A good green day

I know, you missed my posting. Don't worry though because I come bearing news, and not the kind that would have you shooting the messenger. On Monday we had but a single video in the green and Scully was understandably pissed off. Today: Our completed videos number seven. Good stuff yes? I know you are as excited as we are.

The goal is to complete a video from each of our four main projects: wind power, light rail, green buildings, and the canola shuttle. If all goes as planned--and it never does--by the end of the day we will have three of those topics in the can.

In case you didn't know, Kyle has a great radio voice and today he serenaded us with a poem by William Wordsworth. It was beautiful in the way a mother feels about her child. Thats is to say that he did it well but it was clear he had never read the poe, before this week.

Currently I sit in a room full of team members hard at work. Creativity is booming, the stock market is up, Obama is president. This is a good day for the team, a good day indeed.

Wendesday Night

I admit, its debatable whether 4:25pm can be considered night especially when it is still mostly light outside, but after eight hours in this freaking room we'll tell you when night is. That said, let me tell you about the day.

This was a good day. It began with us watching a nearly complete canola shuttle video and moved on to a relatively successful green building shoot in Providence. Turns out that the green-minded renovation of the "Incubator" left behind a few vestiges of its pencil factory past. For example to get to the roof you had to climb a rusty old iron ladder and hoist yourself up. Everyone was very excited about the prospect of putting their lives on the line climbing the ladder only to come face to face with their fears of heights. Fear of ladders + fear of heights = AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Later in the day biology professor Loren Byrnes stopped by for a little green screen shoot about sunstainable energy use. We were wowed as he proved that incandescent light wastes far more energy through heat than its flourescent counterpart. While the shoot took longer then it should have get started and Bynes was definitely nervous about lecturing on camera every so often he flashed hints of a light hearted personality. Hopefully the wonders of editing can trump his camera shy nature.

Ask me how I know we're ten days into this project. I'll tell you how, the room is strewn with caffeinated beverages and half filled pizza boxes. A number of our team have come down with some form of illness and Steve is pacing back in forth over and over again.

Now it's 4:51, the sky is dark, undoubtedly this is night.

Week Two

After a weekend of invigorating rest we are back in the studio with a little more urgency then last week. We know that now is the time to get something done and so we tried to kick it into higher gear today. Today was supposed to be all about oysters and green buildings but we got bogged down on both stories by people who either didn't get back to us or kept us waiting too long to get anything done.

We did however, finish shooting the video for the field to tank Canola video which is good, and now we're moving on to bigger and better things. We bought a globe today that we are apparently going to cover in oil to illustrate how oil had degraded the environment.

The project is going slower than expected due to a number of unforeseen issues like uncooperative sources and such. Tomorrow Kyle, Michelle, and Steve are going to Boston to shoot an interview about the commuter rail to New Bedford. And hopefully the oyster shoot tommorow goes more as planned then it did today.

Shooting the shuttle

Today is the beginning of a two-day shuttle shoot. Half the team is off to capture the Fryerlater at work in the cafeteria here, as well as some of the process through which waste oil is gathered. Meanwhile the rest of us are doing whatever research we can for a number of other possible shoots.

Yesterday we finished painting the green screen and made a pretty awesome video of Codie painting sunflowers onto the wall. The screen is a rousing success. We also had a conference call with Frank Sesno and friends which was rather enlightening. I made a bet with Kyle that Sesno would bring Al Gore onto the conference call, but somehow, I lost and am now out a dollar.

Now its off to shoot the mechanic. Cheers.

Mandolins and Michelin men

Kyle says he doesn't really know how to play the mandolin and then calmly proceeds to knock out what Scully defined as "the Bristol Ferry Ramble," which was needless-to-say, moving. And, who knew? People in over-sized painters outfits look something like Michelin men.

There was an ice storm outside last night and the ground and trees are covered in a fine glistening layer of ice. So pretty, so deadly. Obviously the thing to do in this situation is take beauty shots, nature has once again left us awed.

Todays iternery:

storyboard
paint greenscreen
a conference call with frank sesno
more painting of the greenscreen
stress

Long day over

Well the day was long but definitely productive. Jill and Codie found a great source at the Incubator, and the building turned out to be as good as we could have hoped, which is awesome. We had been a little worried that green architecture was going to be a flop.

We also managed to get some preliminary work done our green screen, and hopefully tomorrow that will be up and running so-to-speak. It seems so far that we are pretty cohesive group. Everyone seems comfortable pitching in ideas and working with each other. One might expect that spending eight hours a day with the same people might cause some sparks to fly but so far we remain sparkless.

Scully came romping in in the middle of the day, back from purchasing some Spackle and told Steve and I that they were spray painting the new academic building with green primer and we should go out and shoot some footage. Unfortunately when we got there they had almost finished. We're hoping to digitally remove the green paint and replace it with video. The technology is similar to how they make the maps appear behind weathermen, and the green paint is the perfect color.

While we were out we spoke with a marine biology professor who is spearheading an effort to repopulate local waters with oysters. The oysters are cultivated in the campus wet lab in a solar-powered hatchery. It turns out that a number of faculty and students will be out in Bristol waters on Monday in knee high galoshes which lends itself perfectly to some beautiful footage. In case you couldn't tell, I am amped (excited).

Unfortunately the canola pressing video is still nowhere to be found. For some reason a number of major canola producing companies find it necessary to label their processing procedures proprietary.

At the end of the day we gathered for a meeting to discuss the day's results and what was coming up. We got broken up into teams that will be covering a number of shoots in the next few weeks including a potato farmer and the canola shuttle on Friday, oysters on Monday, and possibly the Incubator sometime next week. While the excitement level is high, people seem tired so Scully let us out at four. All I've had to eat today was a pomegranate so this post must come to an abrupt end, cheers.

Day two: preliminary research

In the business of video, shoots are ruled by the weather, and as Codie, our appointed weather women said this morning, "it doesn't look good." Forecasts call for rain wind and snow over the next few days which means our options might be limited for much of the week.

Its 9:00 am and everyone looks a little bit tired, but as we sit down to plan the day's work the group starts to perk up. We're brainstorming ideas for the video's and today most of us will be doing some legwork to set up the shoots.

Kyle and Michelle are traveling to Lakeville MA in search of information on an extension of MBTA's commuter rail. The line currently ends in Lakeville and since it's Michelle's hometown she jumped at the chance to return home.

Jill and Codie are traveling to the mean-streets of Providence to take a look at a possible green building, the so-called Gordon Street Incubator, which apparently has a third of its roof covered in plants. A quick look on Google maps shows that the area surrounding the building is desolate, full of abandoned factories and such.

Mike and Lorin are going down to TPI to check out the manufacturing of wind turbines and other cutting edge technologies. Interestingly enough it turns out that some of the company's that used to focus solely on high end sailboats are taking a hit from the faltering economy and turning their expertise towards sustainable technology. Mike wants to explore the link.

Meanwhile Kristen, Steve, and I are set to do some background research, including trying to track down illusive footage of canola seeds being pressed into oil.

As everyone splits off on their respective ways it is obvious that their is a new sense of purpose in the room. Having specific tasks, and a more defined direction seems to have people excited.