Tourism videos screening at auditorium

Jeb Schenck of Schenck Photography in cooperation with the Hot Springs Travel and Tourism Board will present their tourism video productions to the public Tuesday, February 8 at 7 p.m. at the Bill Malloy Auditorium. The event is free to the public and attendance is encouraged to see their filmmaking work.

Over the past year and a half, Schenck Photography produced a whole series of videos of different lengths to promote Thermopolis and Hot Springs County. The videos include a series of commercials and several short films that show off the features of the area, from the Wind River Canyon, Legend Rock, to the State Park, the terraces, the swimming pools, and much more. Schenck added, “We want to show it to our home crowd so they can help us spread the word.”

Tourism Director Jackie Dorothy said, “What I like about it is that we produced some scenic, some stories. We’re telling the story of Thermopolis and Hot Springs County and are able to go out there and share this with the world. That’s the cool thing about the way things work in this day and age.”

The tourism board has used the videos so far on television and is now looking at social media distribution. Already the Hot Springs County Tourism Facebook page has over 120,000 views on their videos.

Dorothy continued, “What we want to do is just grow awareness of how beautiful hot springs county is. It’s kind of a hidden gem. We want to keep it beautiful. We want to keep it wide open spaces and we can share via the videos and show people showcase the area.”

Schenck said, “When we started shooting the videos, especially a lot by drone, I have to admit, I was actually quite stunned at how incredibly varied and beautiful Thermopolis is, especially looking at it from a different perspective that almost nobody has had a chance to see unless you were zooming around on a hang glider. I think the people will be very pleasantly surprised.” 

In addition to their commercials that show the many features of the county, there are three short film stories about Legend Rock, floating the Big Horn River, and boating at Boysen Reservoir. 

Schenck described the films and said with Legend Rock, “We opened up with some time exposures, which we did a bunch of field-testing on and 27 trips out to Legend Rock to get the sunrise shots of shadows revealing the petroglyphs. It is very dramatic. What lasts for, like five seconds on the film, would take an hour and a half shooting time, not including getting out there, setting it up, and then coming back. So there are many, many hours.”

Schenck said, “There were several families who were highly involved. One on the river and the others on Boysen. We couldn’t have done it without those people. Enormous cooperation with the marina and several families there with their motorboats and the big sleds and things like that. And it was quite exciting for us because I had never been on Boysen for 40 some years and it was pretty wild. We’re flying around and zooming around and hanging onto the cameras so we can get the footage.”

Schenk emphasized the collaboration with the members of the community. He said, “We’re able to produce this with an enormous level of cooperation from a lot of businesses and different families and personnel in the State Park. We couldn’t have done it without their genuine help and volunteering and putting up with having to do some reshoots and weather and things like that. It was just a lot of fun. If it were a movie with a credit list, it would be long.” 

Dorothy said, “We’re just here to tell the story of Thermopolis and Hot Springs County and we just want to share with the world what we got. And that’s what I love about working with locals.”