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Update: End of Semester Plan

We heard back from Harris Teeter about filming some b-roll in the store, and they said they no longer allow filming. So, right now we are focusing on scheduling our interviews. James Doss, the chef, is going to be interviewed at RX Restaurant on Friday, December 1st at 12 noon. Elsie, the resident who lives near a hog farm, responded and said that the legal issues have been moved to be conducted on December 4th and that she’ll be out of town from December 5th through the 11th. So, the plan for now is to just move her interview to next semester. Then we still haven’t heard back from Don, the former hog farmer. As of right now, we’re just trying to get what we can, and then we’re moving anything else to next semester. Although the class will be over, Jocabed, Paige, and I have all agreed to continue the project with Lizzie until it’s finished. We hope to be able to get all of our footage at the beginning of next semester so Lizzie can begin editing in FST 497. For the end of this semeste...
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Virginia Film Festival Experience!

The Virginia Film Festival was one of the best experiences I’ve had in my time as a film major. The festival was so well organized and the people were amazing. It took place in Charlottesville, VA, and I was able to stay there for 3 days. In that time, I was able to attend 10 screenings and the Opening Night Gala. The films included everything from feature length narratives and documentaries to shorts blocks to undergraduate films. My favorite screening was Krystal  which was directed by William H. Macy. It had such a heartfelt, yet surprisingly funny story with great acting by the entire cast. After the screening, they had a Q&A with William H. Macy (director), Nick Robinson (lead actor), and Rachel Winter (producer). It was so cool to see such famous faces and hear what the process was like throughout all stages of production. Another screening that really stuck with me was called Charlottesville: Our Streets which was a feature length documentary on the events that recently ...
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Update on Interview Subjects

We have a bunch of interview subjects/leads that we are trying to get in touch with and schedule a shoot day. Jocabed and Lizzie have had trouble getting responses from some people, and then a couple others had to reschedule. We were supposed to interview Elsie Herring this past Wednesday, November 15, but she had to reschedule because she had some success in a lawsuit she had against a factory farm. Right now we are trying to schedule her sometime between December 2nd and December 6th. If we can’t get any of those dates, we plan to move the interview to January. We are also trying to get in touch with Don Webb, the former hog farmer, to schedule an interview. Jocabed is calling him this week to set up a day and time that would work best for him. We are hoping to schedule it either on December 2nd or 5th. Paige is also getting in contact with James Doss, a chef at Pembroke’s, to schedule shoot days for him. Our proposed dates are November 30th or December 1st. Lizzie is also still ...
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New Leads

Moving forward, we have some amazing leads for interviews and footage. First of all, Lizzie, Jocabed, and Paige were able to make contact with Elsie Herring at the "Meet Your Neighbors" panel in Durham. She is the Duplin county resident who lives directly across the street from a factory farm. Currently we are trying to set up a day where we could go and shoot her interview as well as get some footage of her showing us the property. The next contact we have is Don Webb who was a former hog farmer that gave it up due to the harm it was causing his neighbors. The last contact we have is Rick Dove who is the senior advisor for the Waterkeeper Alliance. He specializes in aerial footage of the farms and has agreed to give us access to the library of footage. He also offered to take one of us, which will be Paige, up in the air to get some aerial footage of our own! NC Farm Families also emailed us back saying that they would be happy to give us the information we need, but aske...
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Marion Blackburn Interview

On September 30, we interviewed Marion Blackburn on campus inside of Watson. She is a policy analyst for animal welfare and an animal rights activist. Marion was a dream come true! She was extremely prepared for the interview and gave us a lot of good information. She was so easy to work with since she has been through these kind of interviews before. Watson turned out to be a very noisy, echoing building that just happened to have a million tour groups walking through on the day we were shooting. But Marion was so accommodating whenever there was a loud noise. She would just stop was she was saying and start over without a fuss and without us having to say anything. This interview was one of the better ones that I have ever gotten to work on.  The sound turned out to be a little echoey, but we plan to fix that in post. We enjoyed making a connection with Marion and took her out to lunch afterwards! Over Fall break, Paige was able to go out on a boat and get a lot of river b-rol...
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Sandra Gamez Interview

Today, we went to Sandra Gamez’s house to interview her. She works at a hog farm and was able to discuss the many unfair practices towards the workers, including herself, as well as the treatment of the pigs. Once we got there, the trailer was smaller than we thought it would be, but Paige was able to get a good setup with the camera and lights once we moved some furniture around. Sandra did not want her identity to be revealed, and, so, Paige had to backlight her so that you could only see her silhouette.   I brought the shotgun and lavalier mics so Sandra could pick which one she wanted to use. She ended up choosing the lavalier mic, because it made her feel more comfortable, which was our main concern. Once, the interview started, everything ran pretty smoothly! Jocabed asked the questions, because Sandra speaks Spanish and would’ve needed Jocabed to translate if Lizzie conducted the interview. The farther we got into the interview, the more comfortable Sandra became, and she r...
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Update: Sept. 17th

Jocabed has secured our filming permits for the town of Magnolia and Kenansville, and we are currently planning the interviews with Marion Blackburn and Sandra Gamez. She has also called Smithfield and talked to a representative about securing an interview with us to discuss their plan for cutting down on greenhouse emissions. However, we were turned down and sent in a useless direction. Now, we are looking into talking to someone from NC Farm Families about their side of the issue. We have moved forward with the stylistic approach, as planned. On Saturday, our crew went out to Kenansville and Magnolia, NC to shoot b-roll, record some ambient sounds, and scout possible interview locations. Paige got great tracking/panning footage of hog and turkey farms, and I got good sound clips of outdoor/nature sounds, as well as sounds of pigs on the hog farm. We scouted out a couple locations (abandoned hog farms) to set our interview with Marion Blackburn at, but neither se...
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