Our NOVA Premiere - Wednesday, November 9
10/31/11 07:57 AM
TUNE INTO PBS to see NOVA’S newest four-part series.
The first episode, What is Space?, airs this Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 9pm (check local listings).
Our company’s NOVA debut airs next Wednesday, November 9 with The Illusion of Time. It is also The Film Posse principal Randy MacLowry’s first project for NOVA, serving as episode producer/director and co-writer. Tracy Heather Strain worked as the episode’s business affairs manager. Former intern Matt Gavin performed as production assistant on this exciting but challenging program that brings theoretical physics to the screen.
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MacLowry Edited Frontline's The Silence
05/01/11 12:00 AM
The Film Posse principal Randall MacLowry recently edited “The Silence” for director of photography and producer Tom Curran. The documentary short, which explores sex abuse within the Catholic Church in a remote Alaskan village, premiered on PBS’s Frontline on April 19, 2011, and can now be seen on the strand’s website. Native American Public Television co-presented the episode.We've Been Busy!
04/30/11 08:01 PM
We are in the midst of work on projects for three clients—Vital Pictures, Education Development Center, and Boston Arts Academy. Plus our work on Hansberry continues.
Going Back in Time with Louis Gossett, Jr.
11/14/10 12:40 PM
The Film Posse has often worked on stories that require us to interview individuals in their 70s, 80s and even 90s, which we love doing like for BUILDING THE ALASKA HIGHWAY. In these situations, whether famous or not, we think it is very effective to take our subjects back in time, usually off-camera first, with photographs, newspaper articles, video clips and other materials. It also sends a signal to them that we are serious about understanding their point of view and respect their time, and it helps us ask more focused questions.
The practice also helps us identify individuals in the photographs, which is very useful during the editing process. For our program about building the Alaska Highway on which about 15,000 men worked and with whom hundreds of Canadians interacted, we’d collected a vast quantity of photographs from a variety of sources. We brought selected images and articles with us to each interview, and gained a greater understanding of the day-to-day experience and the magnitude of the soldiers’ achievement. We find that bringing the archival material helps warm up the relationship particularly if we’ve never met the subject in person before. Often days, weeks or months later, subjects contact us to share additional archival material they’ve had in personal archives because they know we are really interested.
We also know that sometimes subjects get dates, names, places and even their own stories wrong in interview settings. Sometimes we are asking people to recall the specifics of a day over 50 years ago. (I don’t know about you, but I have trouble remembering specific days two weeks ago.) There is nothing more frustrating than having to re-edit a documentary-in-progress to take out some wonderfully told story because the information is not factually correct. Being prepared and knowing the material well doesn’t mean that we only ask questions to which we know the answers already, we of course want to hear stories that no one else has heard before. That’s another benefit of bringing the archival materials to the interview; we find that our photocopies of their past prompt fresh stories, often allowing us to present never-heard-before material to the screen.
You can read more about our interview with Mr. Gossett on our Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project site.