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The Starman Documentary

The Starman Team produced a mini-documentary for the 2003 Virginia Series Book Convention. The documentary contained, among other things:

• footage of the mud caves in the California desert that inspired the mud caves in Mutiny on Mars
• footage of a real land-sailer, similar to the ones that Mark and Joe used to travel across the desert in the first Starman book
• footage of David Baumann and his karate class acting out the fight scenes in the Starman books, showing how they were done and what they would look like

The documentary was around 23 minutes long and was produced with David's video camera. It's not a professional documentary by any means; we just wanted to show our readers some people, places and things in the real world that inspired things that later appeared in the Starman Series, so we hauled out the video camera and started recording!

We realized that there would be many people who would be interested in seeing this footage who would not be able to be in Virginia to see it. Therefore, I used a handy-dandy machine called a Terapin to convert the video to an MPEG computer file and placed the file on a CD. The conversion turned out fairly well: the video is compressed a bit harshly in some places but overall it's pretty good.

We're not making available the video cassette version of the documentary for a number of reason: it takes a lot of time to copy a cassette and even if I had the time I have no means of copying it. However, we are making available the CD version, at a cost of $5. The intent is not to make money off of this but simply to cover our costs and make it available to those who would be interested in it.

If you are interested in getting a copy of this CD, contact us  and we can work out the details. Keep in mind that in order to play this, you have to have a computer that can play MPEG files. The Windows Media Player that comes free with Windows can handle these files just fine; I haven't tried playing it on other players but I imagine there are other players that would work as well.

Download the Documentary: Valerie Kramer has made the Starman documentary available online. You can download it for free from this website:

http://www.mydfz.com/starman/ 

Be warned: the file is quite large! If you have the ability and the connection to get it this way, though, then feel free to go right ahead.