The above piece was largely shot in two afternoons, and edited in one afternoon, during a recent trip to find personal stories of Haitians who were helping themselves in the aftermath of the Jan 12th earthquake that shook large swaths of Port-au-Prince and surrounding cities. By the time I got there, the press had made the point: the destruction was devastating. I agree with Chip Litherland that the media coverage were that most of the viewer response was largely carried by the photographs. The galleries from the Big Picture, or the NYT revealed amazing, personal moments, with range of context and mood. That’s what I was seeing re-tweeted over and over. Not the videos. Stand-up acts by white guys was the last thing anyone was engaging with. I felt they were appallingly impersonal. I was hard stretched to find personal stories of Haitians delivering aid to themselves.

By the time I got there, the few people I work with had some leads. We pursued one, and Pastor Ronel Mesidor proved a resilient man helping everyone around him, by converting both his church and home into shelters and clinics.

In creating the piece, I wanted to share some learning points I’ve reflected on:

1. Deadline work and Interviewing Foreign Languages
I’ve gotten in the flow now, to be able to quickly shoot and edit foreign-language videos. It involves:
- The Interview: Do the interview with two lapels, one for the subject, one for the translator. The translator sits off-camera next to me. I instruct two important things: the subject looks at the translator (more natural for him to talk to someone asking him questions in his own language anyway), and I take as much time as needed to make clear that the subject needs to contain thoughts to 2-3 sentences and then pause and wait for the translator. The translator also needs to pause and wait for the subject to completely finish his sentence before translating. Translators will often jump in and begin translating on the fly, thus making the subject’s audio polluted with faint English statements. I struggled with this piece to rid the Creole of English audio fall-off from my translator. Lesson learned for next time.

- transcribe the interview in a text editor, then run through and highlight the story. You’d be surprised how fast this goes when you realize that a 40-min interview in a foreign language is half translation being spoken, so really is 20 minutes of talking, which when the statements are broken up a moderate typer can keep up without hitting the pause button. I typed out the above piece in maybe 30 minutes.
- Once transcribed, it’s no harder than skim-reading to find the story in 5 minutes. I edit in TextEdit on a Mac, and just change the font color of key statements to red. Then go find those red statements and cut them into Final Cut. That makes the base of my narrative.

2. Musical Choice.
My company subscribes to FirstCom, so we have a pretty large library, which makes it even harder to find the gem song for any particular occasion. This occasion was “confusion.” As the pastor began his recounting, and I listened to his comments on the timeline, I wanted a musical selection that reinforced that state of mind. The track used had rough beats, drums and strings that were abrupt and sudden, going in and out. I thought it was fitting to help “wrap the emotions” as one colleague put it, using music to guide the emotive response…

3. Value of Subtitles.
I’ve had a recent discussion with some friends on a partner project about this. To do voice-over in English, or native language with English subs? Both have different effects, and are appropriate for different occasions. For this piece though, which was going to be largely distributed and viewed in web browsers, I went with natural language and subtitles. I did this because I felt the subject’s tone carried part of the story. His cadence communicated something to me. Second, I wanted viewers to hear Creole, to hear a local speak, instead of a British-accent pundit standing in front of another bad scene. But here’s some general guidlines to understand when doing subtitled videos:

• Keep the pacing slow. Attention is divided between words and images. So your shot pace has to be slower, and you need to time transitions in a way that when reading the end of a sentence, there’s something to look at for a few seconds before the next sentence or thought begins. Let it breathe more than the average piece.
• You’ve doubled your audience by using subtitles: Haitians can take ownership in a Creole piece, and English speakers can run with it too. YouTube now offers subtitling support, so you can have friends create multiple language versions of your movies. Keep in mind which audience might prove to be your ‘power-spreaders’ who take vested interest in your film because you’ve delivered a documentary in their language.

If you’ve read this far, this post is largely about the production. Not my experience in Haiti. I reserve that for personal inquiry, and might post on that later.

I had the privilege of being a part of a team of people that set out to create a brand, or story, that cut to the core issue of life: We all die. But what’s worth dying for? This is the trailer to a longer documentary you can find at the resulting site we put together: www.thelastletter.org

Check out the entire video feed at the Last Letter Vimeo Channel.

I should mention that we worked with some amazing musicians: Albert Kiteck did some of the solo electric guitar tracks, original stuff. And Jordan Martin gave us permission to use his song “Dark Days”. Beautiful work and mucho thanks guys.

A friend asked me to shoot wedding pictures around the old wall in Chiang Mai, so we went for a tour, rode in the tuk-tuk, then did some evening stuff before ending the following day with a morning at the elephant farm outside of town. Let me know what you think.

Going to the Black Sea was an amazing experience. Freezing, cloudy, but to see the black stones take on bashing water, to feel the power of the wind, the chill of the nose, the sweat under on my neck under the scarf, the vastness of the water, was a truely unforgettable experience. To think there were some that didn’t join us because it was too cold … you missed out…

When my sister got engaged, I commited to doing a short documentary about the history of her relationship to John Thomas (JT) English the Third. I learned a lot about my sister and now-brother-in-law. And I learned a lot about filming. They met in a King Soopers grocery store in Colorado, but King Soopers staff wouldn’t let us film there. So we ran down to a gas station at midnight, and the clerk said, “yeah do whatever you want.” So we filmed in the candy isle of a gas station convenience store. I shot the entire thing in 10 minutes, with an average two takes per shot.

I had never done a re-enactment before, so this was a grand experiment, and a mistake actually. I was editing the piece, wondering what visuals (archive photos from their college albums, etc) I might have to use with the finished audio segment I had edited together. Then I got the hot idea to just have them say certain lines from the edited audio, and I would try and sync the movement of their mouths on top of their interview audio segments. So that was the starting point.

Then with the approach decided, I had to come up with a shot list. So I just listened to the audio segment play back, and just started linearly writing down in my head how it might play back. I often do this when listening to This American Life, a radio program that is one of the most visual forms of journalism out there, in my opinion. I digress. So I came up with a linear shot list, and some of the shots had a quote or two that I wanted them to say. I had, for instance, written down on a post-it, “over Macy’s shoulder, get JT coming around isle, checking Macy out.” When we filmed the shot, after two takes, I knew I had what I needed. So editing was super easy, just setting in and out points.

The other cool thing about this was that as a re-enactment, I got to use the real people, and they got really into it. So it might classify as a ‘docudrama’, but hey, whatever the case may be, it was fun, and got some good laughs at the wedding reception.

I have to thank, of all people, the New York Times for supplying some great ideas and inspiration from their series of wedding videos entitled “Vows.”

~Chris.

I served as one of 6 coaches for the UNC-Chapel Hill hosted project Andaman Rising. I helped three students develop their videos. It was one of the first times I’ve been asked to coach in a somewhat academic setting, and I can’t say how much I learned from teaching. Actually, it was mostly asking them the right questions, and then was blown away by the answers ‘my’ students came up with. The pieces I helped coach were Robed In Merit, A Good Son Forever and Anchored In Faith.

One afternoon during the 3-week project at Khao Lak Resort outside Phuket, Thailand, I watched a video tutorial by Larry Jordan about the “film look” and he dispelled the notion that it’s all about 24p, which is what most of the conversations about attaining the ‘film look’ are about. He said what will really get you a film look is to: 1. don’t wash out your highlights. no ‘zebra stripes’. 2. keep a narrow depth of field.

After hearing that, I picked up the camera and started walking around the small “tree house” that served as our editing room. It had windows on all sides. So I made it my visual playground and started taking 10-sec clips of anything. playing with light, keeping things zoomed, trying new angles. doing manual focus moves. I didn’t even have an edited piece in mind. I was just rolling tape, playing around, experimenting. A few things I discovered in the process, coming from a still photography background: most good cinematography is largely telephoto, shot from far away, and compressed, and is much more zoomed in. Part of the reason is that when dealing solely with sequenced shots, you don’t have to get ‘all the information’ in one shot. You build the information linearly through 3-4 shots that build mood. I’m still learning and playing with this…

The next day, I took out the camera for the closest ‘spot news’ event we were going to cover, which was a tsunami evacuation drill that is done twice a year to test all the new equipment and routes in the area. The locals were going to run down the street at the sound of the alarm, and all the students would be running and moving with them. I figured it would be a good day to get the students in action, so I shot a little of that too.

And without much more effort, I slapped some of these clips together, added a few freeze frames of their movies, and then did some low-light shots on the beach, and wala, a little piece that helps give a sense of place and mood as the Andaman Rising project came together.

Forgot. If you use music, especially good music, give rightful credit. Even if it’s a slideshow for class. I checked the Sigur Ros website, and in their FAQ they say using their tunes for small stuff like this is cool…