Documentary Reel

Long-form documentaries are one of my favorite kinds of projects to work with, and no two are alike.  The workflow for taking a documentary from raw footage to final project can take anywhere from days to years, and the process of slowly recognizing and extracting the story from hours and hours of footage can either drive you crazy or achieve the sublime, sometimes both.

This reel is comprised of footage from three of the feature-length documentaries I've worked on and one short-form interview that was cut together for an online movement, and encompasses work from 2006-2010.

Short-Format "Sizzle" Reel

I've been very fortunate to work with a number of high-profile artists creating web content and Fan Club DVD's.  Here are three examples of short-format rhythmic editing, including a montage, a trailer, and a musical performance.

The Forest (2011)

Here are two scenes from Michael Sais & Cori Silberman's "The Forest", which was a multimedia play production that was put up at the 2011 Midwinter Madness festival in New York.  The play integrated filmed scenes into live performance, and my team was tapped to shoot and assemble the sequences.  It was a fun project with a great group of people, and the videos turned out great.  I also had a chance to do some on-set editing, and help the production streamline and assemble their projection workflow.

These scenes were shot by Casey Krugman, with Gus Gonzalez directing.  

 Here is the largest scene we put together, a dialouge scene between a father and daughter:

This campy "PSA" was played on a loop as the audience arrived at the theater.

And here is a behind-the-scenes featurette I put together to promote the play:

It Gets Better: David and Dustin (2010)

Casey and I have started conducting interviews for the "It Gets Better" project, which was started several weeks ago by columnist and writer Dan Savage, to counteract the recent trend of suicides among gay teens who took their lives in response to intense bullying and lack of community support.  The project invites LGBT adults to share their stories and let teenagers know that there is a future after high school and suicide is never the answer.

We've taken this a step farther than the grainy iCamera videos that many people are uploading, and conducting interviews with a professional set-up which allows our subjects to tell their story honestly and with the help of an interviewer.  We then edit the hour or so of footage to an acceptable length for the project and create targeted, coherent stories without the stream of consciousness style that many self-filmed videos acquire.  

When the project started, we were tracking down interview subjects and trying to get our ducks in a row.  We also found ourselves in Ocean City for a weekend, just a short drive from Dustin and David's house in Philadelphia.  They're an incredibly cute couple, and gave us a frank and honest interview that was hard to cut down - I could easily have put together a thirty minute video of these guys telling their story.  It was a lot of fun, and was a great start to our involvement with the project.

If you're in the New York area and would like to be interviewed for the project, please contact me.

It Gets Better: Rachel (2010)

For our second video for the "It Gets Better" project, we found ourselves interviewing actress Rachel Pincus.  This interview is a bit different from David and Dustin's, for one we didn't shoot it in Rachel's apartment, also the subject matter is quite different - bullying for sexual orientation is only one of the issues that LGBTQ teens face, Rachel mostly dealt with the isolation of being different from the people she grew up with, and the isolation can be just as destructive as more overt bullying.  It was a great interview, and yielded a surplus of footage once again.

If you're in the New York area and would like to be interviewed for the project, please contact me.

Method in the Mountains (2007)