10/23

I spent a lot of this week trying to track more people down. It has been sort of a rabbit hole. I started out trying to contact this one particular guy, Will McInerney. Will was the last listed caretaker of the poetry group Ira co founded. I contacted him a while back. He lives in England, so we correspond on a bit of a time delay. He is gonna do an interview through skype, but he started giving me other names to contact. Some of these names I knew, but some them I had been unable to find contact info for, and he gave me that. An altogether new name he gave me was their high school English teacher.

I had learned that Will was also one of the co-founders of the poetry group and a school mate of Ira. The teacher had a relationship with the poetry group members, but I'm not exactly clear on that. The teacher responded to email fairly quickly, but requested that I called him. I thought that would be a much easier way to figure things out. We had set up a call time, this past Friday. Knox and I were going to call him, and try to work out specifics for an interview and just discuss what he might have to offer. The call fell through for Friday, he did had a scheduling conflict with his childcare arrangement. We are going to try again ASAP.

10/16

10/9

After our weekend filming in Charlotte, we spent time organizing the footage we had. Generally, we are dumping the footage on Knox's equipment, and mine, for safety. So first, I went through and watched our new footage. I saw a lot of negatives right away. The first interview we shot last weekend, was too blue, the guy's shirt was too reflective, and the lens got dirty at the lake. These things help, I suppose, because I learn from them, but out time is too valuable to be learning. This is school though, so that seems conflicting, it is time to learn, maybe.

Anyway, I organized my footage in Premier. I created a bunch of bins, named them, and split of the footage. I put together a version of one of our interviews, Todd Sumlin. I have some different ways to put that interview together, depending on how we use him and the necessary length. At this time though. I'm working on digging more and more sources up, so we can get more of a handle on what we can find.

Again

We spent the weekend in Charlotte as a complete group. We met up during the week to discuss logistics. Getting all that equipment and four people to Charlotte is a bit challenging with the cars we have. I feel like we could cut back on our equipment, but at the same time, it is better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it. So it takes two cars, but we get there.

The interviews went great, I thought. They were at the same location, so we only had to get to one place. We scouted the area and settled on the specific locations at the house. I made an initial mistake, not white balancing the camera before the first interview, so that is a bit blue. Since it is a single evenly lit shot, I believe it can be fixed in post.

We got out on the water, and it was sort of an eerie feeling. We were headed to the spot where a girl died, but it conflicts with the usual light mood you might have when going out on the lake. We made it to the spot, and again it was odd, because there were no real signs of anything. It was just a small spot of beach covered in trash and brush. It was so close to people's homes, docks, and active areas.

Overall, it was a successful trip.