Tonight from 7 to 9, Mississippi State University graduate student Marc Poole will showcase his thesis, “Crew 19: An Artistic Impression on Visual Storytelling” in Giles Architecture Building in Bettersworth Auditorium. In Crew 19, Poole tells a personal story about World War II history using interviews obtained from World War II veterans, including a relative of Poole, factual information and archives.
Poole is pursuing a master’s degree of fine arts in visualization with a multimedia emphasis and a master’s of art degree in history. He said that he has always been interested in history.
“I’ve had a lifelong interest in this type of thing, and I wanted to expand my background about World World II aviation, as well as about my own family’s involvement in the war and answer the questions of those who lived through these events,” Poole said.
Poole’s research for Crew 19 began when his grandmother gave him a rewritten account by his cousin Johnny Butler, a pilot with the 384th Bomb Group that was stationed in England.
Citizens in Chateaubriand, France, found and kept several pieces of Butler’s B-17 plane Hell’s Belles II, wanted to return them and contacted Butler for 50 years.
Using the Internet and other multimedia based programs, Poole combed stories from Butler and created a Web site about the 384th Bomb Group, www.384thbombgroup.com.
Poole said once he created the Web site, friends and family members of the victims and survivors found it and began to respond.
“Response to the Web site was immediate and is continuing,” Poole said. “It is has had 20,000 visitors.”
After receiving information from Butler and responses from the Web site, Poole conducted interviews from Butler and members of Crew 19.
His in-depth research resulted in the reunion of the survivors of Crew 19 in May of 1999 in Savannah, Ga., for the first time in 56 years.
Poole traveled to Chateaubraind, France, where Butler’s crew was shot down on Sept. 16, 1943.
While in France, Poole attended a service in which a monument was dedicated to the crewmen who died in the crash of Butler’s B-17 plane.
“Finding all the veterans was hard work¥Johnny (Butler) knew all them except one,” Poole said. Poole’s thesis was digitally formatted using multimedia software, such as Media 100 Editing, PhotoShop and many others. Poole said he wanted to expand his background in narrative art and apply his research to video.
He has also created a Web site, www.marcpoole.com/index.html, that contains a short video created with Quick Time that tells in-depth accounts about his research and Crew 19.
“The main goal of my thesis is to accurately portray and document a long forgotten event in the hopes of making current generations aware of the sacrifice made by another and pay a small homage to my heroes at the same time,” Poole said.