A documentary about what some folks in Memphis are doing to create a different kind of world. I’ve been working on this project for nearly a year now! Well, there have been some months where I let it sit on a shelf so to speak, but it’s been a year since I shot the first interviews. I’d like to be able to say that time was spent carefully planning but you’d probably see right through that. I suppose I just wasn’t in a hurry. The nature of the projects that I was documenting was such that they had no end date. Two of them were just starting up so my plan was to capture the creation process from beginning.

This is exactly the kind of media creation I want to be doing. My primary interest has always been community activism… usually of an anarchist bent. Of course an important part of that is communicating with people. I started with print then migrated to radio and now that the technology is more affordable, digital film production. The web, combined with digital video, has amazing potential. The possibilities that now exist for sharing information and telling the stories of our communities are really exciting.

Right now I’m in the midst of editing it all together. Actually, I’m finishing up interviews too. Hopefully I’ll be finished with interviews by this Sunday. The video was shot on three different cameras. The least expensive and most basic of the three was a Sony TRV120 which is a digital8. The second was a step up in quality, a Sony PC110 which is a miniDV and also a 1CCD chip camera. The third and by far the best camera of the three is a Canon GL-1 which is what I’m using to wrap up the interviews. It’s a miniDV 3CCD camera of much higher quality. It’s being edited with Final Cut Pro on a G4 Tower and a 12" PowerBook with a LaCiE 120GB firewire drive to hold all the media.

What’s especially exciting for me is that this is my first, primarily solo, feature length film. The first segment of the film was shot by Jeff Peel who consulted on the editing. I’ve shot and edited the remaining 2 segments. When finished, the film will consist of one twenty minute segment and 2 thirty minute segments… give or take a few minutes. These will each stand on there own but will be best shown together. I’ll post more as it develops. The first showing is scheduled for Aprill 2003. Trailer.