Courter: Silvels plans ambitious video shoot Saturday

I've spoken with Angela Silvels exactly twice on the phone in the last couple of weeks, and I can say two things about her with some certainty: She is confident in her abilities, and she is ambitious. She would add a third characteristic.

"I am awesome," she said earlier this week.

Silvels, who goes by Tennessee Valley Girl, runs TVG Entertainment, a talent and production company. Silvels is hosting an event Saturday at the Chattanooga Choo Choo that she hopes will result in several shows she plans to sell.

According to Silvels, she has lined up dozens of guests, including Tupac Shakur's cousin Bill Lesane, local judges Russell Bean and Barry Steelman, musicians, artists, models and actors, and she plans to interview them all throughout the day.

"We are going to talk about everything. Music, gangs, drugs. We've got people from 'Chattanooga Housewives' and 'Chatta Husbands.' We are going to do 'Cha-Cha Diva Talk Show.'

"We are going to talk about the recent murders [in Chattanooga] and the music business."

She said Lesane has been invited to "talk about thug life, drugs, gangs."

Over the five-hour production, Silvels said, she will have guests hop on the trolley car at the Choo Choo, and she will interview the guests as they ride around the campus. A video feed will be shown on screens inside the Centennial Theatre, and the raw footage will be edited down in the coming weeks.

The general public can participate by buying a ticket for the train ride or to the theater showing.

"It's going to be amazing," Silvels said.

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Chattanooga-based film and video production company Atomic Films recently won a national ADDY award for cinematography for a video they produced for Blood Assurance.

The video also earned several gold ADDY awards from the American Advertising Federation at the local level, including Best of Show. The piece also won at the district competition in Nashville before it went on to win the national ADDY at an awards ceremony in Austin, Texas.

"Through creative film-making, we show the journey of an accident victim in reverse, beginning in the hospital and traveling through the scene of a car accident until ultimately reaching the blood donor, whose donation was used by the patient in need," said Bobby Stone, partner and director at Atomic Films. "We are proud of this work not only for its visual creativity, but most importantly, its vital and impacting message."

The video was up against ads from Nike, HBO, Volkswagen, Intel and others according to Linda Hisey, vice-president of marketing and public relations at Blood Assurance.

"We're very proud of the fact that we were able to take our need directly to Atomic Films and they were able to conceptualize it."

You can watch the piece at www.bloodassurance.org/psa.

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I bleep bleeeep bleep the BET bleep Music bleep Awards. Bleeeeeep. Peace.

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