Saturday, September 22, 2007

Bee Aware - my film at Camp Cinequest

Cinequest is a film promotion company, who organize the Cinequest film festival in San Jose every year. Camp Cinequest is a summer camp for blooming film students to learn more elaborate film techniques, about the camera and how to use it, and how to edit using Final Cut Pro. Camp Cinequest is held at San Jose University. it is a wonderful location because of the enormous campus and every kind of person you can imagine if you need a quick interview for your film. The people I worked with were film enthusiasts and that was a huge bonus. The mentors offered professional advice and the co-directors worked to the best of their ability. We had 2 teams, my team that worked on a documentary about honey bees and the other team that worked on a narrative (a narrative is a story rather than pure fact). My production team had a total of 4 people - myself, Calliope Scherrer, Peter Savoy and our mentor, Car Nazzal, who had excellent organization skills. Let me just talk about them individually. Peter was the comedian of the group and provided comic relief in a film about dying honey bees. he stars as a honey critic who is trying to sniff out the organic honey in the midst of non-organic honey ¡EEEW! terrible stuff. Calliope represents the average person commenting about the decline of honey bees. She asked questions that the audience might be wondering. If i may quote her "if it doesn't affect me then i don't care". imagine someone with a horsewhip and a British accent sitting in the directors chair and then you will have me! I was also the cameraman, editor-in-chief, boom mic operator ( a boom mic is a large mic attached on the end of a pole) and the narrator. Car was our mentor; she helped us decide on camera angles, provided music and helped with editing. By now you are probably wondering about what my film was about. Bees. To be more precise the huge decline of honey bees. Basically all the non-organic raised honey bees are dying. This doesn't just mean "no more honey". Oh no its much more important that that. It means no more pollinators.
And no more pollinators means no more food! The main reason causing the deaths is that the commercial bee keepers are transporting bees around the country for pollination. To save money the bee keepers feed the bees corn syrup. This compromises the immune system and they really feel the effects of the mites and diseases that were always there. Note that organic beekeepers haven't had any unnatural deaths at all. Thanks to my mum for compiling all the research. What's filmmaking without a little fame? My team got their 15 minutes of fame when our film was chosen to represent the best of Camp Cinequest! We had 2 public showings of our movie, one in San Pedro Square, the other in St. James' Park. The Willow Glen Resident thought it would be good to feature someone who lives in Willow Glen and participated in the camp. Guess where I live?
Here's the movie:

Download the Beaglemania movie here.
QuickTime 7, iTunes 6 or VLC 0.84 will play the file.
Or watch it on YouTube