Focusing on King Middle School

Last week, we shot a short piece for Arts Engine and Teaching Channel about the awesome teachers at King Middle School in Portland, Maine. The school is amazingly diverse (students speak 29 different languages!) and is among the best schools in the state of Maine. We saw middle school classes doing field work on the beach in Biddeford Pool with marine scientists, producing their own plays at Portland Stage Company, and presenting research projects that analyzed a topic of interest and also explored ways in which statistical data can be (and frequently is) manipulated in the media. These are some smart kids.

Best of all, we got to work with two of our favorite collaborators, Joe Nelson of the The Toughcats and Lindsay Mann of Beechwood Film.

: Lindsay Mann, Joe Nelson and Cecily Pingree shooting on the beach with students from King Middle School

: King Middle School students search for invasive crab species

: Students working on their play, backstage at the Portland Stage Co.

Arts Engine, in addition to producing a wide array of independent media, is a fiscal sponsor of documentary films, including our upcoming documentary Betting The Farm.

Posted on: June 1st, 2011 by jason No Comments

Documentary interviews

An interesting site: The Documentary Interview. It’s always tough to make simple interviews visually interesting. Some great examples of doing it well.

The frog farmer interview from the film Manda Bala

Posted on: May 22nd, 2011 by jason No Comments

Our documentary subjects in the news

I’m a little late in posting this, but John Bliss and Stacy Brenner—proprietors of Broadturn Farm, friends, and documentary subjects from Meet Your Farmer—were profiled in the latest edition of Mainebiz:

The CSA makes up the bulk of their income, but another roughly 30% comes from other lines of business they’ve developed, including floral design services and a popular summer camp in which potential “budding entrepreneurs” man a farm stand, Bliss says. “I joke that the farm is an advanced lemonade stand,” he says. Broadturn also hosts eight to 10 weddings a year, with guests noshing on food supplied by the farm and enjoying flowers picked on the property. “They see the cow being milked while they drink their cocktails,” Brenner says.

John & Stacy, in addition to running their CSA and raising lovely children, have a blog! You should read it right now! Our good friend Jon Courtney, timber-framer extraordinaire, is helping renovate their iconic barn, which will become Flora*Bliss at Broadturn Farm: “a farm stand and floral design studio space, selling organic produce, cut flowers and general farm goodness.” Scarborough and southern Maine shoppers, take note!

Also, tune in to see John & Stacy in the broadcast premiere of Meet Your Farmer, Thursday May 19th at 10:00pm on MPBN. Also airing at 11:00am on Saturday, May 21, for those of us who have infant daughters with early bedtimes.

Posted on: May 17th, 2011 by jason No Comments

Meet Your Farmer Broadcast Premiere!

We’re excited to announce that Meet Your Farmer, our series of short films about Maine farmers, will premiere on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network on Thursday, May 19th at 10:00pm. It will air again on Saturday, May 21st at 11:00am. More information about the screening is at MPBN.net and MeetYourFarmer.org

Meet Your Farmer is a series of eight short profiles of farms in Maine. Produced for Maine Farmland Trust, an organization that works to preserve farm land in Maine for farming use, the films offer a glimpse at the many different types of farms in the state.

From the potato harvest in Aroostook county, to the innovations of a seventh-generation dairy farmer in Western Maine, the short films remind viewers that farming is more than just a historical feature of Maine; farming in Maine is alive and well.

Meet Your Farmer was directed and produced by Cecily Pingree & Jason Mann, with additional editing and cinematography by Lindsay Mann. Josh Povec edited one of the films and color corrected the whole show. Joe Nelson (of The Toughcats) created the music with Lindsay Mann and mixed the audio.

Posted on: May 9th, 2011 by jason 1 Comment

LEF Foundation supports Betting The Farm

We are extremely grateful and excited to be among the Spring 2011 grantees of the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund, which is supporting our feature documentary Betting The Farm.

From the full announcement:

Betting the Farm

This character-driven film follows three farm families in Maine as they launch a new milk company, in a desperate attempt to save their farms and their families’ way of life.

LEF has been a generous supporter of our documentary from the beginning, and their continued support if both a practical and psychological boost for our long summer of editing. Check out the other grantees, too. It looks like a great slate of documentaries.

Posted on: May 6th, 2011 by jason No Comments

MOO Milk & Pull-Start in the New York Times!

In February of this year, the New York Times profiled Aaron Bell and Carly DelSignore, two of the main characters in our feature documentary Betting The Farm. The story is a good general description of the struggles of Maine’s Own Organic Milk Co. (or ‘MOO Milk’) over the past year or so, as this small group of Maine dairy farmers attempts to create a new model for small-scale dairy farming.

Aaron and Carly are raising their family and making a living on Tide Mill Farm in Edmunds, Maine.

Their farm is a six-hour drive from most potential customers — so far that their longtime processor, HP Hood, gave up on them in 2009, convinced that no one would never make a profit hauling milk such a vast distance.

But the married couple, part of the eighth generation to farm on Mr. Bell’s family’s land, is determined to keep dairy a viable industry here in Washington County. They are of a small, farmer-run outfit called Maine’s Own Organic Milk — MOO Milk for short — which hopes to persuade New England foodies to pick up a carton of MOO’s organic, local, slow-pasteurized milk instead of reaching for familiar national brands like Horizon Organic or Organic Valley.

Cecily was commissioned by the Times to create a video to accompany the article. With the help of DP/editor/brother-in-chief Lindsay Mann, they put together a brief glimpse of the challenges the Bells—and any of the other MOO Milk families—are facing.

To see the Times video about MOO Milk click here. And for more information about our documentary about MOO Milk, please signup for our mailing list!

Posted on: April 25th, 2011 by jason No Comments

Avesta Housing in the news

Avesta Housing, part of the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition–which commissioned our recent video Along The Way Home–was the subject of a great article in the Portland Press Herald last Friday.

Eight affordable housing projects that will generate $55 million in spending and create more than 900 jobs are under way or set to begin by summer in southern Maine, a welcome burst of activity in an otherwise sluggish construction season.

Check it out!

Posted on: April 22nd, 2011 by jason No Comments

Cecily speaks at College of the Atlantic

Cecily Pingree will kick off College of the Atlantic’s Marine Policy discussion series with a talk on March 31st!

The series begins with filmmaker Cecily Pingree, who was raised on North Haven. Her talk is titled Filmmaking for Social Change. Pingree started her film career with Big Mouth Productions in New York. After returning to Maine, she formed her own production company, Pull-Start Pictures, focusing on producing creative non-fiction work. Pull-Start has made films ranging from the controversy surrounding media consolidation, to rural health in Africa, to fishing and farming issues in Maine.

Posted on: March 15th, 2011 by jason No Comments

Interview about ‘Meet Your Farmer’

Cecily and I were interviewed by NewEnglandFilm.com about our experience making Meet Your Farmer, our series of eight short films about Maine farmers.

Posted on: September 13th, 2010 by jason No Comments