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Progress is always slow but...
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| Monday, August 2, 2010
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After months of pursuing funding from PBS, Sundance and Tribeca we've given it a rest and I hopped on that short flight to San Diego from NYC. We now, almost two years later, have a rough edit. Except, it still needs audio and video mastering...and subtitling. With my new laptop, the 400gigs of video I've got and Premier Pro I can make it show-able in some free time I have at the end of the summer! This should help with formal fundraising proposals to institutions but also enable some fundraisers to get a couple of thousand bucks to get our editor and musicians in Mexico started.
Alex has gotten a guy who seems like a good, committed type to take what we have and help us close it up. I think we have to spend more time in Minnesota because we've got an uneven balance of people in Mexico and a lot of footage of characters in MN who we never explored fully and only two families in the docu now. Alex doesn't like to hear me say this after our winter trip there. Which was in fact as cold as -5'F one night and regularly 10'F.
Alex finally saw how we needed to assemble all the scenes before jumping in to intercutting, which will be for the editor. We have more than an assembly but it's still mostly sequential. Even if we don't find funding our editor will give us a more cut that lays down more precisely the film will flow. If we need then we can go back to MN in the spring. We can then have it down to a fine edit and, hopefully, find finishing funds for final mastering and apply to P.B.S.'s Latino Diversity Initiative for outreach in a year.
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Done with the rough cut!
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| Wednesday, July 21, 2010
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Jon was in San Diego last week and we already finished the rough cut! It's about 1.5 hours and I'll take it with me to DF (Mexico City) so that Aldo, our editor, can work on the fine editing. We also have two guys getting involved in the music.
Meanwhile, Jon will be working on a version of the reel so we can show around. We're moving forward.
The idea is to have by December a pretty polished version of the film, then re-apply for big funding during january-april 2011, with a much better quality reel and with the experience of this part year in the application process. This is damn exciting.
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Austin, MN in Christmas
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| Wednesday, January 6, 2010
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We went back to Austin, MN, on Christmas to take the last bits of shooting we need to complete our documentary. It feels so good. We have been working for about two years now on this and finally we have finished, I think, the shooting stage.
We went to Austin with specific footage in mind, because we have been working on the rough edit so much that we had figured out exact shots we needed. There was a lot of snow, and the weather dropped to 11F (around -20C). We spent Christmas eve with a Mexican family, who feasted us with barbacoa, beans and beer. Delicious.
We reshot some scenes because Jon wasn't convinced with the lighting, but we basically got some beautiful shots of the countryside and some great b-roll of the people in winter. It was awesome. Jon and I decided that we are a good team shooting, but lousy when it comes to editing.
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Austin, Minnesota
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| Sunday, December 13, 2009
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Jon is coming down to San Diego to work for about 4 days in the rough edit, and then we'll fly up to Minnesota to spend Christmas there with some of the families of the documentary.
We want to get the last minutes of footage, the families celebrating and remembering. The snow.
This is going to be the last work of the filming stage. After this we'll concentrate on funding post-production.
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Those ... Letters of inquiry
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| Wednesday, December 9, 2009
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We have been working on our letter of inquiry for the LEF foundation. We are going back and forth with proposals, some too weak, some too academic, and we are still looking for the sweetspot. Should it make a broader point, or should it focus at a very basic level, or both?
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DP flies from NY to SD because director is lazy
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| Wednesday, September 9, 2009
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Alex got this chance to go back to Oaxaca so I went out to SD to help put together an assembly so we could determine if we needed any VOs and broll from there. Alex had experimented with a lot of stuff and selected the best so we edited sequences character by character. His question was whether to focus on topics or people. I prefer the more intimate approach of showing each person to lead to an ultimate conclusion through them all than to reporting on the issue. We only need each person to express each point of view. Our introduction to the rurality of the Sierra is through woman named Luisa, whose husband has been gone for three year, and the family of Eleuterio. We got these and our favorite chicken killing scene very tight. Alex wanted to do a lot more, but making an assembly is all about going through your footage by some categorization that you don't necessarily need to stick with. So, we went character by character and then we had to move on from these first two That took us until Monday. There'd been a weekend in between so...we had two and a half days to assemble more than twice what we'd done. Being on a budget means no money to change plane tickets. We went at it and ground out another hour + of stuff, and this was all the Mexico footage. The film is grounded around showing rural life and then talking to families who have relatives abroad and two teenage boys with older brothers there who have to choose between trying to go to college or going north. The footage we took in Minnesota will hopefully, show the cultural alienation they experience when they get into the bowels of the USA. We're planning on editing all the stuff from Minnesota together now and going back there for the snow at Christmas.
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The point of this documentary is
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| Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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I've been polishing the treatment of the documentary:
This documentary seeks to present a humanized perspective on the problem of illegal migration from Mexico to the U.S. There is a dehumanized narrative surrounding this issue that objectifies illegal immigrants as criminals. It is the main point thesis of this documentary that this conception fails to acknowledge the complex political-economy at the center of the problem.
Almost everybody is winning out of this situation: migrants and their families in Mexico live better, corporations are making record profits by having access to cheap labor, which in turn allows the U.S. to maintain a competitive edge in the world economy (read China or India), American consumers are better off having lower prices in the supermarkets, and the Mexican government has an exit valve to an otherwise socially explosive situation. This context makes it almost hypocritical to point-fingers at immigrants and reduce the problem to a criminality debate.
The documentary also acknowledges the fact that there are, for sure, losers in this game. There is a very real competition of labor that affects working-class American families, and the documentary also explores their points of view. Finally, it seeks to inform the debate surrounding illegal migration by presenting facts about how many illegal immigrants, because they have to work using fake documents, also pay their taxes, so they are not the leeches some anchor people portray them to be.Migrants are not their stereotype. There is a human drama underlying each one of them, and there is a corresponsability between Mexico and the U.S. to do something. We want to portray the humanity beyond the stereotype, the invisible, the job-taker, the alien. We do not wish to accentuate the problem, but rather influence how people in both sides of the river perceive the problem.
Este documental busca presentar una perspectiva humanizada del problema de la inmigración “ilegal” desde México hacia Estados Unidos. Hay una narrativa deshumanizante que rodea este tema social, que objetiviza a los migrantes y los tilda de criminales. El punto central de este documental es que esta concepción no toma en cuenta la compleja economía-política en el centro del problema de la migración ilegal.
Casi todos ganan con esta situación: los migrantes y sus familias en México viven mejor; las corporaciones están teniendo ganancias record gracias a la mano de obra barata, lo que permite a las empresas de EUA mantener competitividad frente a países como Chine e India; los consumidores en EUA tienen precios más baratos en los supermercados, y el gobierno mexicano tiene una válvula de escape a una situación social potencialmente explosiva. En este contexto, señalar a los migrantes como criminales y reducir el problema a uno de tipo legal es francamente hipócrita.
Este documental también reconoce que ciertamente hay perdedores en este juego. La intensa competencia por trabajo afecta a las familias de la clase trabajadora en los EUA. Finalmente, busca informar el debate sobre migración ilegal presentando otra versión sobre la migración ilegal y los impuestos: muchísimos migrantes trabajan con documentos falsos, y en esa medida están dentro del sistema fiscal y aportan sus cuotas como cualquier otro, por lo que no son las sanguijuelas fiscales que algunos dicen.
Los migrantes no son su estereotipo. Hay un drama humano subyacente, y hay una corresponsabilidad entre México y EUA para hacer algo.
Queremos enseñar la humanidad que subyace al estereotipo, al invisible, al que “quita trabajo”, al ilegal. No queremos acentuar el problema, sino más bien influenciar la forma en que gente en ambos lados del debate lo percibe.
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Austin-Magdalena:
Into the Bowels of Luxury
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ArtPower!Film is pleased to present our first ever blog dedicated to a first time documentary filmmaker, UCSD graduate poltical science student Alex Ruiz. An important ArtPower!Film mission is to foster the talents of emerging ucsd filmmakers. Our hope is that you will engage with and learn from Alex’s creative journey – his trials and tribulations as he brings his idea to fruition. Alex and his crew will post images, clips and comments on a weekly basis.
The Treatment
About the Documentary Film:
This documentary seeks to present a humanized perspective on the problem of illegal migration from Mexico to the U.S. There is a dehumanized narrative surrounding this issue that objectifies illegal immigrants as criminals. It is the main point thesis of this documentary that this conception fails to acknowledge the complex political-economy at the center of the problem.
Almost everybody is winning out of this situation: migrants and their families in Mexico live better, corporations are making record profits by having access to cheap labor, which in turn allows the U.S. to maintain a competitive edge in the world economy (read China or India), American consumers are better off having lower prices in the supermarkets, and the Mexican government has an exit valve to an otherwise socially explosive situation. This context makes it almost hypocritical to point-fingers at immigrants and reduce the problem to a criminality debate. The documentary also acknowledges the fact that there are, for sure, losers in this game. There is a very real competition of labor that affects working-class American families, and the documentary also explores their points of view. Finally, it seeks to inform the debate surrounding illegal migration by presenting facts about how many illegal immigrants, because they have to work using fake documents, also pay their taxes, so they are not the leeches some anchor people portray them to be.
Migrants are not their stereotype. There is a human drama underlying each one of them, and there is a corresponsability between Mexico and the U.S. to do something.
We want to portray the humanity beyond the stereotype, the invisible, the job-taker, the alien. We do not wish to accentuate the problem, but rather influence how people in both sides of the river perceive the problem.
Biographies
Alexander Ruiz Euler – Director / Producer
Alex Ruiz is a political science PhD student at UCSD. His background as a documentary filmmaker is null, and he is stepping into these turbulent waters out of the conviction that both human excellence and misery are hidden in the daily events of our lives. Also, he realizes that his life as an academic falls short of his desire to understand this hide-and-seek because we sometimes grasp life better when it is narrated in a screen -and not necessarily through statistics.
Although he currently lives in sunny San Diego, he was born and raised in Mexico City, making him an average neurotic chilango.
Jon Wetterau – Director of Photography
Jon Wetterau is a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer who has produced two films and worked on many others in different parts of the world. Jon was born and lives in Queens, New York and studied filmmaking with Adolfas Mekas at Bard College in the 90s. He is currently pursuing an MFA at Hunter College.
Jon’s most recent production “Doual’a: A Portrait of Three Quartiers” (2007, 54 mins.) is a glimpse of different sides of life in the commercial capital of Cameroon, Douala.
He has worked on his own short films including: “The Road from New York to CentroAmerica” (1997), a personal film about a road trip to Costa Rica; “Keep It Moving” (2000), the story of three New York City bicycle messengers and “Moving to Mexico” (in progress), a film about American gentrification in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He worked for Ashim Ahluwalia on the award-winning films “Thin Air” (1998) and “John and Jane” (2004) as well on Susan Kaplan’s “Three of Hearts”(2006), Paul Korenkeweicz’s “Stephen Pace: Art Through a Life”(2000) and Suzanne Schulz’ “Modern Times: Building Community in America’s First Suburb” (2001).
Jon is committed to projects that explore how world events have more of an impact on peoples’ lives in the 21st century.
Chuk Moran - Editor
Chuk Moran studies cultural systematics of new media at UC San Diego's PhD program in Communication. He designs interactivity affordances in the inter-disciplinary mashup performance format in continued development by the Kamza and Bar Kamza Project of UCSD. He continues outsider work in children's books, video, audio cutup/mashup, painting, cooking, and clothing design.
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CCIS: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (Wayne Cornelius)
http://www.ccis-ucsd.org
Wayne has shaped the project from the beginning by believing in it,
suggesting new angles, and putting us in contact with a vast array of
other people who have supported the project. He can be thought as the
detonator.
Con Mi Gente (Stephen Hickens)
http://www.conmigente.org
Stephen was instrumental in helping us enter Oaxaca, since he put us in
contact with Susy and Randy Hinthorn.
COMI: Centro de Orientación del Migrante (Susy and Randy Hinthorn)
http://comi.giving.officelive.com/default.aspx
Susy and Randy are a very important link in this chain of events,
because they introduced us to Father Fernando (below). They also helped
us see the problem of migration from a humanitarian (and christian)
perspective.
Don Bartletti (L.A Times)
http://www.kpbs.org/donbartletti
Mr. Bartletti has helped us avoid (as much as we could!) many rookie
mistakes when trying to put together a journalistic piece, and also in
this sense, has served as an ethical benchmark for the documentary.
Social Pastoral of Oaxaca (Fr. Fernando Cruz)
No website
Fr. Fernando picked us up in Oaxaca City in took us to San Mateo to meet
his colleague, Father Gregorio (who is in charge of the parish in the
beautiful pueblo of San Mateo Peñasco) and helped us convince him about
the idea, which was by then still in exploratory phase.
San Mateo Peñasco's Parish (Fr. Gregorio)
No Website
Father Gregorio is a central piece of the project because he hosted the
director and the cameraguy for almost a whole month in his parish and
introduced them to local leaders, which softened the "landing" into the
communities. He also fed them substantially.
ArtPower! (Rebecca Webb and Amy Thomas)
http://www.artpwr.com/
ArtPower!, through Rebecca and Amy, is involved in the project through an
indispensable mix of guru-ness, networking and executive producing. They
are also behind the idea of this blog.
UCSD Media Center (Adriene Hughes + Bill Campagna)
http://mediacenter.ucsd.edu
The UCSD Media Center has provided technical support and facilities
related to the process of transferring the DV to a hard-drive and
editing. This, of course, is also relevant to the extent that the
producers' wallets have stopped bleeding, albeit only temporarily.
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