The Southern Documentary Project
TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION OF STORYTELLERS
Micah, our new student worker Matt Minshew, and I were out and about on campus this morning documenting the first day of class. It was cool to see the students starting the semester. They seem so excited. Maybe we should document the 2nd week of class and compare. Anyways, here is the short highlight video we put together. Enjoy and welcome back!
– Matthew
With only 1 more day to go until the world premiere of “The UnRetireds”, what would a fake action movie trailer be without a blooper reel to accompany it? Check back tomorrow afternoon for the finished trailer!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted so I wanted to come back with a bang. Micah and I recently wrapped up the 2010 Summer Film Workshop where 12 high school and college age kids put up with us for a week of film theory lectures, tutorials, and film screenings. As part of the class we shot a movie trailer of a fake action movie entitled “The UnRetireds”. We tried to throw in a bunch of silly over-the-top action movie moments into the trailer and here a few of the shots broken down by their elements to show how they were put together. I always love these little videos in the behind the scenes extras they put on DVD’s so I figured I’d take a crack at one. Special thanks goes to Andrew Kramer and his invaluable Action Movie Essential Elements. We’ll post the finished trailer online soon but until then enjoy this sneak peak.
-Matthew
Visual FX Breakdown Video
A very nice notice of Cut/Chop/Cook on the Sizzle on the Grill blog where they ask and answer: “What is REAL barbeque? – This.”
The blog goes on to say “The University of Mississippi’s Media & Documentary Projects Center & the Southern Foodways Alliance created this video profile of Rodney Scott, a second generation owner/operator of his family’s destination barbeque restaurant: Scott’s Bar-B-Q in Hemingway, South Carolina. To my way of thinking this family has wrapped their arms around what it means to cook real barbeque.”
Check out the Sizzle on the Grill blog and enjoy Cut/Chop/Cook.
Micah and Matthew have been helping create a new generation of filmmakers this week teaching the University of Mississippi’s ninth annual Filmmaking Workshop. The class is four days of intensive instruction in the techniques of filmmaking as well as an opportunity for students to get hand-on experience with all aspects of creating a film. Stay tuned for the final class project and be on the lookout for these up and coming filmmakers.
Media & Documentary Projects recently teamed up with the Oxford Film Festival, the YAC, Rock Star Taxi and First National Bank to host a seminar on home movie preservation. As a primer for the event, we showed this 2-minute highlight reel of some of the images we’ve transferred here over the past few years. We’ve seen a lot of home movies and it has never ceased to amaze me how incredible each film is. These are all documentaries in my book, and each one tells a unique story.
If you’ve got old home movies, seek them out and get them preserved and digitized. You’ll be glad you did!
“Smokes & Ears” a co-production of the University of Mississippi’s Media & Documentary Projects Center & the Southern Foodways Alliance, was featured today in Jackson’s Clarion Ledger. Check out the article here. The short documentary by Joe York chronicles the Big Apple Inn, a sandwich shop on Farish Street in Jackosn, MS, that specializes in pig ear sandwiches. It will screen tomorrow night at the New York Food Film Festival. Owner/operator Geno Lee (pictured above) will be in attandance, feeding smokes and ears to a sold-out crowd of over 2,000.
Smokes & Ears, a short documentary by MDP producer Joe York, will screen this Friday night, June 25th, at the New York Food Film Festival. The documentary chronicles the Big Apple Inn on historic Farish Street in Jackosn, MS, and was produced by MDP and the Southern Foodways Alliance in recognition of Geno Lee, owner/operator of the Big Apple Inn and recipient of the SFA’s 2009 Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award. Check out the trailer for the New York Food Film Festival…
NYC Food Film Festival 2010 Trailer from George Motz on Vimeo.
The New York Food & Film Festival is a great event and it’s unique in that attendees get to eat the foods documented in the films while they watch. Geno Lee will be in New York Friday night to represent the film and to cook pig ear sandwiches for an already sold out crowd. If you’re not one of the lucky ones with a ticket for Friday night, you can watch the film right here…
Funding for “Smokes & Ears” was provided by the Fertel Foundation.
In February, MDP and the Southern Foodways Alliance embarked on a year-long project which will result in the feature-length documentary “Southern Food: The Movie”. Since then, project director Joe York has filmed segments throughout South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and along the Gulf Coast from Empire, Louisiana, to Apalachicola, Florida. In between trips, Joe sat down with Vanessa Gregory and talked a bit about the film. Gregory’s article was published on The Atlantic’s website last week. You can read it there, or right here…
Southern Foodways Alliance/flickr
This April, in a river swamp near Wewahitchka, Florida, Joe York filmed a beekeeper named Ben Lanier as he stood under a towering white Tupelo gum tree. Surrounded by the fierce greenery of a Southern spring, Lanier explained that the tree’s blossoms last for just two weeks, and they are the only source of a prized, light-colored honey his family has harvested since 1898. “I grew up in a beehive,” Lanier says.
For seven years, York has made short films on a shoestring about people like Lanier—farmers, barbecue pitmasters, pie bakers, cheesemakers, and fry cooks—who live and work in the South. He also shot and edited Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House, a feature about rebuilding a New Orleans restaurant after Hurricane Katrina. His food films focus on an American culinary landscape rarely seen: a rural place populated by working-class people who, as York shows, are just as reverent about ingredients and cooking as any urbanite with a CSA subscription and a five-dollar cup of shade-grown coffee.
The footage of Lanier, which York showed me on a laptop in his office at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, is part of York’s newest and loftiest project. Over the next year, the self-taught filmmaker plans to document the ways life and food intersect in every state in the South. He’s aiming for a cinematic summation of today’s Southern foods, from a seed saver in Kentucky to such chefs as Hugh Acheson and Sean Brock, who are reinventing traditions through high-end food. “It’s hugely ambitious,” York says. “It’s way bigger than anything we’ve done.”
He doesn’t appear on camera or supply voice-overs; he’d rather offer lingering shots of golden fried chicken or images of grass-fed cattle in a Georgia field.
York’s project has also become way more urgent as the BP oil spill spreads in the Gulf of Mexico. By chance, he was on the coast in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, when the spill began. The town’s annual blessing of the fleet, a normally celebratory affair with mountains of boiled shrimp and fried fish, had turned anxious. Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi, the man who during the blessing asks God for a safe and bountiful season, told York, “We don’t know where it’s going, how it will impact us—and the danger that poses not just to a livelihood but to an entire way of life.” Across the state line in Biloxi, York found a similar scene: Vietnamese-American shrimpers unable to trawl in Mississippi waters because the season had yet to open, and unable to work off the coasts of Louisiana or Texas because of oil. York’s footage captured men ill at ease with idleness; one passed the time fussing with his boat, painstakingly painting the image of a shrimp on the hull since he couldn’t go to sea and catch the real thing.
York says his feature, which he’s calling Southern Food: The Movie, is a small way of giving these shrimpers and others outside the industrial food chain a voice. There’s little doubt his film will be activist in spirit, but if his earlier work is any indication, it will be less strident than something like Super Size Me. York’s movies are financed by the University of Mississippi’s Media and Documentary Projects Center and the Southern Foodways Alliance, a non-profit that promotes Southern food and culture. The alliance’s director is the author John T. Edge, and although Edge writes about similar topics as a columnist for the New York Times, he said York has his own voice and the potential to affect a broader audience interested in the intersection between food and culture. “Writing is a geek’s pursuit,” Edge says. “Film is a pop pursuit. And I don’t mean to denigrate film: we can reach more people with film.”
Like Edge, York is a democratic foodie, so you can afford to eat most of what he puts on the screen. You can also watch most of his films online, for free. His style is similarly democratic. He doesn’t appear on camera or supply voice-overs; he’d rather offer lingering shots of golden fried chicken or images of grass-fed cattle in a Georgia field. “Most of the time it’s just kind of me with the camera talking to these guys,” York says. And that intimacy seems to inspire an uninhibited honesty in his subjects. In his short, Smokes & Ears, about the Big Apple Inn sandwich shop in Jackson, Mississippi, patrons sing to York’s camera about the joys of pig ear sandwiches.
York’s big hope—aside from making this movie happen on a $50,000 budget—is to persuade multiple public television stations across the South to simultaneously premiere Southern Food: The Movie. York likes the public aspect of public television. And just as in Smoke & Ears, which uses pork sandwiches to talk about Jackson’s segregated past, he’ll be editing with the idea that we learn who we are by exploring what we eat.
How well that approach will work for a place as diverse as the South remains to be seen. Anyone who lives here knows that Mississippi hardly shares much with neighboring Arkansas, let alone Virginia or Florida. No matter how York defines the South, it’s sure to invite some criticism. Already, he has drawn a hard line through Texas: only the east counts as the South. “What exactly is Southern?” York says. “We’re trying to figure that out.” His answer will be worth watching.
Last week, MDP producer Joe York traveled to New York to screen his latest short documentary Cut/Chop/Cook at the Big Apple BBQ Block Party and at the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Potlikker Film Festival NYC. The film profiles Rodney Scott of Scott’s Bar-B-Q in Hemingway, South Carolina. Says Scott, “We only cook with wood and I’m so sure that we only cook with wood because we go out and chop it ourselves.” Monday through Wednesday, you’ll find Scott doing just that, cutting down trees and chopping wood, and Thursday through Saturday he burns that wood down into coals that he uses to cook a half-dozen whole hogs every night. This film was produced by the University of Mississippi’s Media & Documentary Projects Center & the Southern Foodways Alliance, with funding from the Union Square Hospitality Group. Check it out….
Congrats to Tyler Keith, Eric Griffis, and Meghan Leonard–Southern Studies grad. students whose film on the Brown Family Dairy was featured in the New York Times today with a wonderful article on the Brown family. This film came out of the Documentary Fieldwork class that we taught last spring with David Wharton at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Here’s a little bit of behind-the-scenes action from the filmmaking workshop that Media & Documentary Projects helped put on last month. We worked with the Boys & Girls Club, the Oxford Film Festival, and local filmmakers Nitin and Deepak Mantena of Celery Studios in creating a day-long filmmaking camp for local children. Look for the finished result sometime in August (fingers crossed!)
On Tuesday, June 22 from 7 until 8:30, the Oxford Film Fest, in partnership with the Center for Media and Documentary Projects at the University of Mississippi, will host a free clinic at the Powerhouse on preserving your home movies. Whether your films are 8mm, Super 8mm, VHS, Beta, or even 16mm, come on out and take advantage of the informative discussion on how to make sure your precious films are being preserved for the future generations.
This free seminar covers the basics of shooting good video. Be it for the home movie shooter, or the burgeoning filmmaker, this free workshop will introduce the basics of composition, light, sound, and camera movement. Bring your home movie camera for help understanding how to get the most out of it, or work with one of ours to gain insight into shooting better video. From 7-9 pm on July 13th, at the Powerhouse. FREE to the public.
Brought to you by the Oxford Film Festival and the Center for Media and Documentary Projects at the University of Mississippi.
Here is the latest addition to the Academic Network profile video series we have been producing this year. This profile focuses on the School of Engineering, touching on the variety of programs that students can focus on including Civil, Chemical, Geological, Mechanical, General, Electrical, and Computer Science. This particular profile comes from a longer piece I produced for the School of Engineering for their 2010 orientation class. That video should be up soon so come back to check it out.
-Matthew
As an ongoing project, we are constantly cleaning, repairing and digitizing the old 16mm film footage here at Ole Miss. In doing that, we try to share bits and pieces of the footage that we discover as we go along. Today’s offering is a hodge-podge of campus scenes from 1976. The footage offers a neat glimpse at an Ole Miss spring 24 years ago! If you see yourself in there, let us know and we’ll get you a copy! If you have questions about film transfer, or anything you’ve seen here, contact me at micah(at)olemiss.edu, or 662-915-3475.
This past Saturday, Micah Ginn and Chris Williams helped out during the Oxford Film Festival’s Kid’s Filmmaking Workshop. The event was hosted by the Boys & Girls Club of Oxford, with many of their members taking part in the production, as well as non-members from the community. The children worked with local filmmakers Nitin and Deepak Mantena, of Celery Studios, in the creation of a short film which will have it’s debut later this summer. Everyone had a great time, and we look forward to doing this again soon!
The workshop was sponsored by OFF, Media & Documentary Projects, YAC, Papa John’s Pizza, The Downtown Oxford Inn, and Rock Star Taxi & Limo.
Here are the final projects from the Southern Studies Documentary Fieldwork class we taught this semester with David Wharton. We are proud of the graduate students and the hard work that went into producing these documentaries.
“Biker’s Preacher”, by Novelette Brown, Jake Fussell, and Amanda Lillard
“A Grit Flick,” by J. Bingo Gunter
“Brown Family Dairy,” by Tyler Keith, Eric Griffis, and Meghan Leonard
“Original Grit Girl,” by Catherine Stout
Here is a Jackson Free Press review of “Smokes and Ears” that came out just before the Crossroads Film Festival–where it won the Best Mississippi Film award. This review sums up the Mission of the Media and Documentary Projects Center about as well as anything I could write.
In a Pig’s Ear
By Bret Kenyon
April 14, 2010
“Smokes and Ears,” directed by Joe York of Oxford, is a 26-minute documentary tells the story about the Big Apple Inn on Farish Street, and its speciality sandwich. Also known as “Big John’s,” the small restaurant’s trademarks are two sandwiches: the Smoke, a spicy ground-sausage sandwich about the size of a Krystal’s burger, and the Pig’s Ear sandwich.
Bet you’ll never guess what that’s made from.
I’ll admit that I gagged a little when I first saw a small child devouring a boiled pig’s ear slapped on a bun. But by the end of the film, I was craving one.
Local history begins to bleed into the narrative as the film’s explains the sandwich origins and ingredients. We learn that the Big Apple was a safe house for planning political strategy during the Civil Rights Movement. We discover that the restaurant was built by a young immigrant who started out selling hot tamales on the street corner, and that the price of a Pig’s Ear sandwich has only gone up approximately a penny a year since their introduction (current price: $1.05). While local Butchers gave the pigs’ ears to the restaurant free of charge, the price of ears has gone up due to their current use as a popular dog’s chew toy.
York, on staff at the University of Mississippi Media and Documentary Projects Center, not only shoots and edits the documentary so well that it looks like a History Channel feature, but he manages to use a local delicacy to tell the story of Jackson’s glory days.
The Southern Food Alliance produced the documentary. Dubbed by the Atlantic Monthly as “this country’s most intellectually engaged (and probably most engaging) food society, the SFA attempts to tell a locale’s history by exploring the roots of its unique cuisine.
I wish more films could do what this film does—find a unique device to tell the history of home. The past few decades have been unkind to Farish Street, but the popularity and stream of musical legends that passed through that place made me wish I could have spent a day there in its prime. Who needs a Bourbon Street or a Beale Street when you have something like this?
The film left me inspired to hold out hope that Jackson can one day regain some of what it once had. In the end, it’s not a documentary about some far away place or people you’ll never meet in a lifetime; it’s a documentary about our backyard.
Reference: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/index.php/site/comments/in_a_pigs_ear_041410/
A collection of still and video moments that capture the spirit of the University of Mississippi. Produced by Karen Tuttle of the Media & Documentary Projects Center.
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, an Ole Miss alum and former Mississippi Governor, was the featured speaker at the 2010 commencement ceremony. Secretary Mabus challenged the Ole Miss class of 2010 to to always be ready … ready to learn, ready to serve, and ready to give back as they go their separate ways.
MDP was at the Overby Center tonight recording Professor Gary Gallagher’s lecture on the Civil War in Hollywood. The presentation, sponsored by the UM Center for Civil War Research, addressed the main interpretations of the Civil War as depicted in motion pictures.
Sarah Kellum is a student-worker of ours who’s interest lie in cinematography. Her first solo flight with a video-camera in hand was last week, and here is what she cut together from her first time out with the Canon XL-1. Over the summer, Sarah will be working with our Panasonic HD cameras, as well as trying her hand at 16mm film, so be on the look out for more campus shots from Sarah!
Here are a few excerpts from the Keynote Address and Sustainability Leadership Award Ceremony that took place yesterday at Off-Square Books as part of the University’s Green Week celebration. Enjoy!
It’s Post Time for the students in the Documentary Projects Class. They have been working hard this semester putting together short films. Here, Jake Fussell and Novelette Brown work on their film featuring Reverend John Wilkins. Check back in a few weeks for the finished films.
Congratulations to Joe York whose “Smokes and Ears” took home the Ruma Award at the Crossroads Film Festival. The award, designed by artist Wyatt Waters honors the best Mississippi film.
Joe has had quite a run this last month with screenings of films in California, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, and upcoming in New Zealand. Joe is also featured this week at the Atlanta Film Festival, where CUD will be screened. Enjoy Joe’s Q and A with the AFF.
Way to go Joe!
Ahhh. That’s the word for today. After a long week of sessions and speakers and cameras and 3D and 3D and 3D, I’ve finally arrived back in Oxford. It was a great week and I tried to learn as much as I could but it’s nice to be back and I’m excited about getting back to work.
The final day of the exhibits for me was definitely not a letdown. I spent the whole day looking through the gargantuan South Exhibit hall that was barely big enough to hold everything in the Post Production category. There were software people everywhere showing off their products and enhancements and drives and storage solutions. You really get to the point at the NAB show that you have to stare at a blank wall for a few minutes just to reset your brain. I was most interested in what other companies were doing for storage solutions. Almost everything we do is tapeless and the need for reliable storage is a must. I definately saw a lot of shocked expressions when I said our primary storage was single hardrives. It was the kind of look you see in movies when you know a character is about to die. At any rate, it was a nice way to wrap up the week and I got a look at some really great software that’s coming out soon.
Some of the product highlights that stuck out to me included this slick super-widescreen monitor.
Check out this virtual camera system that could project 3D graphics onto a card. Not sure what we would this but very cool nonetheless. I also was excited to see this small cyclorama screen. After talking to rep, it really made me think we could achieve a similar look in our own studio. More on that later.
I’ve always wanted a tripod head with the wheel controls for smooth tilts and pans and LOVED the feel of this one from GearNex.
Along the same lines was the remote pan and tilt system from a company named Scorpio. It was smooth as silk and would be a fantastic head on a crane or dolly.
And of course I couldn’t look at film equipment without a stop by Steadicam’s booth. Pictured here is their new prototype rig for the RED One. For some reason, I’ve always been so attracted to steadicams. After trying one out, I’m definately sold. Now if only I could scrape up 20K.
So as I end this week I’m still excited about the opportunity to see the crazy new products in film and television production, and the sessions that I attended were really really helpful. I thinks it’s important to always be learning new things and methods in production and how people tell stories. But again, the most important thing is the story. Everything at NAB is simply a solution to tell better stories but content is king. As I walk past literately hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment and software I can almost here the laughter of guys like Oren Peli, the director of Paranormal Activity, who spent $8,000 dollars and a camera from Best-Buy and made a movie that grossed over 100 million. I’m glad I went but I’m glad to be home and I’m really excited to get to work on some of my upcoming projects.
Thanks again for reading and I’ll see you soon!
-Matthew
Whew. That’s the key word for yesterday at the NAB convention. I spent more time in the exhibit hall speaking to vendors and checking out the new gear. Once again, the big buzz word around here is 3D. I was amazed at how many different groups carried a 3D solution or rig. I was able to check out a few new products trying to get in on the action like a 2D to 3D convertor box from JVC that takes your 2D video and determines the planes within the shot and creates a stereoscopic image. It wasn’t perfect but it looked pretty impressive. I was shocked to see how much production with 3D rigs was already taking place.
Another big hit this year is DSLR. Canon was really touting their different models, and support systems for DSLR cameras could be seen all over the place. I’ve got to admit, I was a little skeptical of DSLR when I first heard that it would be the future of filmmaking last year but you can’t argue with the image. It looks really good!
This new camera from Panasonic was 
interesting as well. It allows the use of interchangeble film lenses with a 4/3″ sensor that’s roughly the same size as a 35mm film camera image. All at around $6,000. Very interesting indeed…
At the end of it all, you really get the point that the most important thing in all of this is the content. It’s not the camera, or the support system, or the lighting, or the sound. These are all tools that are really valuable to the creating of the story but the most important thing is the story. It’ s really the only thing that sets anything apart. I would definatly love to use a lot of these tools to enhance the story but I could shoot with the best camera with the best lens under the best light with the best sound but if my story’s crap than all I’ve got at the end of the day is a pretty piece of crap. And who wants that.
I’ll be spending most of today checking out the Post Production exhibits and sitting in on today’s keynote address with Jeffery Katzenberg from Dreamworks. More tomorrow on the last day. Thanks for reading!
-Matthew
Wow. The best word to describe yesterday’s opening of the exhibit hall at the 2010 NAB covention. Products from manufacturers all over the world were on full display and man did they come out swinging. One of the obvious connections with at least the camera makers were the 3D solutions. Everybody was touting their new 3D Cameras. In this photo you can see one of the formats that’s gaining popularity. 
3D Solutions offers this rig that inverts one of the cameras looking straight down a glass plane that reflects the lens and inverts it the right way. In other words it creates the conversion of the 2 lenses but allows them to be closer together than they would be side by side for better paralax. Whew! What a mouth full. Panasonic offered to me the easiest solution with a mounted camera lens with dual lenses. Getting my hands on it proved to be similar in controlling our HVX 200.
Another interesting setup for the cameras was the sets that each manufacturer used to show off the image quality. Seen here is the Panasonic’s 3D camera set up.
I was able to attend some incredibly helpful Final Cut Pro sessions. I use this software every day but was blown away with tips and tricks they taught us. Needless to say, I’ve been burning up the notes. I’m heading off now to a similar session on Color Correction so I’ve got to sign off. Things are definately going 3D around here and I can’t wait for Ole Miss to be apart of it.
Matthew
