Crunch time… I hope everyone is doing well with editing/adding final touches. We just edited our rough cut based on some feedback from Professor Smith. Let us know if you have any more feedback!

Hi guys, this is what we have so far for our fine cut… Please let us know if you have any feedback that would be useful for us to change before Wednesday!

Also, I don’t know how to change the thumbnail to a different photo, so if anyone knows how, please help us out!!!

Title: Deepening Our Roots

Logline: LaFarm harvests more than just produce; it harvests connections between the college, community, and Lehigh Valley.

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I was lucky enough to have already shot and cut an interview for another class earlier in the year, which gave me a bit of a leg up while doing this interview. It was tough for me to choose another subject however, because I feel like I put so much thought into my previous one that I would never get a subject that I was as passionate about. You don’t always have to be extremely passionate about your subject to begin with, however. I learned a lot about my interview subject, Daniel Gonzalez, when I shot his interview, which made me more and more passionate as the project as it went on. I had known Daniel previously, he is a fellow employee at Skillman library with me. I thought I knew a lot about him, but it turns out I knew a lot about his life here at Lafayette, but I knew nothing about his life prior. I think I really tried to tell Daniel’s story through the lens of a student who is part international and part domestic. I think this was what made Daniel an interesting interview subject; he doesn’t fit a specific mold.

I’ve noticed a few key tips when actually shooting interviews that make them successful:

• Make sure you have good audio (use a wireless lav mic)
• Utilize the rule of thirds when interviewing your subject
• Make sure your subject is not looking right at the camera (position yourself off-camera so that he/she looks at you and makes the interview look real ad effective)
• Ask the right questions (prepare them beforehand, and make sure they require lengthy answers)
• Make sure your subject rewords the questions

The thing I still struggle with in terms of interviews is b-roll. It is extremely difficult to get b-roll of a subject from their past without recreating it, which is difficult in itself. Also, when your interview theme is very specific, it is difficult to get b-roll that is specific to your subject. Time is always of the essence with b-roll. There is always a deadline looming and that means you have to ask your subject to take more time out of their day to dedicate to your project. B-roll is something I will have to work on with future interviews, for sure.

My original idea for my interview subject was Mike, the friendly custodian who works at Skillman library. However, when I approached him to ask if he would participate in the project, he was reluctant. He said that students have asked him throughout the years to do the same, and he has turned them down, so he would like to remain consistent. However, he did say that if I couldn’t find anyone else that he would do it. He clearly felt uncomfortable about the whole thing, so I thought it would be best to pursue another subject.

I’ve worked at the front desk of Skillman library since my freshman year, and a lot of students that work there are international, fulfilling their work study programs. I’ve met people from all over—Rwanda, Nepal, Madagascar—and most recently, I have a coworker from Colombia. He is a really interesting person, because he moved to America when he was younger, for about 10 years, then back to Colombia, then back to America for college. He is both international and domestic—he doesn’t fit one category. He is very involved on campus, an eloquent speaker, and just an all-around friendly person. I think that since I already had a relationship with him prior to asking him to be my interview subject, he was much more willing. I learned a lot about him that I didn’t necessarily know before the interview, which I made the experience really rewarding.

I think going forward, I need to obviously incorporate b-roll. I’m going to ask Daniel if he has any photos or videos from Colombia and maybe just some footage of him around campus doing various things. If anyone has suggestions for b-roll, I would really appreciate it. I also need to cut it down. I ended up with about 10 minutes of footage when I edited my questions out, and just had his answers, so cutting it down to even 5 minutes was difficult. I think the message I’m trying to get across is that Daniel has a double-life. He’s not just an international student or just a domestic student; he doesn’t fit either mold. I think what I cut it down to revolves more around that message, but I’m open to any other constructive criticism.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Night and Fog is a secret order under which “persons endangering German security” in the German-occupied territories of western Europe were to be arrested and either shot or spirited away under cover of “night and fog” (that is, clandestinely) to concentration camps.

Night and Fog is unlike other Holocaust films I have seen. The problem with Hollywood Holocaust films is that they attempt to make the audience vicariously live through the characters experience with such a staggeringly incomprehensible experience, which then reduces such an experience to a sentimental melodrama. Instead, Night and Fog resembles the anti-documentary: how can we document such a harsh reality? Resnais did not presume to speak for the victims and survivors of the camps: he chose as his screenwriter the novelist Jean Cayrol, a man who had actually been imprisoned in one.

Resnais and Cayrol do not attempt to offer a comprehensive guide to the concentration camp universe. On the contrary, the voiceover is filled with skepticism and doubt, and a sympathetic awareness of the viewer’s resistance to grasping the unthinkable. The voiceover narration says things like “Useless to describe what went on in these cells,” and “Words are insufficient,” and “No description, no picture can reveal their true dimension.” Meanwhile, the viewer is calmly given information about the Nazis’ extermination procedures. in Night and Fog, there is a clear dichotomy between the necessity of remembering, and the impossibility of doing so.

Something that was very powerful throughout the film was the discontinuity between sounds and visual. The score of the film is a light, airy tune which completely contrasts the images of limp, dead bodies being bulldozed, thrown into pits, and dismantled. The most disturbing part of the film, for me, was the footage of materials that were made from the dead bodies, like cloth made from hair, manure made from bones, soap made from bodies, and paper made from skin. This scene is an example of Resnais’ attempt to show rather than tell.

In light of the recent shooting in Texas, I think Snyder’s film was especially poignant. I like how each speaker we’ve hosted, though their material is vastly different, share one distinct filmic struggle, which is the ethical dilemma that documentary film evokes. It was especially important that Snyder brought up the difference between independent filmmakers and non-independent filmmakers, and the leeway a filmmaker gets when they are independent versus when they are not. Snyder brought up an interesting anecdote that applies to this ethical dilemma: she told us about how she filmed one of the fathers of the deceased at the cemetery, paying his respects. Later, when he talked it over with his wife, they came to the conclusion that they didn’t want the footage to be shown, so Snyder, being the empathetic filmmaker that she is, told them that no one would ever see it. Snyder went on to explain that if she had been working for a big company like Sony or something, she would never have been able to make that decision independently to scrap the footage from the film, because it wouldn’t have been her decision to make. This goes along with the ethics of filmmaking dilemma, and it was something that really stuck out to me during the discussion. It is a perfect anecdote that shows that Synder was trying to maintain a healthy relationship with the families in Newtown and do their story the justice it deserves.