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Rare Light Media Rare Light Media creates epic commercial and brand films, plus stunning documentary photography.

Whether scoping a new video or capturing raw moments, we bring your cinematic vision to life.

When Production Research Goes Somewhere You Didn't ExpectWe're deep in production on BlueCoal360 — our multi-year projec...
07/03/2026

When Production Research Goes Somewhere You Didn't Expect

We're deep in production on BlueCoal360 — our multi-year project to build a 3D photogrammetric archive of the Huber Breaker, an anthracite coal processing structure in Ashley, PA that was demolished in 2014 before adequate documentation existed.

Long render sessions come with the territory. So does research.

This week's reading led us to three published federal studies that we think deserve more attention in conversations about the future of northeastern Pennsylvania — and about how communities that spent 150 years powering this country are positioned in the next wave of decisions being made about their land.

Here's what the research says:

Federal researchers at NETL analyzed 94 passive acid mine drainage treatment systems across Pennsylvania and found rare earth element concentrations of up to 2,000 mg/kg in the treatment sludge. Neodymium. Dysprosium. Cerium. The materials that go into EV motors, wind turbine magnets, and the batteries at the center of the energy transition. Estimated potential: over 1,100 tons of REE annually from Appalachian AMD systems alone. (osti.gov/biblio/2511302)

Pennsylvania has approximately 11,000 abandoned mines. Roughly 500 AMD remediation systems are accumulating REE-rich solids right now, without a recovery plan. (osti.gov/biblio/2570848)

Penn State's Center for Critical Minerals is already running a pilot facility processing 1,000 gallons of PA mine drainage per day. This is not theoretical. (osti.gov/biblio/3363370)

We should be clear: we are a documentary production company working in industrial heritage preservation, not scientists or economists. We found these studies during a render session and we had time to think.

What we think: the communities in the Wyoming Valley and the broader anthracite region have been on the receiving end of other people's economic decisions for 150 years. The coal companies decided. The railroad trusts decided. Now data center companies are arriving with tax incentive packages and job projections, and the pattern is recognizable to anyone who has spent time in this history.

The AML reclamation funding arriving from the Infrastructure Law, the rare earth research being conducted in state, the ongoing mine pool treatment costs — these represent a genuine decision point. The difference from every prior one is that the research now suggests there is recoverable value in what was left behind.

Whether that value stays in the region or routes elsewhere is still being decided.

We document what happens to places that ran out of time to ask that question. We'd rather not add another chapter.

→ BlueCoal360.org

So the question we kept coming back to through this whole project was simple enough. What's the point of preserving a sp...
04/30/2026

So the question we kept coming back to through this whole project was simple enough. What's the point of preserving a space in 360° if nobody can actually step inside it?

Composing without a frame was the first shift. Stitching came next. The last step was making it experiential — an equirectangular file wrapped onto the inside of a sphere, rendered in a browser using Pannellum. No plugin, no install. Just a space you can navigate with a mouse.

The live embed is on the BlueCoal360 site now. The Huber's conveyor room. A building demolished in 2014. Look up at the ceiling, down at the floor, across at machinery that no longer exists.

Final in a three-part series. Go try it.

bluecoal360.com/embedding-360-web-experience/

Most production companies start with a brief and protect it through delivery. The creative direction is locked early. Su...
04/30/2026

Most production companies start with a brief and protect it through delivery. The creative direction is locked early. Surprises are problems.

We founded Rare Light Media — not Rare Light Productions — because the work we do is investigative before it's cinematic. You follow the material where it leads. You stay open long enough for the real story to show up.

The BC360 project started with a coal breaker in Ashley, Pennsylvania. The research eventually turned up Russell Johnson — the Professor on Gilligan's Island — born in Ashley in 1924, raised on the same problem-solving instinct the town required of everyone. He brought that to a desert island six decades later. The writers had no idea.

We didn't go looking for that. We were researching something else entirely.

That's what a media company does differently.

rarelightmedia.com

People ask about the stitching. It sounds like where the complexity lives — control points, parallax, HDR brackets, geom...
04/22/2026

People ask about the stitching. It sounds like where the complexity lives — control points, parallax, HDR brackets, geometry that bends in a spherical projection.

But it wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was the fieldwork. A full day inside the Huber. No power, no ventilation. July heat trapped in seven floors of timber and steel. We went through a lot of Gatorade and still ended up with heat stroke.

The stitching in PTGui was largely automated — because the research and testing happened before we ever walked into that building. You front-load the preparation so the process doesn't fail you in a space you can't reshoot.

Second in a three-part series on the craft behind the BlueCoal360 archive.

bluecoal360.com/stitching-retouching-360-image/

So the first thing 360° photography took from us was the frame.Most work starts with a viewfinder — you decide what's in...
04/15/2026

So the first thing 360° photography took from us was the frame.

Most work starts with a viewfinder — you decide what's in, what's out. 360° removes that entirely. No dedicated camera either — a standard professional body on a pano head, manually calculating angles to cover the full sphere. If it existed in the space, it was in the image. The ceiling. The floor. The equipment case you forgot to move.

Documenting the Huber Coal Breaker before its 2014 demolition forced a completely different way of seeing. That work grew from Beyond the Breaker into the BlueCoal360 archive — and we've never written about the compositional side of it until now.

First in a three-part series on the craft behind the archive.

bluecoal360.com/seeing-in-360-how-to-compose-360-image/

BlueCoal360 doesn't exist without the people who were already doing this work when I showed up in 2012.Bill Best and Ray...
04/10/2026

BlueCoal360 doesn't exist without the people who were already doing this work when I showed up in 2012.

Bill Best and Ray Clarke took me on tours of collieries across the region and walked me through the Huber floor by floor — the same path the coal traveled. Ray's wife made Irish soda bread and her own jam for us. That's the kind of people they are. Don Kane has picked up that work and carried it forward, and lately we've been talking about something I find genuinely exciting — using the film, the 360° archive, and the 3D reconstruction as living resources for people who visit the Miners' Memorial Park in Ashley. History you can actually step inside, at the place where it happened.

The has been at this for decades. I'm glad to be working alongside them.

Chris Murley at has been essential since the beginning. He took us to the No. 9 Coal Mine in Lansford and the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour in Scranton — and pulled out maps and documents that never make it onto the public tour. The kind of detail that changes how you understand everything above ground. That knowledge is embedded in this project.

And these three join as BlueCoal360's new partners — organizations that have been doing this work long before this project existed.

These are the partnerships that make the work honest.

Follow us here for updates. bluecoal360.com

Documentary work often begins with a question no one else is asking. For us, it was this: what happens to the history in...
04/08/2026

Documentary work often begins with a question no one else is asking. For us, it was this: what happens to the history inside a building when the building comes down?

The Huber Coal Breaker in Ashley, Pennsylvania was one of the most sophisticated anthracite processing facilities ever built. Constructed in 1939, it processed thousands of tons of raw coal daily through seven floors of machinery before closing — and stood abandoned for decades before demolition in 2014.

Our 2019 film Beyond the Breaker told the story of the community that fought to preserve it. But the deeper we went into that history, the more we understood that the full story — the geology, the industry, the people, the machinery — deserved something far more comprehensive.

BlueCoal360 is that project: a 360° photographic archive of 22 scenes inside the Huber captured before demolition, a complete 3D reconstruction from the original 1939 HAER engineering blueprints, and a feature documentary tracing the complete story of anthracite coal in northeastern Pennsylvania.

We've written about why we started — and why this kind of industrial heritage documentation matters now more than ever.

bluecoal360.com/huber-breaker-industrial-history-of-pennsylvania/

Sixteen years ago today — April 5, 2010 — we were at Kennedy Space Center filming and photographing STS-131, one of the ...
04/05/2026

Sixteen years ago today — April 5, 2010 — we were at Kennedy Space Center filming and photographing STS-131, one of the last four Space Shuttle launches before the program ended.

There's a particular pressure that comes with documenting something you know will never happen again. You prepare for every contingency. You set up redundant systems. You camp 11 miles from the pad and make peace with the fire ants. You run your checklist, and you do not miss the moment.

This week, watching Artemis II lift off with its crew bound for the Moon — the first crewed deep space flight in over 50 years — that morning came back vividly. The missions are different. The responsibility to capture history correctly is exactly the same.

That's what drives the work at Rare Light Media. 🚀

Last night's Artemis launch sent me straight back to April 2010.I was on the banks of the Indian River in Titusville, Fl...
04/02/2026

Last night's Artemis launch sent me straight back to April 2010.
I was on the banks of the Indian River in Titusville, Florida at 3am — camera rolling, tripod set, filming STS-131, one of the last Space Shuttle launches ever.
The launch was incredible. But here's the shot nobody plans for:
After the launch, most people packed up and left. The only ones still there were me and a group of British travelers who'd driven straight from a wedding and were running on zero sleep. We were all just standing there in the quiet when we looked up — and the shuttle's v***r trails were catching the rising sun, refracting into these incredible illuminated streaks across the sky.
Best photos of the whole morning. The ones I didn't know I was going to take.
I just rediscovered those images while updating my online presence for some new projects. Fifteen years later and they still stop me cold.
Last night, listening to the Artemis countdown, the commentator said that from that point forward all controls were being handed over to the spacecraft's computers. I thought about all the clever AI workflows and automation systems me and my collaborator have been building lately and felt pretty good about ourselves.
Then I remembered what those computers are actually doing.
I showed my AI collaborator the photo. He saw it. He had no comeback.
We'll stick to documentaries. 😄🚀

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