One of the cool things I have gotten to do through my internship is attend the Memorial Day concert on the west terrace of the capitol building. The concert is held every year on the capitol lawn and generates quite the crowd. The concert features American Idol winners, Tony award winning singers, famous actors, a school choir, an orchestra, and of course veterans of the wars America has fought in. There was a huge stage that faced the crowd and a large TV screen above it to both broadcast what was occurring on the stage for those who couldn’t see and to show mini-films. Since I was sitting quite far away from the stage I was expecting my vision and ability to hear everything would be limited, but the sound system used and the size of the TV screen made it almost impossible to miss anything. The filmers also had great camera placement at their disposal and were able to catch amazing angles of veterans, the actors on stage, and the classic military man playing the trumpet with the flag behind him (they used a cherry picker to do this, it was amazing). The concert was much more depressing and heartfelt than I was expecting. One of the performances was a reading of the relationship between two brothers who survived the Iraq war, only for one of the brothers to commit suicide due to PTSD a couple years later. The videos shown were ones with original footage from the battlefield and newsreels of the day.