Sean t. Hanley

I was DPing a shoot all weekend, so I took today off work in order to get some pre-production done.  It felt good to sleep in for once, and then wake up to a hot cup of tea.  It’s surprisingly still cold in Boston for being the middle of March.

My goals today were as follows:

1. Finish my fiscal sponsorship proposal to the Marlborough Arts Center and get some feedback
2. Finish my working shot list and location/contact list
3. Write a proposal letter to the family that lives in my old house
4. Update this website

I did about 50% of those four, but the night is still young.  I got some good feedback on my fiscal sponsorship proposal, but I found that becoming sponsored is more complicated than I imagined.  I need to consider things like ownership, liability, and other IRS legal stuff.  It’s tough to think about the creative aspect of the project, while at the same time thinking about the non-creative stuff.  I feel like my mind can only focus on one thing at a time.  Both are very stressful, so when I try to multi-task (like I did today) I end up becoming frustrated with myself.

But I decided to take a break and watch a film that I had been wanting to see for a while, but just never had time.   It’s a German documentary called, “Our Daily Bread” and I actually found it very inspiring.  The film is essentially wordless.  There are a few scenes where we scene people in conversation, but there are no subtitles for us non-German speaking Americans.  Ultimately the conversations don’t matter because the point of the film is the images.  For 90 minutes, I was engulfed in the utter weirdness/beauty/horror of modern food production.  Because the film has no narration, and no interviews, the images let the audience develop their own reaction.

I’m glad I watched Our Daily Bread today because it provided needed inspiration for what I want to do with Hindsight.  My original idea was to make Hindsight a wordless film, but I was nervous about whether or not I could produce enough images to complete a story or render a theme.  I changed my original idea after seeing some films by Ross McElwee in which narration was paramount to the theme.  Working off that thought, I decided to try and include some interviews with my family.  I think Hindsight will end up being a mixture of two very different approaches to documentary filmmaking.  I can only hope I know how to find the right balance.