30 Day Submission

Baker Creek from Quint Smith on Vimeo.

I ended up feeling pretty good about this story. I feel like there is a lot more there to the story about our food, and the popularity of heirloom gardening. For this project I only had time to build the one perspective. I envision a future version of this story with more characters and points of view. I would like to hear from the companies making the GMO seeds. I think their perspective would be valuable to balance things out a bit. I would like to hear from farmers who are stakeholders hopefully on both sides. Jere talks about small farmers being sued by the big seed-makers. It would be great to add that perspective.

From a visual perspective I was a bit hamstrung by the time of year I chose to tell this story. I shot a lot of b-roll that just didn't up being relevant to the story I ended up telling. I wanted the final story to be about GMO versus heirloom which gets to the heart of what the two guys are passionate about. It would have been nice to have purple tomatoes on the vine when he talks about them. I feel I thoroughly shot everything there was to see down at Baker Creek at the beginning of winter. I didn't end up in Jere's house except to film in the greenhouse out back. Now that I know where I ended up with the final version I don't think those shots would have been necessary.

I had a couple of issues with the interview footage. Although I still think it looks quite nice, I sat on the wrong side of the camera. It makes them look slightly off camera for some of it. The other issue was one I anticipated. I wanted to shoot this with multiple cameras but felt like I would only be able to reasonable monitor one plus the audio recorder while conducting an interview. I wanted a tight shot so I brought a Nikon with a 70-200 and set it somewhere like f5.6. I thought that would provide enough depth of field for that shot but it came out looking so much fuzzier than the primary shot. Part of that could be that my camera and lens just seems very sharp footage, but I would have benefitted from a camera operator for the tight angle. Multimedia really works well in teams. Things can get really complicated quickly when working alone.

I was pleased with how this turned out. In spite of the visual issues I pointed out above I think I ended up with a very watchable story.