Weeks 1 & 2: Sept. 28-Oct. 11

Welcome to my Production Blog! For the next 9 months or so I'll be tracking my Organic Farming documentary from pre-production to completion. These first two weeks have been dedicated first and foremost to completing my contract, and collecting the books from my book list. I ordered many of the books online at Alibris Books for a great deal - although 2 orders got canceled, and the others pertaining to this project have yet to arrive. Some of these books include Food and Culture: A Reader by Carole Counihan, The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating by James L. Watson, A Nation of Famers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil by Sharon Astyk, for starters. Nevertheless, I haven't completed much reading yet, but in lieu of delayed reading material, I took a trip to the book store today to find one of the canceled books. Borders carried one that I skimmed through for the first time, and I'm pretty happy the order got canceled, because it wasn't really what I was looking for - it focused more on cultural discourse from a mainstream standpoint (magazine-type food writing, including recipes) and less on educating the reader about the facts of the food industry, which is more where my heads at at this point.

I went through many other books in the food literature section, as well as the organic gardening section, and came upon a great book titled Organic, Inc. by Samuel Fromartz. It gives a comprehensive overview of the American food industry, with a focus on "organic" and how it came to be. I didn't realize the amount of politics/drama just in this specific area of food - especially between independent organic farmers vs. the organic "industry" (a.k.a. Whole Foods Market, etc.) which is apparently just as much of a corporate money machine as the traditional corporate farms. The author also gives a great deal of historical background to organic farming processes, as well as why companies began using chemicals to produce food in the first place. Reading about pesticides is pretty gross, and made me feel better about buying organic, local produce. I'll write more about this later in the week, as I read more of the book.

Since I didn't have much to read this week, I decided to jam out about 10-12 hours in the non-linear suite working on After Effects. I'm really enjoying motion graphics so far - I've been mainly using videocopilot.net (thanks to Belinda for the recommendation). It has a plethora of tutorials to choose from, and a great "Basic Training" section comprised of 10 tutorials on everything from basic key-framing, to time re-mapping, titling, etc. I'm currently about to begin #9, so hopefully I'll be moving on to more advanced tutorials during mid-week. I've been saving all the work I do in tutorials, for reference and to show the critique group.. I learned how to do the ipod commercial sillohuette thing - it's really pretty simple surprisingly. Overall, that's going pretty well, and I'm excited to learn some more advanced animation techniques.

Well.. that's it for now. I'm sure I'll be writing more later in the week after I've done some more reading. Also, I'm planning on posting some video of the B-roll I took when i worked on farms in Canada, just to get sort of a visual theme going. I'll also post some reference videos of other food documentaries, motion graphics, and whatever else is inspiring me.

Cheers!