Today I pledged $5 to support the Kickstarter campaign of the documentary, "A Defiant Dude." The story seems simple enough: The defiant dude is a guy from Vermont who makes T-shirts that say "Eat More Kale." The dude was told to cease and desist by Chick-fil-A, which claims he was infringing on their "Eat Mor Chikin" campaign. The dude decided to resist instead. Here's the trailer:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1674889308/a-defiant-dude?ref=live

Interested in the struggle over copyright laws and the freedom to use and build on ideas? Here's another interesting film to check out:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/88782/rip-a-remix-manifesto

WHY FIVE DOLLARS?
One of the most interesting things that happened during a recent Kickstarter fundraising campaign for my own film, SOURLANDS, is that someone pledged $1. I remember opening up my email and thinking “Why did someone just give me a dollar?”

I Googled around and soon discovered that the $1 came from a man who is giving $1 every single day of 2012 to a different Kickstarter project and, just as importantly, helping promote each of these projects on his website.

This has inspired me to do the same. Once a week for at least the next year, I’m going to pledge at least $5 to a documentary film project on Kickstarter that looks interesting. I’ll also help promote each of these projects on the Sourlands blog (http://www.sourlands.com/blog.html) and the Sourlands Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/Sourlands). I hope you'll steal this idea, just as I did!

Today I pledged $25 to the Kickstarter campaign for the upcoming documentary film BIG FAT MOUNTAIN:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bigfatmountain/big-fat-mountain

This film is about a woman named Kara Richardson Whitely, of Summit, New Jersey, who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro despite struggling with the challenge of weighing 300 pounds.  Kara was a colleague of mine at my first job out of college: working as a reporter at the Courier News in Bridgewater. Good luck Kara!

THE IDEA:

One of the interesting things that happened during a Kickstarter fundraising campaign for my own film, SOURLANDS, is that someone pledged $1. I remember opening up my email and thinking “Why did someone just give me a dollar?”

I Googled around and soon discovered that the $1 came from a man who is giving $1 every single day of 2012 to a different Kickstarter project and, just as importantly, helping promote each of these projects on his website.

This has inspired me to do the same. Once a week for at least the next year, I’m going to pledge at least $5 to a documentary film project on Kickstarter that looks interesting. I’ll also help promote each of these projects on the Sourlands blog (http://www.sourlands.com/blog.html) and the Sourlands Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/Sourlands). I hope you'll stead this idea!

Today on Kickstarter, I pledged $10 to support the documentary film Barzan, about an Iraqi immigrant to the United States who was deported after getting linked to an Al-Qaeda operative. There’s some controversy about his guilt or innocence. What intrigues me about this film (at least based on the trailer) is that it appears to be a serious work of investigative journalism, with no presumption of guilt or innocence on the part of the filmmakers.  Here’s the link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cassidyd/barzan-the-movie

I recently watched If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, which is now up for an Academy Award for best documentary. It dealt with some of the same complex issues, in this case involving domestic terrorism. I thought the filmmakers did a great job with the balancing act these types of stories often require. Recommended.

What Am I Up To: Through Kickstarter, I’m pledging at least $5 each week to a different documentary film project for an entire year. Kickstarter really works – it made possible my latest film, SOURLANDS. Through these blog posts and small donations, I hope to help promote some other worthy documentary film projects.

We made it! I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the 89 people on Kickstarter who helped fund the post-production of SOURLANDS, the 103 people who helped fund the production phase earlier in the year, and many others who have contributed to the project in countless ways. It feels wonderful this afternoon to know that I can eat, sleep and drink SOURLANDS for the next several months and not have to worry about fundraising.

One of the most interesting things that happened during this fundraising campaign is that someone pledged $1. I remember opening up my email and thinking “Why did someone just give me a dollar?”

I Googled around and soon discovered that the $1 came from a man who is giving $1 every single day of 2012 to a different Kickstarter project and, just as importantly, helping promote each of these projects on his website.

This has inspired me to do the same. Once a week for at least the next year, I’m going to pledge $5 to a documentary film project on Kickstarter that looks interesting. I’ll also help promote each of these projects on the Sourlands blog (http://www.sourlands.com/blog.html) and the Sourlands Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/Sourlands)

For my first donations, I cruised Kickstarter last night and chose two projects that both look compelling. The first is a film titled “The End of a Marvelous Era.” A group of San Francisco State University film school graduates plan to travel across the country and document what’s left of the Big Band music scene in this country. I especially liked that the mom of one of the filmmakers left a really nice message for him on the comments page:

“I'm stirred by your talent and inspired by your commitment. We simply MUST make this project happen! I love you, Son. Mom”

Here’s the link to the “End of a Marvelous Era Kickstarter” campaign: http://kck.st/AvNMFA

The second film I donated to is titled “Of Two Minds.” It documents the highs and lows of people living with bipolar disorder – as over 5 million Americans do. The trailer is intense but very well done.

Here’s the link to the “Of Two Minds” Kickstarter campaign:
http://kck.st/x0EXZx

And finally…

GASLAND director Josh Fox was arrested yesterday while attempting to film a House Science subcommittee hearing on the EPA’s investigation into groundwater contamination in Pavillion, Wyo., potentially caused by hydraulic fracturing:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72326.html

According to the article, Josh had gone through the proper channels to try to get official credentials to be there to film... and was denied. Also, there were no other broadcast journalists in the room.

I like this quote in the article from Josh:

“They came to us and said, ‘You’re in violation of House rules.’ I told them, ‘You’re in violation of the rules of the United States of America, which is the Constitution.”

It's the final 24 hours of the Sourlands Kickstarter campaign. Here's the latest trailer:

http://kck.st/ulvTrm

And here are all the other video clips I've posted over the past 11 months:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e55-e0JKqlw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4FRONjQzz0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuq3eeUXKHk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bmDLa_jm3s&feature=related

For about 11 months now – ever since I started working on SOURLANDS – I’ve been brainstorming the DVD cover. A DVD cover is important. Despite good advice, many people do judge books and movies by their covers.

Pasted below is the DVD cover I’ve settled on for SOURLANDS. The next image is another concept featuring an ovenbird, a design I also like, but which I ultimately decided against.

If you’re interested in the inner workings of a graphic designer’s mind, read on:

DVD cover #1 is inspired by two of the most famous photos ever taken, Earthrise and The Blue Marble.

The Earthrise photo was taken on December 24, 1968, by astronaut William Anders. This was during the Apollo 8 mission, the first manned voyage to orbit the Moon.

According to a recounting by Bill McKibben in the book Eaarth, these were the emotions of the astronauts onboard:

Commander Frank Borman said later it was “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me. It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was simply black or white. But not the earth.” The third member of the crew, Jim Lovell, put it more simply: the earth, he said, suddenly appeared as a “grand oasis.”

The Blue Marble was taken by astronauts of the Apollo 17 mission on December 7, 1972. According to the encyclopedia, “Apollo 17 was the last manned lunar mission. No humans since have been at a range where taking a whole-Earth photograph, such as The Blue Marble, would be possible.”

The Sourlands are also a beautiful oasis, and it’s this subtle connection I want to encourage with the DVD cover. Plus:

-The stories in the documentary are simultaneously local and global in scope.

-I think the aerial image of the Sourland’s forest is striking. Many people I met during the course of making the documentary, even people who had lived in Central New Jersey for years, didn’t know what the Sourlands were. Take a look at the DVD cover… those are the Sourlands.

-Over the next few years, I’m going to be looking at this DVD cover a lot. So a good check is asking myself the question, “Am I going to get tired of this DVD cover?” I don’t think I will. It’s simple and classic.

Okay, so now for what I see as the one drawback of this design.

The feedback I’ve received from designer friends is that it’s a little dark overall, and rather serious. And it is, there’s no two ways around that. But I can live with a little dark and rather serious. If people don’t buy the documentary because they’re not in the mood to watch something serious, I can live with that. Sourlands is entertaining and occasionally funny, but at its heart it’s a serious film.

Now some thoughts on the first runner-up, the DVD cover featuring an ovenbird. There are elements of this concept I really like, and this is the image I’ve been using on the Sourlands website for most of the past year. But in the end I decided against it.

Ovenbirds are migratory songbirds that are, by many accounts, the signature bird of the Sourlands forest. Many ovenbirds winter in Central America and spend their summers in the Northeast. They can be elusive and hard to see, but their populations are doing well in the Sourlands region.

In general, migratory songbirds are a wonderful symbol of the Sourlands. Migratory songbird populations worldwide are threatened by habitat destruction, invasive species and climate change, which are all issues I explore in the documentary. Overall, birds are a great indicator of the health of an ecosystem. And what I really like about songbirds is that they sing. Their presence makes the forest a more beautiful place. Henry David Thoreau once wrote of the woodthrush’s song:

“Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him.”

The ovenbird DVD cover is colorful and intriguing and it’s also one I don’t think I’d get tired of looking at.

The drawback I see to this concept is that there’s nothing in the image that would make a passerby suspect that the SOURLANDS documentary might have more to it than birds and trees. The documentary is also about sustainable agriculture and energy, and this DVD cover doesn’t support that idea. To me, this feels like a very specific design, a smaller idea, while the Green Marble design feels like a bigger idea.

In the end, I feel most strongly about putting the image of the Sourlands region on the DVD cover. It shows people what home looks like when you back up a bit.

Although there can be only one DVD cover, the nice thing is that there will be an opportunity to use a number of images in promoting the film. So the ovenbird image will still have an important role to play, just not the starring role.

Thanks for reading. And just a friendly reminder that we’re still in fundraising mode: The last day to reach our fundraising goal on Kickstarter in February 2. Thank you for continuing to help spread the link:

http://kck.st/ulvTrm

We’re 45% of the way to our goal with 16 days left. So SOURLANDS needs to raise about $5,000 in a short timeframe. At this point we’re likely going to need to find some bigger organizations to sign on for some of the bigger sponsorship rewards. If you haven’t seen it, the biggest reward we’re offering costs $2,000 and includes DVDs, a public screening/educational license, recognition at the top of the film credits, and, here’s where I think there’s some great value: 10 hours of video or editing work, by me, on a project of your choice.  I know there are organizations out there paying for video production work anyway, so if you know any, please ask them to consider this reward (Limited to projects in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania.)

All best,
Jared Flesher
director, SOURLANDS

I just spent some time compiling SOURLANDS press coverage over the past year. The film's not out yet, and we've been in 4 New Jersey newspapers, on TV, and I also did an interview with Filmmaker Magazine. Here are all the links:

http://www.sourlands.com/press-coverage.html

Here's some more new footage from SOURLANDS:

http://kck.st/ulvTrm

The characters featured in this new trailer come from the third part of the documentary, which focuses on clean energy (in particular energy efficiency, which is the cleanest energy of all.)

I picked up a book at the library recently, titled "Seeing Is Believing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography" by Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. I haven't finished yet, but so far I'd say it's an instant classic.

When is a photograph "real" and when is it "staged." When is a documentary "real" and when is it "staged." Errol Morris tackles this question both as a philosopher and as a boots-on-the-ground investigative journalist.

The book is very relevant to my editing of SOURLANDS, because editing is by its very definition the editing of reality. What scenes will stay and what scenes will go? What parts of reality will I choose to include in the film, and how will I frame them?

Editing on SOURLANDS continues. I'm still not sure if I'll make my first film festival deadline of January 6, but I'm certainly going to try. Being one's own editor is a challenge in that it requires, as Stephen King would say, "killing your babies." It's a challenge for anyone to take an objective look at one's own work. But fortunately, I have some very honest first watchers to give me the straight dope on what's working and what's not. After shooting the documentary and putting together the first draft, the work is now becoming much more social. I'm starting to show bits and pieces, and then the whole rough cut, to others, and receiving feedback. I think the early take on the first cut is that I have three strong stories, one about forest ecology, one about sustainable agriculture, and one about renewable energy. What the rough cut needs is stronger connections to be tied between all three stories. I think I can do it, and that's precisely what I'm working on now.

Over the past two weeks, I have been at my editing computer for many hours, continuing to make tweaks to the SOURLANDS rough cut – which is slowly but surely looking a little less rough. A limiting factor to how many hours I can put into a day of editing seems to be eye strain. After a dozen hours, it’s  usually time to drink a beer.

The SOURLANDS Kickstarter campaign is on track, but I’ll need to continue to work hard on outreach to reach my goal of $9,500 by February 2. Thank you to everyone who has made a donation to support the film.  Please help to spread the link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1480255348/sourlands-stories-from-the-fight-for-sustainabilit?ref=card

I was just interviewed about SOURLANDS by a writer for the website of Filmmaker Magazine. It’s a fairly technical interview about the advantages and disadvantages of using a DSLR camera for filmmaking, and the nuts and bolts of working as a one-man crew. Here are links to the two-part interview:

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/12/jared-flesher-on-doc-filmmaking-with-a-dslr-part-i/

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/news/2011/12/jared-flesher-on-doc-filmmaking-with-a-dslr-part-ii/

Happy Holidays everybody. Now, back to work!