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Making Media Now Conference

"Re-defining Collaboration in a Fractured Media World"
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Screening at Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

Join Helen De Michiel in Ithaca!
Wednesday April 13th, 7pm & Saturday April 13th, 12pm.
More info here.

Upcoming Screening at Cinema Pacific

Join us! Saturday, April 9th in Eugene, Oregon
More info here.

Eco Child's Play | How to Improve School Lunches

By Jennifer Lance
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Mother Nature Network | The Lunch Love Community

By Robin Shreeves
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Sightline Daily | Lunch on a Budget

By Jennifer Langston
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San Franista | Lunch Love Community in School

By Emily Goligoski
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The Lunch Tray | Someone Call the Fire Department - That Cheeto Really IS Flaming Hot!

By Bettina Elias Siegel
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Sierra Club | The Green Life:
Schools Serve Lunch and Love

By Natalya Stanko
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The LunchBox | Lunch Love Community

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SF360 | De Michiel and Constantinou Offer Food for Thought

Daily News & Features from America's Film & Media Frontier. Published by the San Francisco Film Society

In Production - By Michael Fox
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Pacific Film Archive

Stay tuned for details: Upcoming Lunch Love Community event at PFA on February 13, 2011.

Thank You Kickstarter Donors

Over 100 of you helped get this project off the ground.

Helen De Michiel

Helen De Michiel, co-director of the Lunch Love Community webisode series, blogs on the process of making this project, and on her adventures in filmmaking for the web.

Making a Living Read Post - Close Post
Written for Fresh at FLEFF blog.
Why Gena Mangiaratti Kept Me Thinking
The Ithaca College FLEFF student interns watched my powerpoint and video clip presentation of the Lunch Love Community project with polite interest and asked thoughtful questions.

When I read the perceptively intuitive Live Blogs on the FLEFF Interns Voices blog later, I noticed one major question that I did not answer well enough in person. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

FLEFF intern and blogger Gena Mangiaratti articulated the undercurrent in the room that I could feel, yet did not satisfactorily address:

"How can someone make a living — earn money — when you are not profiting off the sale of your films? That was what I had been wondering about. With the shift toward internet technology, how will new independent filmmakers who have a fantastic message to spread, such as De Michiel, be recompensed for their work?"

During my talk I did not discuss many of the nuances facing media makers forging ahead in the emerging digital era. I did mention that it would not be possible to earn a living from creating a media series like Lunch Love Community, which, while it is now testing a set of hypotheses, still may prove sustainable in ways we have yet to discover.

The challenges I was thinking and working with, and how students were hearing my answers were coming from different issues, different generations, and different points along the creative career path.

Observations and Advice from the Frontlines of the Public Media Field

Here are some further observations from my experiences working in the field and evolving within my own practice. I acknowledge that the lines between corporate and independent media spaces are blurring, and that there is little use now in worrying about whether you will choose poorly and be stuck where you do not want to be. The situation is far too fluid and dynamic – so, happy surfing.

There is no doubt you can earn a living in the emerging new media economy while not having to make a hard and fast distinction between indie and commercial, entertainment and “nutritional” (like documentary, installation, experimental) media flows. No matter where you land, you will find yourself in some type of cultural economy. With many of you facing enormous college bills and debt for years to come, it is crucial to understand how to function in these art-media-design industries. Your education should lead you towards satisfying projects and jobs using 21st century conceptual frameworks and technical skills.

Neither one package of skills or one focused pathway will ensure success or stability in the new media world now emerging. Creative adaptability to a variety of situations or opportunities will, though, lead to success and stability over time.

As an independent filmmaker for more than two decades after my own MFA from UC San Diego, I’ve adapted to take on various work opportunities that I either was curious about or offered me a challenge. When they were good, they involved working with smart people I could learn from. I’ve worked as a media and television producer, a professor and an arts organization executive. And all along I nurtured and completed my own projects, all of which were deeply affected by the work worlds and people I was interacting with in that phase.

What You REALLY Need to Possess for the 21st Media Ecology

When Rodrigo Brandão, Director of Publicity at Kino Lorber, gave his talk to FLEFF fellows, a comment he made struck me as the truth: He said, "there are three areas to know well if you want to get a job in the film industry today – be fluent in other languages besides English; know how to program code and build online sites; and know your film and media history really well."

These three aspects of your profile will signal to a media employer that you can communicate across a global context, and that an international scope interests you as an activity you take seriously. Technical skills like coding and managing an organization’s web presence are always valuable and attractive. You’ll be able to achieve common ground with other media and film professionals you are dealing with when you can demonstrate a strong knowledge of and appreciation for the history of your chosen field and art form.

Leadership, Leadership, Leadership

Another kind of knowledge and experience that will help you as you move into the new media economy -- especially in these early stages of digital development -- is continuing to sharpen your leadership skills across several areas. Leadership abilities are critical in the creative industries – leading and managing teams and collaborators, motivating groups, and looking for new ways to do business.

As young adults entering a volatile and shapeshifting communications sphere, you will be wise to build confidence in your ability to manage and mentor older people who may not understand the digital environment the way you do. You may get involved in digital infrastructure and media policy issues, and need to speak out publically to your peers about the importance of an open internet.

You may want to start your own company or nonprofit – utilizing ideas and facilitative leadership methods developed over the last decade to make the workplace a more humane and satisfying environment.

And you may have to raise money, either from investors, government or foundations. Leadership training gives you an anchor in how to move gracefully in a variety of sectors that feed the arts directly. In Leading Creatively, a free publication you can download from the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, you can find stories of arts leaders from three generations reflecting on the role that effective leadership has played in their careers.

Moving in Other Directions

In the creative economy, people may start in one place, discover a strength or a passion, and move in another direction.

When Donna Choi became our Digital Arts Service Corps member at NAMAC in 2009-10, she had graduated from UC Berkeley with an undergraduate degree in Ethnic Studies. We offered her this VISTA position because she was a strong writer, web designer and coder, and online community manager who could apply an intellectual rigor to the job. We also valued her ability to work independently along with focus and persistence to solve problems.

When she came to our organization, Donna wanted to work in social change organizations and politics. Art and design were side interests for her. We invested in her professional development to advance her technology skills. When her yearlong VISTA assignment was completed with us, she found a job teaching new media in the San Francisco schools system and was preparing to go to graduate school for illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. That was not where she had started off two years earlier.

There are many markers along the creative career path that allowed and encouraged me to produce a project like Lunch Love Community, and to be actually executed and distributed. That we are not charging for this cultural gift may be a problem worth investigating further, or it may prove to be a blessing still unfolding.

YOU!

How you enter into the new media ecology, what you intentionally want to do in it, and how you treat it as a space open for telling truth, is wide open, spiraling and expansive.

The future is yours to shape.

You will need to chip away at old distinctions that could keep you from doing what we wanted when we left college back in the last century:

TO CHANGE THE WORLD AND GET PAID FOR IT!
Blending An Emulsion: Part One Read Post - Close Post
Why were we screening short web documentaries for an audience in a traditional university museum film theater if they could easily see them on the Internet any time?
This was the question I wanted to answer honestly for the Lunch Love Documentary Project as my co-producer Sophie Constantinou and I were laying out the elements to design a two-hour event for our Pacific Film Archive screening in February 2011.

Steve Seid, video curator at the PFA and clever wordsmith, called this screening and community gathering a "Media Social." We set up the event as a public expression of stories and issues that now surround food reform, and in particular, how these topics have played out in Berkeley, where I live, and have been making the Lunch Love Community documentary project since 2009. Sophie and I wanted this first public screening-event to be inviting and familiar to the community, but also slip into the mix a few, riskier and unpredictable combinations with a Berkeley flavor in which film, performance, and town hall meeting could spark something exciting and memorable.

Lunch Love Community -- a series of short webisodes that we've been giving away online since December 2010 to anyone who could use, post or burn them to a DVD -- has been an emulsion made up of separate and distinct elements. Like oil and vinegar, movies and the Internet, collaboration and creative autonomy, we are working with materials and processes that don't naturally combine smoothly. Emulsions can be fragile and unstable, or they can cohere, with a lot of rapid whisking, into a thick and rich new substances.

For the people who came out to sit together in a dark theater on a sunny and warm mid-February afternoon, I wanted to offer a more expansive, live community experience than could be had on a small digital screen. Ever since we'd been making, showing and using documentary film in new spaces, combining both the virtual and real, I've tried to retain a connection to familiar ways of approaching, watching, and considering the film experience -- no matter how far and wide our web films travelled online. Bodies and minds together in a dark theater for a couple of hours is still one of the most powerful ways to connect and imagine alternative realities.

Around 150 people showed up to see the short films, ranging from 3 to 10 minutes in length, and listen to four speakers we invited from our community: Joy Moore, community food activist; Stephen Rutherford, elementary school teacher; Bonnie Christensen, Executive Chef for the School Lunch Program; and Charlotte Biltekoff, Professor of American and Food Studies at UC Davis. In the intervals between films, each of the speakers would briefly comment on one of four framing questions that linked them individually through their work, to one of the themes around food, education and school lunch reform that got its start here in Berkeley.

I was curious to explore how, in our super social-mediated world, people are now interacting and engaging with one another and the films in different environments. What would happen when individuals came together in a dark room to enter the magical world of film, and after, break away and interact with experts about real social issues and problems?

How then, to capture that energy, and move those conversations on to the Internet, where the films could be watched again in a completely different space and framed in a completely different context where they were just beginning to generate attention? This was the transmedia experience I was looking for as a filmmaker -- one that was solid, grounded in real people's lives and work, and where form follows function.

The structure we had designed for the PFA screening could not contain our speakers' needs to digress, question, or defend the school lunch transformation in Berkeley. Following the first webisode The Parent Factor, and commenting on the question, "What are You Up Against?" Stephen Rutherford used his ten minutes to point out, in a heartfelt, digressive monologue, how the promises of the lunch program, while being touted and celebrated, were not actually being realized effectively at his elementary school.

Chef Bonnie Christensen watched and listened to him. Her anger was visible as she took notes on what she was hearing as an exaggerated, public misrepresentation of the facts. After the next short film, The Labor of Lunch, Chef Christensen spoke to her framing question, "What is the Future?" in a way we hadn't expected -- by delivering a blazing, improvisational rebuttal to Rutherford's comments. Berkeley schoolteachers in the audience then took the mike to add their pointed responses, both pro and con, to a debate we hadn't anticipated.

Real life experiences, strong feelings, and unpredicted controversy erupted out of the containers we had designed to hold these passionate voices. I wished I could have pulled out my video camera (which I did not have with me) to capture this exchange -- individuals in the audience getting excited and engaged as they asserted their thoughts, and brought their experiences to bare in front of others. This was Berkeley in action - a city of fearless idealists and opinion makers with the drive and courage to examine and try to fix the flaws they had uncovered. An alive and present force of real life concerns and conflict flooded over the films, and came together in an inadvertent demonstration of the confusing and messy processes it takes to make change on a community level.

Here was what we had hoped to stimulate- "citizen participation." The films encouraged people to imagine new possibilities for children, for education, for beautiful food that awakens their kid's appetites and senses. The event led us to revisit the assumptions and ideals of the school lunch reform movement, which in turn opened onto a larger, more free-ranging conversation about how little time children get to eat and play at school, how pressured teachers feel now with disappearing resources, and in this time of shrinking resources, how to work on educational equity in racially and class-divided neighborhoods.
Blending An Emulsion: Part Two Read Post - Close Post
When reporter Sarah Henry's Berkeleyside article appeared and was reposted and retweeted the morning after the Sunday PFA screening, the dialogue we had started about school food moved online.
Among the many comments about the Berkeley school lunch program - complaining, attacking, defending and explaining - a few commentators just said thanks to the chefs for making this program work each day for their kids.

To my surprise, these online discussions spread and kept on going for another three days. The flow of commentary was intense and partisan, giving me new story ideas for the long form film still to be completed. As author Sara Miles said, "Anywhere there's food, spirit and matter intersect."

Now that Lunch Love Community is let loose online, Sophie and I as independent filmmakers and artists hold no power over the way in which the webisodes can be used or repurposed. Their status as precious objects, to be sold, bought, or controlled has vanished. On the Internet, we've traded ownership for free-ranging access to dialogue and action. My reality is that my documentary work grows now in the context of an expansive conversation that knows no limits, and where the distinction between process and product is continuously dissolving.

Yet, the webisodes have become more valuable than I'd thought possible, inviting real life involvement beyond a click: from reading a blog, to watching a short film, going to a meeting, signing on to a committee, and creating a new local policy that could affect thousands of students. Sophie calls the webisodes "tools" for anyone to use as they wish. In this evolving media economy, documentary is becoming a downloadable app to sharpen focus and provoke change.

The movement of media online will be in flux for a long time to come. As collaborator and best friend forever, the Internet comes with a price, one whose mercurial and startling needs and desires demand constant attention, exploration, and energy.

Designer Bruce Mau, author of An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, said that now "it's our job to jump fences and cross fields." Digital culture, with its openings and obstacles, has obliged me to make radical changes in how I create my media work. I make mistakes faster and correct them even faster, and I connect my work to forces way outside the screen, the theater, and narrow assumptions.

After the Pacific Film Archive screening I saw how Lunch Love Community reflects its subject both in process and spirit. The physicality, the drama and the fragility of the real, and to many, imperfect Berkeley School Lunch Program - an institutional service fighting to exist within a system of precarious and uncertain resources draws me back to the intersection of food, matter and spirit. Its magic comes from its "wabi," the flaws that reveal the human touch and the striving to do good.

Conflict is no longer only constructed in the narrative of a documentary's structure. It now spills out way beyond the screen. How we engage with critics, blogger journalists, commentators and passionate participants will reveal new relationships to non-fiction filmmaking and its transformation emerging now on the Internet.

In my experience, it is every documentary filmmaker's aspiration to transform consciousness by presenting alternative ways of seeing or doing things in life as it is actually lived and struggled over. When there is an audience to speaks its mind to you, around you, and beyond you, that emulsion you have worked so hard to blend together will hold, lose its delicate fragility, and become more potent than you had ever imagined it to be.
Contained Abundance Read Post - Close Post
Trish Kandik rents out a room in her Eugene, Oregon downtown bungalow to travelers coming through town. I stayed in her home last weekend while visiting my daughter who goes to the University of Oregon.
Her home is small and modest. The first thing I noticed though, when I walked in was a sense of spaciousness and calm.

It is completely lacking clutter. I found out later that Trish has a business helping people get rid of stuff and organize the environments they live in. I was really drawn to this domestic space she’s created, and each day I would marvel at how I enjoyed being there and taking pleasure in the minimalist aesthetic. It was not severe or deprived, just serene, and imbued with a spirit of intentional reduction.

My room was simple and tidy. A bed with a quilted cover, a bookcase with six books clustered in a corner, a closet holding four hangers, two towels and an extra blanket. Every object is in a place, where it seems it is supposed to be.

There was a house key, loaf of pumpkin bread and a bunch of bananas on the dining room table. It might have been the dark, rainy November day, the multi-colored leaves scattering outside in the park across the street, but I thought this is contained abundance.

To focus and pay attention to keeping things simple takes a huge amount of care and discipline. And to keep it up day after day. Not letting the proliferation of stuff happen. I’m not sure if it requires an obsessive-compulsive personality to create this kind of atmosphere. Perhaps the lessons of less can be learned and internalized.

My experience at Trish’s has me thinking about the Lunch Love Community Project – exploring how a ‘story’ or a ‘proposition’ can be conjured out of cascades of recorded material from the river of life and arranged into a five minute film that tries to imply much more than it shows. What is not there, or there between the edit points, is as important as what is there.

For me, the Lunch Love Community webisode will do well to have, upon clicking the Play button, an infused spirit like the one I found at Trish Kandik’s bungalow in Eugene. Small, contained and spacious, with a subtle power that only becomes apparent as you tune in and pay close attention.

Is this possible to create an oasis like this in our media-cluttered environments?

I am trying.

It really is like writing a poem where every word, and how it sits, and is linked to the next, is making the experience work.

I say this because it requires a fearless and confident relationship to language, design, and visual culture. To be able to pick and choose, remove more than you add, and contain the abundance.

Lessons from less, so that people can see more.
Jumping Fences - A day in October - Read Post - Close Post
I drive to casual carpool at the North Berkeley BART station, pick up two riders, we cross the bridge and stop at the corner of Howard and Fremont Streets in San Francisco where I drop them off.
I continue on to Citizen Film offices in the Mission district to work with my producing partner, Sophie Constantinou, on title and graphic finishes for the first batch of Lunch Love Community webisodes. Things feel urgent because we’re screening two of them for the first time that night at the Berkeley Film Foundation fundraiser being held at the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley.

I also have to proofread my latest California Council on the Humanities grant proposal, which we would be submitting that day through Citizen Film as the sponsoring organization.

Six web movies are now completed, between three and six minutes in length. It’s taken several weeks of working with the raw documentary material to figure out the form and understand the story of each piece alone and in the larger context of the whole group. I’m excited about the next six that we are making. Maybe it’s like writing songs for an album.

I keep in mind as I work, that each short piece resembles a necklace, and there could be only a few carefully selected beads to string along on it. Each bead is a shot, a piece of interview, or dialogue, music, sound or graphic text. Since mid-August we’ve spent our time working with the pattern and rhythm of each film, and then editing and shaping each one uniquely to its story and theme.

Mike Shen, our editor, would review the materials we’d pulled, and sequence them into a narrative or proposition that the web movie could be organized around. In a slow evolution with a few crucial leaps forward in the last two months, our vision and input has worked harmoniously with Mike’s considerable editorial abilities. It’s been a very disciplined process of addition and subtraction while bringing each element into play precisely.

We’d reached a turning point recently with this project – one that I’ve watched come into focus over the last several months. It’s been evolving into a three-dimensional collaboration. And more than ever, I understand how its success depends on the quality of the trust relationships we are building and growing.

Lunch Love Community now involves several dedicated people and organizations to make it happen in as many layers as necessary, and to give it weight and endurance among the ephemera of the web. Because of the complexity, cost, risk and continuous need to create an audience or community through social media streams, I’ve brought the project to my colleagues at Citizen Film and Media Working Group, and they decided to join me in its production. Sophie, who has been shooting, is now my co-producer and webisode project co-director. Jean Donohue, filmmaker and founder of Media Working Group is the executive producer.

I leave the Citizen Film office as Sophie is burning the exhibition DVD to bring over to Berkeley later that day. The issue of scale is fascinating -- that is, the jump from creating a moving image on a laptop, to experiencing it with a group for the first time on the large screen with surround sound. I’m relieved to see that Sophie has confidence that the webisodes will work well in a theatrical setting, even though we’d designed them with an eye for small computer and mobile device screens.

We meet in the Brower Center lobby-- our panel moderator Mark Fishkin, executive director of the Mill Valley Film Festival, Abby Ginzberg, documentarian and the main organizer of this fundraiser for the Berkeley Film Fund, filmmaker Rick Goldsmith who had just returned from a screening of his film The Most Dangerous Man in America, about Daniel Ellsberg, and Daniel Ellsberg himself who had just returned from speaking in England. Also a Berkeley resident, he’s been busy recently speaking out about WikiLeaks.

The Most Dangerous Man in America was a 2010 Academy Award nominee, and the intense gravitas among the Berkeley social issue documentarians in attendance at the event is palpable to me. I am nervous and find myself at the periphery of the reception, an observer rather than a circulator. Abby included me and Sophie onstage to discuss how Lunch Love Community was presenting a local Berkeley story to the world through internet media exhibition and distribution; Rick and Daniel Ellsberg were placing their film within recent global events impacted by WikiLeaks releasing documents, much like Ellsberg had done with the 1970 Pentagon Papers.

I set up the webisodes succinctly. They seemed to play nicely for this audience, and I appreciated Phil Perkins’ sound design more than ever, especially to be able to notice the audio subtleties that are missed in the YouTube translation.

Berkeley filmmakers, especially those clustered at the Zaentz Media Center are a tough group to please. They are highly accomplished and known throughout the world for long form documentaries about complicated and provocative subjects. Several of them came to the event to support the Foundation, or because the Foundation had supported them. They’re scattered among the politicians, media people and business folk who believe that giving modest grants to local film production is a worthy and important activity.

Sophie explains the reasoning behind making the webisodes and the intention to create pieces that can touch and support advocates for food reform anywhere that there is access to a computer. She connects in tone and stance to younger people there who get what we are trying to do with this experiment, and appreciate the lightness in our mode of offering the work.

I listen and watch the audience carefully. Most of the questions are directed to Daniel Ellsberg, but a few filmmakers worry aloud about what internet delivery and distribution will do to the theatrical, big screen, communal experience. I think that we try and explain that it shouldn’t be an either/or proposition, but simply that the nodes of entry to a media experience have expanded and become more layered and participatory.

I am neither particularly comfortable nor overly anxious, an interesting combination of moods. My overall sense is that we are in the process of shaping a new pathway to reach people who might never be especially interested in documentary. And we are giving the webisodes away for free to anyone who wants to use them.

After the event ends, and people stop by to say hello and wish us well with the project, I find myself trying to take a detached perspective on the evening’s dialogue about the art and form of documentary as it evolves around new media interfaces and delivery systems. It was a moment in which I was pivoting between two different realities, generations, expectations and methods of approaching the question of how to sustain a strong documentary practice now.
Beautiful Imperfections - Read Post - Close Post
Working on the Lunch Love Community webisodes, the form-follows-function rule comes up again as I get used to making these shorts for the web.
One function of this project is to attract and coalesce emerging advocates for school lunch reform. These pieces about the Berkeley experience are gifts to anyone who wants to watch and use them.

Another function of the project is to create a laboratory-like environment where we can create and test out a new container for growing them.

As I thought of using the work “container,” the image of container gardening came to me. Our container garden for these pieces -- that I hope will grow and vine out across the web – sits on the wire frame of the web. For now, we are testing how these little documentaries will be noticed and used even though they are not yet connected to traditional distribution streams like broadcast, or venues like film festivals or museums or other art spaces.

The variegated forms of each of the webisodes are emerging from both an internal, dialogue I am having with myself and an ongoing external conversation I am having with my creative partners, about function, clarity and possibility.

What ideas, scenes and images to include and build upon? What elements to intentionally leave out? Is there a story that is being pointed to, indirectly, outside the frame? Or a proposition – an insight or idea – being offered to the viewer to take and extend further? These questions come up while building a piece we limit to no less than 3 minutes and no more than 7.

The process is imperfect because we have to discover what each piece wants to be -- picking and choosing, drafting and revising, adding and subtracting, reducing and polishing a narrative or string of linked ideas to spark the viewer to want to explore the subject more. I’m calling this exploration “Beautiful Imperfections,” because I feel I am working with a highly unstable tension between:

1. Being an artist using digital media and…being a filmmaker.

2. Art that builds community and …art that tells the truth.

3. A creative partnership and …individual vision and control.

4. Vernacular, alive imperfect video and…professional craft.

5. What is media communication and…what is media art.

6. Creating a viewing space for insights to emerge and… having a simply clarified message to put out as a call to action.
Jamie Oliver Provokes - Read Post - Close Post
I would NEVER have thought, in 2007, when I started working on this doc, that we, as independent filmmakers, would be competing with Jamie Oliver doing school lunch for major broadcast media. His series is certainly now polarizing discussions, but I want to say that in this emerging era of social media, there are alternatives to this kind of television.
All over the country people are struggling to change the way our children eat. We want to see, think about, and talk about how other people, in other communities, are solving these problems and having a good time doing it. Alice Waters told me, "there's no need to 'replicate' the way school lunch being done in Berkeley. Think about how to 'interpret' this experience for your own place, social situation and food customs. "I love that idea of interpretation rather than replication -- like improvising with a recipe."

In this highly partisan society we live in now, the Berkeley school lunch initiative proves that giving the gift of healthy and sense-awakening food to children may be an issue that a community can rally around, and individuals can discover common interests and passions they did not know were there. And when that happens, it might become a space in which to share -- as citizen -- thoughts and possibilities about other issues that matter, all outside the conflict-ridden media echo chamber.

In our webisode series, it is a very diverse and opinionated community -- not an individual hero -- that works over years, not days or weeks, to make change. It is hard, and it is gratifying, and it is an adventure in which we can all participate.
Finding Water - Read Post - Close Post
Persisting and concentrating, I make non-fiction films shaped from images, sounds and voices caught from the waters of life. In order to create energy for this long and arduous process, my devotion to a subject needs to match my devotion to images and sounds moving on a screen, so the two can merge and create a stronger alternative reality.
It used to be that a track record of success might help you attract funding institutions to back a new film. You would be in a dialogue with your funders, your producers, and your technical and editorial team. When the film was completed, you would show it to close friends and supporters, distributors, and begin offering it to venues and festivals. It might be bought for broadcast, either public or cable.It would be sent in for awards consideration. If more money came through, you would design an outreach effort to get the word out about the film and its subject. Your website would be promotional and you would meet your audiences at screenings.

If you have the capacity and the resources, this model could still work.

But now, I wanted a new experience, with different results.

Open Minds Open Mouths is evolving into an outcome rather than a completed object. It is a network of intentional relationships and dialogues among people who are passionate about the subject.

It is an experimental laboratory within fluid platforms and formats. And it is a visual conversation about what constitutes authorship of the project.

It is also touching an expanding web of collaborators and supporters who see it, and its spirit, as a way to activate and participate in an expressive field larger than any of us individually.

I am learning to see the work I do in media as liquid, a permeable substance that moves across and through networks or clusters of activity. The film will no longer be an object that is solid, and completed. It will come together momentarily in one space, only to be dispersed and re-formed in another. Yet, the context I give it, as the artist, infuses it with my human intention, and keeps it from dispersing only as disappearing fragments across the media stream.

This image reminds me of a moment one summer, standing on a bridge looking over the small but rushing Onion River in northern Minnesota.

Sparkling and hypnotic, the stream moved over and around rocks, being pulled down towards the wise expansive lake. The waters at the river’s edges would wind back to the larger stream, regardless of apparent force or laziness, adding to the growing momentum.

And that mainstream changed its position, depending on my vantage point and where I was in relationship to the water flowing.

We inhabit many image and media cultures moving together, but at different strengths, and always changing, assuming different shapes, just like the summertime water in the feisty Onion River.
Eating with My Eyes - Read Post - Close Post
I enjoy slipping away from my desk, my screen, my thoughts and worries at noon, on an occasional Tuesday, to walk over to King Middle School in Berkeley and buy a five dollar school lunch. I will stop by the Chefs’ office to check in and see what activities or events they’ve posted on the calendar, and where I might be able to shoot next. I am drawn to unpredictability and surprise when making a documentary.
I am also fond of the Berkeley School Lunch’s Mexican coleslaw, a recipe Executive Chef Bonnie Christensen and her team perfected before the start of this school year. I ask the server at the burrito station for a slice of quesadilla, a small scoop of rice, another of pinto beans, and a lot more of the fresh Mexican slaw. I make a mental note to get the ingredients for the slaw so I can copy it at home.

The 6^th,7^th and 8^th graders pour in to eat in 20 minute intervals. The noise and energy levels reach peak levels in the uncommonly beautiful dining commons, the centerpiece building space of the school. Teachers on duty keep the kids contained and almost focused on their plates of food. For many, this is the only hot meal of their day.

A few hours later, some of these kids will have been in Ms. Sonnenberg’s or Ms. Tanner’s “What’s On Your Plate” science class, and after school they will also hang out with friends at the corner store across from Fat Apple’s restaurant on MLK Street, buying and eating hefty bags of Red Hot Cheetos.

I would never want to stop them. Watching the clusters of young teenagers laughing talking and jumping up and down with sheer hormonal excitement after seven hours in class, it is impossible not to see again in so real a way, how food – even these naughty dayglo snacks -- is the powerful force that binds us together.

The love and care that the school district cooks and servers, dishwashers and cleaners put into each meal infuses every molecule of the salad bar, today’s Mexican plate station, the milk tap and the compost bins. It’s like what one of the teachers explained, “it’s OK to hold both realities—hot lunch and hot cheetos in your mouth, that’s what kids can do.”

The school lunch cooks are planting seeds for future memories. At some point later in their lives, the kids who have gone through these lunch lines will remember the fine smell of delicately seasoned pinto beans, the crunch of the fresh Mexican slaw, and the ceiling light in the Commons rooms, and that moment when they were twelve years old and peeling a perfect Clementine orange to taste.

This is how we make change on a daily level, one plate at a time.

We are so grateful to all of you -- the community backing this project, this important movement, working for it, and communicating through LUNCH LOVE COMMUNITY what we can collectively achieve.
Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it. - Read Post - Close Post
Since Patty Zimmermann and I have been developing our ideas about Open Space Documentary, I’ve wanted to report on my creative process developing the Open Minds Open Mouths project in this spiraling participatory media environment.
I’m trying to understand what is going on now for independent filmmakers like myself, and how new ways of financing, producing and distributing will change both the current project and how people are responding to it.

At the same time though, I hunger for a reprieve from the purely instrumental viewpoint on how the world — especially for creators — is turning upside down.

Without the infusion of a strong moral and values-driven dimension to ground ourselves in the digital future, I think that the forecasting rhetoric we see everywhere seems hollow and repetitive, framed only by economic and infrastructural models.

How can we as artists talk about what this revolution is doing to our cultural ecology? How can we offer other ways of imagining it?

To be sure, small artisanal filmmakers must pay attention to business, but other social and cultural needs drive and fill this work with purpose, making it what I have called Slow Media. Why do we do what we do in this environment, and what does it mean for our culture and communities over a long stretch of time?

Two years ago, I began working on Open Minds Open Mouths, a one-hour documentary film about the Berkeley School Lunch Initiative, and the plan remains to complete the long-form version within the next twelve months.

But since The Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act is coming up in congress this year, we are seizing the moment and using our storytelling power to create (8) short webisodes right now — from our existing media assets which we have shot over the last 18 months.

This is my open space documentary project — a work-in-progress experiment –adapting and responding to online media creation, tapping our social networks as backers, and reaching out to new users and audiences to get inspired and get involved.

With my co-producing team at Citizen Film in San Francisco, we are making bite-size web-based stories of vision, passion and action that will easily and freely travel around the internet to build awareness of the importance of supporting and developing healthy and nutritious school lunch programs for all American children.

They will show how, in Berkeley, an economically and ethnically diverse community of cooks, educators, parents, health advocates, politicians and food vendors has persisted over a decade to reinvent school lunch – and successfully integrate it into an innovative cooking and gardening curriculum throughout the K-12 system.

We will produce the eight webisodes, and launch the Lunch Love Community: Stories for Changing the Way Our Kids Eat campaign live online by early summer 2010. These pieces will be there to share, and anyone, anywhere can use them to get dialogue going about food policy reform.

In a moment when education budgets are being cut, obesity is a major problem, and food insecurity is growing across the country, these little documentary glimpses into the Berkeley School Lunch program – one that is working remarkably well –can inspire people to change the way children are eating in their own communities.

The short stories will also help us build an awareness and interest community for the one-hour Open Minds Open Mouths film when it is completed and ready for release.

Food, love and children. It’s what Open Minds Open Mouths is about, and why it is such a pleasure and an adventure to imagine such a wonderful and workable way to do new things and make a difference.