race

today was another marathon of pickup shooting in macarthur park for damelo todo... and time is of the essence cause we're closing in on a new rough cut (aaaand my producer kathy rivkin is cutting me off! no more shooting after friday waaaah ok i get it). i'm trying to create a visual narrative about the neighborhood of silver platter without being too heavy handed- beacuse at the same time, for many of the folks seeing this movie, they will not know the nuances of the amazingness of macarthur park, so i have to figure out a way to REPRESENT it- which is like my most dreaded, and most compelling challenge about this project.

anyways i'm learning a lot from my director of photography michelle lawler- who is a seasoned doc maker and shooter- about how to create establishing shots, ie stuff we may have no personal connection to but that LOOKS like some of the major ideas we're trying to convey about the environment (race class ethnicity economics history etc etc etc). i tend to be suuuper uncomfortable with what thinking like this does to my brain, but we settled on a compromise of making portraits of the storefronts all the major labor/rad orgs in the neighborhood: UCLA LABOR, SEIU, CHIRLA, CARACEN, Opportunidad, Asian Pacific Legal Center, etc. hopefully that mixed with money shots of sunset skylines will do the trick ;)