A few months ago I helped some students at Indiana University who were working on a short documentary titled “From New Orleans to the Midwest.” They got in touch with me through my video mentor and teacher Ron Osgood and asked if I could shoot some footage of New Orleans. So I shot some scenes of the things they needed: Superdome repairs, vacant houses around Mid-City, newspaper headlines about crime.
Their subject was New Orleanians who’d evacuated to Bloomington, Indiana. Since most of the people they interviewed in Bloomington seem to be staying there for the foreseeable future, they also asked me to shoot an interview to provide a little balance. After all, we evacuated to Bloomington but have returned to New Orleans.
So I shot an interview with Xy in our kitchen, and for good measure I shot an interview with myself as well. That was kind of funny. To make it fit with the style of the documentary, I had to pretend I was talking to someone just to the right of the camera, even though I was in the room alone.
This documentary also uses footage from ROX #93.
With gracious permission of the producers, I’ve uploaded the video as a QuickTime Movie [29MB] and as a higher-quality MPEG 4 Movie [54MB]. I’m pretty sure you’ll need QuickTime 7 (which is free) to view either one. It’s about 14 minutes long.
Hats off to Valerie Lisa Bartelt and Sang-Jin Kim for a job well done.
Bart,
Thanks for helping Valerie and Sang-Jin. They did a nice job telling an important story and it would not have been as good without your footage and cooperation.
Well done to Valerie and Sang -Jin for this piece. As someone who lives in Germany and was not in the States during Katrina, it highlighted for me the after effects that this terrible event had on the lives of regular people.
Damon