Farm B-roll and Sandra Gomez Interview

Saturday September 16th The Dead in the Water crew drove out to rural North Carolina in search of CAFO b-roll.  To avoid legal entanglement via trespassing, we shoot mostly from public roads, which, thanks to our producer Jocabed, we have permit for.  Usually we start our day planning a route using google maps.  CAFOs are easy to spot from the air, if the giant pig and chicken houses don't give it away, the lakes of feces that accompany those houses make it undeniably a CAFO.  During this shoot we primarily used the A7Sii on a shoulder mount for quick run & gun style shots.  We were very fortunate to get footage of both hog and poultry CAFOs, where you can actually see the animals crammed in the houses.

This past weekend, Sunday September 24th, the crew drove out to Rose Hill, NC to shoot an interview with Sandra Gomez, the sole breadwinner for a family of 4 who makes her living working on an industrial hog farm.  Because of this, she did not want her face on camera.  We chose to back light her to conceal her identity.  Before we drove out to Rose Hill, we tested the light setup in the department black box.  Thinking forward, we also brought a back-up background in case we weren't satisfied with the backgrounds available.  We are lucky we brought it, because we ended up using the background we brought in.   The interview went well, the space was small but we made it work. I couldn't have asked for a better team.

(Practice lighting Lizzie in the Black Box)