I recently completed a project for Rosie’s Place, a homeless women’s shelter in Boston, for their annual “Funny Women, Serious Business” fundraising event. This was the fourth video I had created for them (including this piece that I did last year). Earlier this year, Kip Tiernan, the founder of Rosie’s Place, passed away, so they wanted this year’s video to be a tribute to Kip. I had met (and filmed Kip) on a few occasions in the past, and she was a very interesting woman, with a long history of social activism. I felt pretty honored and inspired working on this project, knowing that I needed it to feel worthy of Kip.
In terms of the production, the video was pretty straightforward. We did one day of filming interviews at Rosie’s Place. and I decided ahead of time to shoot on a seamless backdrop with the (likely) intention of making the interviews black and white. We shot with 2 Panasonic AF100s, so we could have a second angle (this has pretty much become the norm for me for shooting interviews now). They gave me a lot of photos and some archive footage of Kip that I could use as well. I decided that in lieu of the normal “pan and scan” approach to moving on the photos in post, I would film the photos instead. I often see this approach on ESPN and in some documentaries, and I think it’s a nice visual change from the “Ken Burns” effect. I really liked it at first after shooting and editing the pictures in. Then I didn’t like it so much. Then (I think) I liked it again. Ultimately the client was very happy with it, so I guess it worked.
Normally I HATE choosing music for my videos because I find it to be so painstakingly difficult, but I actually really enjoyed it this time. I found a couple tracks right away that I thought worked perfectly (I think it was the first 2 tracks in the video) and that got me on a roll to find the others. In the end, it’s a fairly simple piece, but I was quite happy with how it turned out. I was told that it was the highlight of their fundraising event, at which they raised $450,000.
Enjoy!
Tags: AF100, director of photography, interviews