A busy week of production!

So quite a bit has gone down in the past week as far as work on the documentary goes. On Wednesday morning, Victoria and I headed over to Horizons School on the east side of Atlanta to see and shoot the SCAP program in action. Tim was working with the students along with a new intern, Jana, who was on her first "campus visit." The program was broken into two main parts. In the first, Tim talked w/ the kids about what had happened with the HOPE scholarship and encouraged and assisted them in organizing to actively question and protest the changes. Secondly, he had the students work to complete statements describing advocacy videos they had produced several months ago in conjunction with SCAP. The students then presented for the entire group. Horizons is a really unique school in a lot of ways, and they were totally cool with us shooting everything that was going on. We used two cameras to shoot just about everything, interviewed several students and a teacher, and at one point let a student use the small handycam we had with us to talk to and interview his peers about their experiences with the SCAP program. The morning wrapped up with some impromptu recorded outdoor interviews with Jana and Tim before they headed out.

Wednesday evening Victoria and I attended the SCAP weekly meeting at the AFSC office downtown, and spoke about he documentary project, actively "recruiting" some additional participants and asking for ideas and suggestions. We were able to line up several folks to do interviews, and scheduled a time to work with AFSC intern Josie to help out with the Migrant Youth Voices video project she is working on (we hope to use our skills in editing to help with the project, and perhaps use some of the footage or ideas from Josie to include in our documentary).

Saturday was another extremely busy day for production. Early in the afternoon we did an interview with a current active-duty soldier and friend of Victoria's. Kristy was able to hook us up with the GSU-TV studio, and we worked together to set up lighting, camera positioning, and sound. From what I could tell in asking the questions, the interview went extremely well and I think we will get some powerful moments out of it that will serve the final film really nicely. We also spoke quite a bit about our strategy in featuring "talking head" formal interviews in the film and while we are still making decisions I think we have come up with some good ideas about how to do this in a way that is not boring or overpowering.


Following the interview Kristy, Kristan, and I headed directly over to the AFSC offices so that we could shoot the SCAP Art Show that was a result of a contest held for local high schoolers. To try and cover everything was a lot of work, and I was pretty exhausted at the end of the night. We were able to shoot the art on the walls, lots of good "b-roll" of folks enjoying the experience, as well as several spoken work and musical performances that took place leading up to the awards ceremony. We also did interviews with several of the winners and the volunteers who had organized the show. Another great thing that came out of our presence at the show is that we were able to help out in capturing images of all of the art that SCAP can now use for their blog/website (a big thanks to my wife Ashley who spent a lot of time talking pics. Kristy jumped right in as well and made sure all of the art was documented via still photos). What may be the coolest thing to come out of the show (other than the great footage), were some of the connections we made with young people involved with SCAP and interested in our documentary project. We connected with some really talented young musicians who we are hoping to feature on the soundtrack, as well as a video producer from a local high school. I'm definitely hoping that we can bring some of these kids in to work with us as we start in on post-production in the coming weeks.

Later today we'll head out to do our final interview with Tim Franzen, and will likely begin work with Josie here at GSU on the Migrant Youth Voices video project.

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