Spellbound

I loved this documentary! It brought me back to middle school all over again and thought of my own experiences trying to get into the spelling bee and my friends who did win the spelling bee, etc. The way the film was edited together made it so you wouldn’t be able to tell who the winner of the spelling bee was.

In fact, most of the kids had such character I wasn’t sure who I wanted to win, or who would win. I found myself being anxious with the parents and spelling along with the children feeling the same tensions that they did. When I finally thought I knew who would be the winner of the spelling bee, I was wrong, haha. I want to know their process of making this film. For as many children that went to the spelling bee I wondered how they decided which children they were going to film. For some I understood because they had been to the spelling bee multiple times.

I also wondered how long it took for them to gather all the footage they needed and organize it, considering I’m in the organizing process of my doc.

Footage of Family

I decided to put Trey’s doc aside, considering the amount of post processing I’d have to do with his pictures as well as the Skype footage. It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve wanted to do a documentary about my family for the longest time. I’m finally getting around to doing that.

Youtube/Skype Footage

I didn’t really get the specific questions or answers I needed after all—and I forgot to get a basic introduction of him. So I asked him to finally chat with me over Skype. I found a video chat recorder which recorded the audio and video from Skype and got a lot of good footage that way!

Edit: It turns out the footage was a weird format and wasn’t transferring correctly onto FPC. Also the main piece of footage has a weird watermark on it when I was using the demo. The other footage seems okay though. *sigh* This is turning out to be a bigger hassle than I wanted it to be.

Shots at his house

It’s taken a while, but I finally managed to get some time with Trey at his house and I’ll have some of Alex’s help. We finally got equipment (Huge Hassle, btw.) and Alex has a car so he was able to bring me to Trey’s House. I got a lot of good footage from inside the house, even though it was a little badly lit (we managed to find a light since he’s a photographer and had some standing lights.)

I also got some footage of him at work on his computer; which made for good B-roll. I have to figure out how to make his pictures work on After Effects!!

Hybrid

This was a very strange documentary. But I suppose it had to be considering the topic. One might find it difficult to even think about how one could make a documentary about corn. There was a lot of archival footage, however of this seemingly mad scientist of corn. It was surprising to hear that many individuals did not want to take the better hybrid corn from Milford because it seemed to be against nature. I got a kick out of the stop motion animations they had of corn mating.

Milford lived for such a long time and even after his factories closed down he still mixed and bred corn. He seemed like a very eccentric individual from the accounts as well as the footage. I think the very experimental nature of the film matched that.

I wish it had been a little shorter. Stock footage and stop motion about corn can only be interesting for so long. There were long periods of landscape that I found to be only filler.