The Twelve Films Project

The 12 Films Recap

About half-way through this process, I wanted to do a recap.  It seemed like a good place to pause and reflect but I eventually decided to wait until I was totally finished so I could get some perspective on the project as a whole.  I’ve decided to go back and re-watch all the films, writing a little summary for each one, so here we go:

January - Flying South

 

I was already a week or so into the year when I got around to writing this script.  I had been recovering from holiday travel and finishing up some work when I realized that I had already told people that I was going to be making one short film every month.  I had to get on the ball and write something. 

I opened up my screenwriting software and started a conversation between two characters which is often how I like to start writing.  With a quick pause to go shower about halfway through the morning, I finished it quickly.  A couple little revisions and it was ready to shoot.  Casting went quickly and the shoot went relatively smoothly apart from a blown day when the wind kicked up so badly that we’d never be able to record audio.

Flying South, more than any other of the Twelve, is a perfect example of me trying to do too much.  I didn’t plan ahead enough, took too much for granted and the film suffered because of it.  The audio is distractingly bad and I didn’t know enough about the camera to really make it look great.  Still, it was the first and holds a very special place for me, if only because it was just me and Matt Ryan on a freezing cold day shooting the first of the series.

The film also started a trend within the narratives in the series...the conversation film.  All of the narratives (except for Heist-Off! which I’ll talk about later) are simple conversations between people, which are the kind of films that I really love.

February - Thirty Years

 

Here’s where things started getting better.  I decided to up the production value a little (and test out some gear that I wanted to buy) by renting a slider and a focus pulling system and I think the film looks worlds better than Flying South.  It also SOUNDS a lot better due to renting better mics and finally figuring out how to run the audio.

Shooting another narrative, I was trying to play to my strengths a bit more in the beginning.  I had directed more narrative than anything else and so I was living in my comfort zone a bit while I got better on a technical level.

My biggest issue with this was timing.  Sadly, I got no rehearsal time with the actors except for a few read-throughs before we started shooting and I think it shows.  I feel like the overall timing of the piece, the dialogue and the back and forth between the actors is lagging.  They did a great job, I just wish we had more time to work it before we started shooting. 

March - Stars Fall

 

I’ve known Andrew Rosas for a while and have always been a big fan of his music.  When I heard this song, I really loved it and wanted to make a music video for it.  After making two narrative films, I wanted to step out a bit and do something different which is why I asked him if he wouldn’t mind running around downtown Austin with me for a few nights.  

As it turned out, we had a lot of fun and managed to get some really good looking footage just using available light.  I also got to stay within my comfort zone a little by shooting the green screen stuff and really utilizing my post-production experience to make the video pop.

One thing I got to try on this was speeding up the song and the frame rate of the camera so that, when everything was slowed down, it would have a dreamy quality to it.  I only got to do this when we were shooting the green screen, but it was a good test and something that I would be able to use later. 

April - 360

 

After buying my camera slider in March (I got to use it on a couple shots for Stars Fall) I decided to do a project where I got to use it a lot so I could get good with it.  Sliders are deceptively difficult.  It looks easy enough (just side the camera along the rail) but getting good at timing and slow moves was a lot more challenging.

I had seen some of Philip Bloom’s “mood pieces” before, where he would pick a location or a subject, shoot pretty shots of it and then set the edit to music.  I had been inspired by them because he would use those pieces to get good at a new camera or tool in his bag of tricks.  So I decided to do something similar and chose the 360 Bridge in Austin (one of my favorite landmarks) as the subject of my April film.

I really love this one.  The music is wonderful (a cut from The Rentals album, Resilience) and shooting this was a huge challenge that ended up being a lot of fun.  The bulk of the shots were taken from the top of a cliff that overlooks the bridge and I (by myself) had to lug not only my camera gear, but the slider and tripods as well, up some very slippery steps in pitch black.  Since I wanted to get timelaspe shots of the sun coming up over the bridge, I had to get up there and set up around 4am.  Once I was up there and done shooting the timelapse, I set up the slider and shot all of that.  It was a blast, but a lot of hard work.

May - Farm to Trailer

 

Wanting to break out of my comfort zone even more, I decided to try my hand at making a short documentary.  I’ve always loved watching documentaries but had never considered making one.

Julie and I had eaten at Odd Duck and Barley Swine and loved Bryce’s food.  When I started thinking about documentary ideas, the “farm to table” concept really jumped out at me.  I called Bryce and left a message, but what I didn’t know was that when I left that message, he was in New York accepting the Food & Wine Magazine Best New Chef award.

When I learned that he had won, I figured I’d need a new subject since he’d be too busy or maybe even too important to talk to me about doing some little documentary.  But a few days later, he called and we talked for a while.  I met him down at his restaurant and explained what I’d want to do.  He agreed and we shot his interview a few days later.

Shooting this documentary was a lot of fun and it really taught me the importance of a pre-interview.  Apart from our phone conversation and meeting at his restaurant, Bryce and I really didn’t talk before the interview and so I only went in with the questions I came up with based on research I did online.  I feel like, if we had spoken more before the interview, I would have had more information and better questions.  Still, I do love this doc and think it was a great way to open the door to that world of filmmaking.

On a side note, Farm to Trailer was accepted into the Sedona International Film Festival recently which was huge for me.  It was the first of the 12 Films to be accepted into a festival and, as my first documentary, I’m very proud of it...and Sedona is an amazing festival, so that made it even more incredible. 

June - Heist-Off!

 

When I started the Twelve Films Project, Matt Ryan said that there was bound to be one of them that just wasn’t very good.  This was it.

Looking back, I’m amazed how good it was given the 48-hour time constraint.  And when we went to the screening and saw it up against many of the other films that had been made that weekend, I felt a lot better about it.

It’s a goofy little film filled with many mistakes and some pretty awful storytelling, but there are also moments in there that make me laugh every time I see it.  Looking at it against the other films in the project, it’s pretty awful, but looking at it for what it is, it’s actually not too bad.

July - Charcuterie

 

For my second documentary, I decided to focus on something that was near and dear to my heart, cured meat.  The Kocurek’s had been on my radar since I moved to Austin, only because they make some of the finest charcuterie I’ve ever had.  Their bacons are wonderful and their sausages are inspired.  What’s funny is, when Julie and I looked at their website about a year earlier, we said, “We should be friends with these people!”...and that’s what happened.

I got in touch with them and asked if they’d be interested in participating.  Originally, I had wanted to make the doc about three different charcuterie companies here in Austin, but when I met Larry and Lee Ann and saw what they were doing, I knew the doc should only be about them.

Learning from my mistakes with Bryce, I spent a lot of time with Larry and Lee Ann in their kitchen, shooting them making their charcuterie as well as talking with them and getting them comfortable talking to me.  We developed a bond that made everything a lot simpler when it came time to sit down for the interviews. 

In the end, Charcuterie is one of my favorite of the Twelve, if only because I made some amazing friends out of it.  

August - The Cathedral of Junk

 

I won’t lie...this was a quickie.  I was buried under a lot of work and was struggling to find time to get something done for August.  I knew of the Cathedral and had thought about doing that for the June film, but the 48-Hour project seemed like a better idea (ha!).  I got in touch with Vince Hannemann, who owns the Cathedral, and he was open to having me come out and shoot.

I decided to go early as August in Austin is pretty brutal.  I arrived around 7am and shot for 4 hours.  I got everything I needed and had it edited in a few days...pretty easy, but it’s actually one of my favorite pieces.  The simple piano music plays against the chaotic visuals that are full of things to look at and I was very happy with the camera moves and how that helped to show off just how big the Cathedral is.

September - Layover

 

Until moving to Austin, I never really had much in the way of allergies.  Usually, when the weather turned from Summer to Fall, I’d get the sniffles for a few days, sneeze a few times and that was it.  This year, my immune system (or whatever it is that controls allergies) decided to go on vacation.  I got the worst sinus infection/allergy/whatever that I’ve ever had.  It seriously destroyed me, sending me to bed and even for a quick trip to the emergency room.  Of course, all of this was happening while I was trying to make Layover.

The original idea came to me when I was directing a web spot for a cell phone that never made it on the market.  We shot for a day at the Austin airport and it was a very cool experience.  The people at the airport were very accommodating and, even though we were shooting right next to an active gate all day, the whole thing went off without a hitch.

Since the web spot was never going to be seen, I decided to go back and shoot a short film out at the airport.  We shot the whole thing in one night, from 8pm to 3:30am and I was in quite a bit of pain for the whole thing.  I had started taking steroids for my allergies, but they hadn’t kicked in fully yet and I was a bit of a zombie that night.  Fortunately, I had Paul Toohey with me to help with the shooting and general “keeping shit going”.  The shoot went well and because we were shooting with two 7D’s, we were able to get a lot of angles in a short amount of time.

I think this is the narrative piece that I’m most proud of in the 12 Films.  There are some fun moments and it really does feel like something that might happen at some airport late at night.  There are plenty of mistakes, but I think it has a real organic feel to it.

October - Instant Lovers

 

Hands down, the most fun I had shooting any of the 12 Films.  I was introduced to Deano by David Barrow of Applebox Imaging who knew I wanted to do another music video for the 12 Films.  Deano sent me his upcoming album and when I heard Instant Lovers, I knew that was the perfect track for a video.

The song is kind of a throwback to those great “butt rock” songs from the 80’s when the men were men and the women were hot and in bikini’s, so I decided to make something that had that feel to it, but was a bit of a satire on those videos as well.

I had shot at the swimming pool location before when I directed a web spot for Verizon.  We shot there at night, and so I thought it would be cool to go back and do it during the day.  Putting the band in the water was an idea I had when I started looking at the location and figuring out how I would shoot it.  I knew I could speed up the song and the camera’s frame rate and get some really amazing shots.

I assembled the same team from the Layover shoot and got on Craigslist to find some used musical instruments that we could trash by keeping them underwater all day.  The weather looked like it was going to hold, but the night before the shoot, a cold front moved in, chilling the air a little which made it a bit uncomfortable for the band, but they were troopers and the day went off without a hitch.  Playing the “hot girl” was Natalie Monstanto who I directed in Sketch last year.  She came out and really nailed the mix of sexy and gross that it needed.

November - Local

 

This originally started as an idea for a documentary about farming, and how the dynamic of farming has changed in the past 3-5 years with the rise of the “organic” and “local” movements.  I had the idea in June after interviewing Farmer Kris Olsen out at Milagro Farms for the Farm to Trailer documentary.  In the months between June and November, I learned a lot more about local food and the differences between that and “organic” food and, in the end, I decided to expand the scope of the film to include, not just the farms, but the people who supported the farms and brought that produce and protein to the public.

I wrote down all of the people I wanted to interview and the list was about 17-20 people.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to interview everyone and still have time to edit the doc, so I culled the list down to 10 people and got started near the end of October.  The shoots went well and it was a beautiful time of year to be out on the farms.  I got lucky with a couple of my interviews including Valerie Broussard and Paul Hargrove at the W Hotel’s restaurant, Trace.  In the end, I had about 14 hours of interviews and another 5 hours of b-roll from the farms and restaurants.

I finished the interviews around the 13th of November and started going through the footage, synching the interviews and getting a sense of all the b-roll.  I knew going into it that this was going to be the biggest of the 12 Films.  The scope of the doc was big and after going through all the interviews and b-roll, I decided to go for a 30-minute running time.  I probably could have made a 40-45 minute film and still had a lot of great stuff left over, but I knew I’d never be able to really focus on a film that long.  The 30-minute mark was realistic and it worked out well.

Local was probably the hardest of all the 12 Films, mostly because it was the only film that took up the majority of the month.  I was also finishing up a lot of work for my “day job” clients at the same time, so I ended up editing on Thanksgiving while my wife and family was making dinner...that was a long month.  In the end though, I think I’m most proud of Local and what I was able to do in the limited time.  The film has got an amazing amount of positive feedback, both online and within the Austin local food community.

December - SB 81

 

I originally had planned on making a narrative film for my final entry, but I just couldn’t come up with an idea that felt right.  I read an article by my friend Melanie Haupt at the Austin Chronicle that caught my eye and I decided that I would use the article as the jumping off point for the doc.

SB 81 is by no means my best work, and I was kind of sad to end on what I considered a low note.  The doc is fine, but by the end I was just exhausted and ready for the project to be over.  Mix that with the holidays and my need to take a small vacation before the New Year started, meant that I just didn’t have the time or energy to really knock it out of the park.

Still, people in the Austin food and home baking community liked the doc and the State Representative for Austin, Eddie Rodriguez, did a blog post about the doc, saying how much he liked it, so it wasn’t a total disaster.

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In the end, the one thing that I had hoped for was that, if someone was to watch all the films from January through to December, they'd see a progression in quality.  Watching all of these back, I feel like that happens, both technically and in the degree of difficulty.

I learned a lot while doing this project, but the thing I learned that surprised me the most is that I really love making documentaries.  Don't get me wrong, I still love scripted narrative films, but there's something thrilling about finding the thread in the edit and crafting a story out of many hours of footage.  I think I'll always make scripted films, but I really was bitten by the doc bug.

This blog is finally winding down and I think this might be the best place to end it.  I'm moving on to a few bigger projects this year and none of them would have been possible without this project, what I learned while doing it and the people that I met in the process.

This past year was incredible and I wouldn't trade it for anything.  Thanks.

January 2011 - January 2012

Thank You

I wanted to take a break from writing the 12 Films recap to thank some of the people that made the last 12 months possible.  I had help on all of the films that I made and so I wanted to give a quick shout out to the people who got behind what I was doing.

Julie - My wife was there when I came up with the idea of the 12 Films (we were making our New Year’s resolutions) and was there for every film in the series.  Julie is a wonderful sounding board for a project and has a great eye for where to cut and where to expand, especially with the documentaries.  She was supportive and honest, both at the same time, which can be really difficult.  This project never would have made it through the June film (Heist-Off!) without her.  When everyone else either bailed, fell asleep or just gave up, she was there making sure we had everything covered and I will always love her for that.

Matt Ryan - Matt started helping me out with the first of the 12 Films and was there for Flying South, Thirty Years, Farm to Trailer, Heist-Off! and Charcuterie.  In January, Matt was in a similar place as me.  He had just bought his camera (a Canon T2i) and we ended up learning a lot of stuff together on those first films.  The project would have been impossible in the beginning if Matt wasn’t there to help and, for that, I will always be thankful.

Paul Toohey - Paul started contacting me every once in a while after Melanie Haupt's article in the Austin Chronicle.  He’d offer his help from time to time and I decided to take him up on it in September.  He showed up and proved that he was invaluable in the first couple hours, helping shoot, grip and set up shots while my head felt like it was going to explode with all the allergies.  Paul worked on all the rest of the films and has become a good friend and an awesome collaborator.  Moving into 2012, we will be working on a lot of projects together and I couldn't be more excited to be working with him.

Lee Ann & Larry Kocurek - The Kocurek's were so supportive of the documentary when it came out.  They pushed the doc through their Twitter and Facebook pages to many food related news outlets and, because of that, Charcuterie ended up on the Huffington Post, New York Magazine and many other web publications and blogs and it brought a lot of new viewers to the project.  The fact that they also became such great friends was an added bonus.

Melanie Haupt - I got an email in May from Melanie saying that she had been assigned to write a feature story about the 12 Films Project for the Austin Chronicle.  I was psyched that the project was starting to build steam and met with Melanie a few times to talk about filmmaking, the project and everything else.  When the article came out, I got a lot of great response and I really owe so much of that to her.  Melanie has continued to write about the films for the Chronicle and has become a really good friend.

Cary Daniels - Cary answered a Craigslist ad for a location sound mixer in May for the Farm to Trailer film and we instantly got along.  Cary did location sound for me on a few outside projects as well and moved to Los Angeles in September.  Since then, he’s been doing sound mixing on all the films and knocking it out of the park.

Chris Walker - Chris is dating Cary’s sister...let’s get that out of the way first.  When Cary moved to L.A., I asked him if he knew of anyone who could replace him for location sound.  Cary sent me Chris’ info and I booked him for the Layover shoot.  Chris immediately got how we worked and became an integral part of the last few films.  Chris also wrote the music for Local and SB 81 and I just love his style and sound.  Both Chris and Cary are people that I'll be working with on projects in 2012 and beyond.

Melissa Porter - I met Melissa while directing a commercial here in Austin.  She was a P.A. on the set and was fun, funny and did a great job.  I found out that she was also a camera operator, so I asked he to come work on the Instant Lovers music video, hopping in the pool with me to shoot the GoPro footage.  She also operated on Local and SB 81 and did an amazing job.

I also wanted to thank everyone who watched the films, commented on Vimeo and wrote in with questions.  The support for this project was huge and I couldn't appreciate it more.

Thank you!

The December Film - Update 2

Sorry it's been a little sparse here on the blog.  Finishing up the December film along with my day-job has left me very little time to sit back and reflect, but I got some amazing news yesterday and figured I'd fold it into a little update about the December film.

First off, we finished shooting all the interviews and b-roll for the December doc, "SB 81" last Thursday.  After I took my car in to get the tire fixed, I started the transcoding and audio synching process.  Once everything was in Final Cut Pro, I went through the interviews, marking the answers along with any clips that I wanted to make sure to use.  Got all that done by Sunday and started cutting.

It's now Wednesday and I've got the first rough cut done.  I'm sending that out to some people for feedback and I'm hoping to have the final cut of the interviews done by tomorrow to send out for sound mixing.  While the sound mix is being done out in L.A., I'll be laying in the b-roll and working on the opening titles.  Should have everything back next week, just in time to lay it all in and post it up.

Overall, I'm happy with the way the doc is turning out.  It's hard to judge it when it's just raw interviews, so hopefully laying in the b-roll will help focus some of it out.  It's a big subject with a long timeline, so the doc feels very full to me right now...a lot of ideas...and moving between them feels a little clunky, so I'm hoping to smooth all that out in the next cut.

As for the BIG NEWS!  Farm to Trailer, the May film, was just accepted into the Sedona International Film Festival.  They called me last night to let me know that the film got in (very classy) and it was so amazing.  Sedona is a very cool festival, it's been around since the mid-90's, and I can't belive that Farm to Trailer was accepted.  It's my first documentary and the first of the 12 Films to be accepted into a festival, so I'm just super psyched.

Can't believe that I'm just a little over a week away from finishing this project.  Feels weird.

The December Film - Update

I'll be finished shooting the December film, SB 81, today.  Overall, the shoot has been going well and I think it's going to be a cool little doc.

Yesterday myself, my Producer Paul Toohey and our sound guy Caleb Hey hopped in my car and drove about an hour and a half north of Austin to go visit Judith McGeary out at her farm.  Judith is the Executive Director of the Farm & Ranch Freedom Alliance and has a lot of great things to say about the new law.  The drive out there was pretty, winding through the Texas farm country near Rockland, but as we got closer to Judith's home, the roads stopped being paved and became dirt roads.

We pulled up and started scouting where we wanted to shoot and once we decided to shoot indoors, we headed back to the car to unload...that's when we heard it.  A loud hissing sound.  I was a couple minutes away from having a totally flat tire.  There was a big rock embedded deep in the tire.

We decided to shoot first and deal with the flat later, so we loaded in and got a great interview with Judith.  Once we were finished, we packed up and went to change the tire.  My Honda CRV has locking lug-nuts on each of the tires, to keep them from being stolen.  You need a special attachment to the wrench in order to take them off.  I keep this attachment in my center console...or at least, I thought I did.  About a year ago, I had a flat and that's where it was...I took my car to get a new tire and figured the people who changed it out put it back where they found it.

No such luck.

We tore the car apart looking for it and came to the realization that we were just a little bit screwed.  I called my insurance company (I have USAA which gives you Roadside Assistance as part of your car insurance) and they informed me that it was going to be an hour and a half before they could get a tow-truck out there.  So we waited...and waited.  He finally showed up and we had the car towed to the nearest Honda dealership (1.5 hours away) so they could remove the locked lug-nut and we could change the tire.  Here's a shot of me and Paul Toohey, in the tow-truck, right as we were leaving.

We finally made it to the Round Rock Honda where they loaned us their lug-nut key.  We quickly changed the tire (mostly that was Paul...I did what I could) and went to Fuddruckers to get some lunch.  I've since decided that I'm not gonna have those locking lug-nuts on my tires.  It's not like I'm driving through downtown Detroit on a daily basis.  

Quite the adventure.

Some hometown press

LOCAL has been getting a lot of attention here in Austin, especially since this week is Eat Local Week, and a lot of area restaurants are featuring locally sourced specials on their menus.

Melanie Haupt (who wrote the Austin Chronicle article about the 12 Films Project) wrote an article for the Chronicle's food blog about LOCAL and just posted it up here.  Click on the link to read the entire article, but the part that really got me was this:

"In my other life, I teach a rhet/comp class at UT called The Rhetoric of Eating, which focuses on the different stories we tell about ourselves and our values through the way that we talk about eating and the choices we make about the food that we eat. I showed Local to my students on the last day of classes this semester and it was a breath of fresh air, a burst of inspiration and hope in the face of a feeling that we are trapped in a food system that effectively enslaves and poisons us in its drive for profits at any cost. Local is an example of the kinds of stories we should all aim to tell when it comes to talking about our food."

That feels pretty awesome...

December - The last one...

I wasn't sure how I wanted to finish up the 12 Films Project.  For a long time, I thought about finishing with a narrative film, maybe even bringing back the two characters from Flying South (the January film) and wrapping up their story, but I wasn't really inspired by anything I came up with.

The one thing I've learned from this process is that I love making documentaries.  I had really only planned on making three docs this year, all about food, culminating in the longer and more in-depth, LOCAL, which I made last month.  As I was thinking about what to do with the December film, I read an article by my friend Melanie Haupt about the Cottage Food Laws that just passed here in Texas.  The law (SB 81) allows for home-based bakers to sell their wares (pies, cakes, jams, jellies, etc.) to the public without the need for renting a kitchen, insurance, etc.  It's an interesting topic that dovetails nicely into the theme of "locality" that all of my docs have had.  I think it also speaks to the current state of the economy and how so many homes are struggling on one (or two) paychecks and need to suppliment to live.

So my final film is going to be a doc.  I'm happy about it because I've really grown to love making documentaries, but they're so much more difficult to make in the 30-day window because of the longer post-production timeline, so I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.  Still, this will be a much smaller doc than LOCAL, so I'm hoping it won't totally destroy me.

I took this past week to rest a bit from finishing the November film and get some of my "real" work done.  I'm going to start shooting the December doc next week and hopefully have all the interviews shot by mid-month so I can get it edited before Christmas.  My good buddy Paul Toohey will be on-board for this one as well, shooting and producing with me (as he did on LOCAL).

It's so weird to be at the end of this.  It seems like I just started and yet, here I am.  There's a small part of me that's sad that it's all ending...but there's a much bigger part of me that wants it to be done so I can move on to the next thing.

The November Film - LOCAL

 

Here's the November film, LOCAL.  This was the hardest of the 12 Films so far, but I have to say, I think I'm more proud of this than of any of the other films.  This film could not have been made without the outstanding work of Paul Toohey, Chris Walker, Caleb Hay, Melissa Porter and my wife Julie.

And, or course, a HUGE thank you to everyone who participated in the documentary.  Couldn't have done it without them.

I can't believe there's just one film left...

November - Update

I finished shooting the new documentary on November 11th and sat down to start transcoding the footage.  I ended up with roughly the same amount of footage for this doc as I've had for the past 4 films which was daunting.  I had about 11 hours of interviews and a whole lot of b-roll and so the transcoding took a couple days.  Fortunately Plural Eyes made short work of synching all the interviews which ended up saving me a lot of time.

Over the last week, I've been going through the interviews, watching them and marking where the questions start so I can navigate them easier when I'm editing.  I got all of the interviews marked and ready to cut last Friday, so I started cutting over the weekend.  As of this morning, I've got almost 25 minutes cut together and it's looking good.  I'm hoping the total running time for the doc is under 40 minutes, but we'll see.  There's so many interviews and so much great stuff that I may try and get most of it in.  The craziest part of this is, if I just brought some other aspects of the local food movmember into the doc and went out and shot 3-4 more interviews, I could have a feature film, no problem.  I don't have time to do that now, but I'm seriously considering it, maybe once the 12 Films are done.

Overall, I'm done with the shooting, but this week I'm going to try and get out to Springdale Farm to shoot some time lapse for the opening titles and maybe some other little odds and ends.  I need to have the interviews cut by Friday so I can hand it off to my sound mixer Cary Daniels out in Los Angeles.  While he's working on that, I'll be cutting in the b-roll and working on the opening credit sequence.  I'm actually having music written for this by Chris Walker who recorded a lot of the location sound.

I've also decided to change the title of the documentary.  "The New American Farm" is a cool title, but the scope of the interviews and the content that I got doesn't really support that and so I'm working on a new title.  Once I figure it out, I'll post it up.

The November Documentary - The New American Farm

I've decided to expand on some of the ideas from my first documentary, Farm To Trailer, and take a look at how consumer interest in words like "local", "organic" and "sustainable" has allowed small, family-run farms to flourish in the last couple years.  

Austin has a huge farmer's market scene (there are at least 8 markets in the Austin area every weekend) but what's really helping these farms grow and sustain is the fact that more and more restaurants are going out of their way to source their ingredients locally.  While it's great that individuals go to the markets to buy local produce, proteins and locally made goods like Charcuterie, it's the large orders from the restaurants that are really keeping the farms viable.

I'm going to be talking to a few of the local farms here in Austin as well as some of the chefs from restaurants that source locally.  One of the first people I thought of when I came up with this idea was Sonya Cote, the chef at East Side Showroom.  She sources about 96% of her ingredients locally and makes some amazing food.  Her menu changes daily (each menu has a stamp at the top, telling you what day it was made) and she loves the thrill of the hunt.

Last night, myself and Paul Toohey went down to East Side Showroom to start shooting.  We shot some timelapse of her kitchen at work as well as footage of bartender Jason Stevens mixing his amazing drinks.  Paul and I sat down at the bar, whipped out our 7D's and shot for a couple hours as Jason made some amazing drinks.  For me, he made a Pimm's Cup (one of my favorite drinks) and it was truly magical.

Going forward, we're going to be interviewing Andrew Wiseheart from Contigo and one or two other chefs here in town about their love of locally sourced ingredients.  As for the farms, I've got Kris Olsen from Milagro Farms booked and we're hoping to get the rest of the farms booked for interviews over the next few days.

August & September

This blog has been a bit dull lately, and I apologize for that.  The press and interest about the 12 Films Project has translated into work for me, including some really amazing directing work that I'll be posting up about soon, and so my time has been limited.  I'm glad to say that I'm jumping back into the project, and just in time too, as it's well past the middle of August and I need a film.

Right now, I'm in the middle of clearing my CF cards and charging my batteries in preparation for a shoot tomorrow.  I'm heading out to one of Austin's funkiest landmarks, the Cathedral of Junk, to make a mood piece similar to the 360 Bridge film from April.  The Cathedral is an amazing art project that was created by Vince Hannemann over many years, and it's really beautiful.  I'm psyched that he's allowing me to come in and photograph it and I'm hoping that it turns out fun and funky, like the Cathedral itself.

Also, in other news, I just finished writing a narrative piece for September's film (or maybe October, depending on how things shake out over the next few weeks).  I've been wanting to do at least two more narrative films before this whole thing is over, and I definately think that December's film is going to be a narrative, so that just leaves me with three months to work one other narrative film in.

Right now, it looks like it's going to end up being:

• September - Narrative
• October - Music Video
• November - Documentary
• December - Narrative

September and October may swap, but this is pretty much the line-up for the rest of the project.  I don't have the December narrative written yet, but I think I know what it's going to be about, so really it's just going to take me sitting down and writing it...always the hardest part.

The November documentary is going to finish up my "food documentary trilogy" by examining how farming has gone back to the same kinds of family farms that helped create this country.  This one is probably going to take a bit longer than a month to make, so I'll probably get started on some of it in October.  There's been a brutal drought here in Texas (and especially here in Austin) this year, so I'm hoping that waiting until later in the year means that we'll get some rain and the farms will be able to produce.

It's weird to be planning out the last films of this project.  It's cliché, but it really feels like I was just getting started on this a couple months ago.