality acquisition tool I could to fit inside the relatively small working space I need to occupy for this project.” 
 

“I’m will be shooting in AVC-Intra because of its superb image quality for the present and future,” he says. “I have been dealing with tons of legacy footage that is a part of the Earhart project's archive. Consequently, getting the highest quality original material tops my list of priorities and is a central reason I'm using the HPX170.” 



“The HPX370 also affords very low power consumption, which translates into a two-pound battery powering most of a day’s shooting,” says Smith. “As an HPX300 owner, I have enjoyed shooting in AVC-Intra with a fast P2 HD file-based workflow. The new HPX370 offers all those benefits plus even better imaging. The camcorder, with lens and battery, is sized and weighted ideally for this onerous assignment. An EX-series camcorder, in contrast, can be challenging to shoot with handheld, and I’ll be doing considerable handheld work.”
 


Smith will shoot in AVC-Intra 100 at 1080/30pN on the HPX370 and in DVCPRO HD 1080/30p on the HPX170. He will utilize the P2 Portable’s HD-SDI input to record AVC-Intra 100 1080/60i from the remotely operated underwater camera. He will use the HPG20 and HPG10 as card readers, with the PCD2 as back up. Smith is traveling with hard drives with 16TB of storage, and will routinely offload footage to a CalDigit VR mini bus-powered, two-drive RAID system.

TIGHAR and Smith’s company, o7 Films, are currently negotiating a feature-length documentary profiling the Expeditions’ compelling findings that a major satellite/cable channel is expected to air late this year.
 

Smith has worked extensively for major broadcast and large cable networks in the U.S. as well as independent production companies. Smith gained recognition with award-winning stories including a Nickelodeon report on the hidden content of children's video games that received a Peabody, an ABC News documentary for 20/20 about AIDS and its effect on the medical profession, an Emmy-nominated profile of a Russian athlete training in the U.S. shown on TNT, and the film Returning Mickey Stern, which was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Rome Film Festival in 2002. More recently, he was the recipient of a Clio Award for a long-form public relations campaign for communications agency Draftfcb, and was DP for Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways, which aired on the Smithsonian Channel and won the Director’s Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.


Mark Smith www.o7films.com
TIGHAR www.tighar.org