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CLEARWATER
A professional video editor, Matt Pierce started out in his bedroom, transferring other people's home movies to DVDs for family keepsakes.
But for the last 18 months, he's been holed up in his studio, consumed with a more ambitious project: documenting the experiences of World War II fighter pilots.
Pierce, 48, owns Legacy Video Studio in a space formerly occupied by a bridal shop on McMullen-Booth Road north of Drew Street. Here, he recently completed a four-hour DVD documentary on the U.S. Air Force's 368th Fighter Group — pilots who flew the famed P-47 Thunderbolt over European battlefields.
"I am a one-man show," Pierce said. "There were times I shut my studio down for three months at a time and worked 14 hours a day on this video."
The DVDs include harrowing gun camera footage from the warplanes, a vast collection of photos, and interviews with the pilots. Pierce said the amount of material he received from the veterans was overwhelming. "They had hundreds of hours of original footage," he said.
He had originally aimed for a single DVD of two hours in length. But after much paring down, he settled for two discs of two hours apiece.
The 368th Fighter Group existed from 1943 to 1945 as part of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Its pilots flew combat missions during D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, among others. They strafed and bombed targets and provided air cover for Allied ground troops in France, Belgium, Austria and Germany.
The video documentary is an offshoot of a book by Dr. Timothy Grace of northern California, the historian for the fighter group. His father was one of its members. Grace's book, Second to None, refers to the group's motto, Nulli Secundus, Latin for "second to none."
Awed by his subject, Pierce carefully arranged his set of DVDs.
"The first video tells the story," said Pierce. "We wanted to make sure we got their stories right."
That disc includes the pilot interviews and video footage taken from the planes.
The second disc features a photo gallery and tributes to pilots who were prisoners of war or missing in action. It includes a section on "nose art," in reference to the paintings, frequently of women, that pilots put on the noses of their planes.
Military matters are something Pierce knows personally. He and his wife, Lorna, served in the U.S. Army in Germany in the mid-1980s, and that experience has given him an affinity for veterans. He wants to tell their stories.
Each pilot of the 368th had a tale to tell. One with a heroic story was Capt. Carlos Maurice Talbott.
During an air mission over Belgium in September 1944, Talbott found his squad of Thunderbolts outnumbered by German fighters three to one. The captain, who got separated from his wingman, was alone at 15,000 feet. He still managed to down two German fighters and break up the enemy's formation before he, too, was shot down.
"He took them on single-handedly and broke up their pattern," Pierce said of Talbott.
Talbott later reported that as he was parachuting down, the four remaining Luftwaffe pilots saluted him before flying away. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
For Pierce, this project has been his most time-consuming and gratifying to date.
He started his production company in 2007 in the bedroom of his former home in Manatee County. Along with transferring home movies to DVDS, he videotapes people talking about their lives ("legacy biographies") and helps businesses prepare videos for social media venues such as YouTube.
But as the remaining pilots of the 368th are slowly passing away, Pierce particularly values this project: "It was a real honor for me to do this."
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