Dead in the Water Lizzie

This week we've done mostly contacting and reigning in all of the great contacts we made at the event in Durham. We were fortunate enough to schedule Elsie Herring's interview for November 15th, which is the soonest day she had available. She is definitely a busy activist in this fight, so I feel excited and honored to be in touch with her. We've also been in touch with my old co-workers at Cape Fear River Watch to get a water sampling trip on the books. Kemp Burdette also reached out to me to schedule a flight to get CAFO footage from the air. Both of these are tentatively scheduled for this coming weekend and next week. During off time preparing for these shoots and interviews, we're working on the marketing and distribution assignment. Jocabed has also been working in Photoshop to design a potential poster/postcard image, which is exciting for me to watch the process unfold because I don't know anything about Photoshop. Again, my goal is to film all of ou...

In the past week our momentum has slowed a bit, but we were able to make progress by going to an awesome event in Durham on Thursday (10/19). We went to a panel discussion sponsored by Farm Sanctuary and Indy Week all about exposing factory farming in NC, but more importantly, discussing solutions to the problem. The panel included Elsie Herring, a Duplin County resident who we have been trying to get in touch with since the beginning of the semester. She is a community organizer and has been fighting this issue for decades. She was so friendly and welcoming to us and gave us her contact information to come to her home in Duplin. The panel also included Rick Dove, a senior advisor for the Waterkeeper Alliance and former Neuse Riverkeeper. He spoke about how he watched the health of the Neuse River completely deteriorate before his eyes back when hog production first came to NC in the 1990s. Also, he was one of the first people to think to look at these operations from the air, and ...

Right now with Dead in the Water, we're in a bit of a holding pattern. We are all working on separate tasks so that we can get more interviews and b-roll shoots on the schedule by the end of the week. Currently, we haven't been able to get in touch with two of the primary Duplin County residents we'd like to interview. We've reached out to them via Facebook message and we've asked around to see if anyone in the Cape Fear River Watch community has any other methods of contact for them. No luck so far. However, there is a panel event in Durham on Thursday (10/19) where one of the residents we'd like to interview will be on the panel. Paige and I are working out the travel details so that we can make it to the event and network, film, and hopefully schedule an interview with Elsie Herring. We also contacted NC Farm Families this weekend to inquire about an interview. Fingers crossed they don't turn us down. Along with that, Jocabed and Hannah are helping ...

Thus far with Dead in the Water, the biggest lesson I've been learning is to let go and trust my team to do their jobs. Delegating has always been difficult for me. It doesn't matter what the project is—I like to be in control and know what the outcome will be for even the smallest task. When working on Concentration during FST 302, I felt like I couldn't really delegate at all, not because of the abilities of my crew members, but just because I had never directed a film before. This led to a very difficult production as well as me feeling burnt out, stressed, tired, and tightly wound all semester long. I work on campus at Building a Better Wilmington Campaign, making two-minute documentaries spotlighting local nonprofits, their missions, and their needs. In this, I do everything—direct, shoot, edit, schedule, run interviews, etc. So going from being a one-woman show to having three other people helping me is a strange adjustment. However, my team on Dead in the Water...

This past week with Dead in the Water has been a busy one. On Wednesday, we were able to go out to rural North Carolina with Patrick Connell, an employee with Cape Fear River Watch. I worked with him through my past internship with CFRW, and he has been a friend to the film ever since we started production on Concentration. With CFRW, he wears many hats, but part of his job is to go out to rural NC counties and survey CAFOs for any spray violations or litter pile violations. So he had lots of ideas for places to take us to find dead boxes and affected streams. Paige and I went out with him on Wednesday and while getting some farm b-roll, we were stopped by a farmer, which surprisingly hadn't happened to us yet even while filming Concentration. The farmer drove up to Patrick's truck and asked what we were taking pictures of. Patrick told him it was a research project, which is his usual response when people stop and ask him questions. The farmer then asked us to move on and ...