Meet Your Farmer, our series of films on 8 Maine farmers, airs again tonight on Maine Public Broadcasting at 10:00pm.
If you haven’t had a chance to see them yet, tune in! More information is available at MPBN’s website.
Archive for the ‘Client News’ Category
Meet Your Farmer re-broadcast!
Good news! The folks at MPBN just let us know that Meet Your Farmer—our series of documentary shorts about Maine farmers—will be re-airing on Thursday, September 29th at 10pm. Mark your calendars!
Or, better yet, like us on Facebook, and we’ll remind you when the time comes!
A new economic initiative from the Island Institute
The Island Institute announced a brand new initiative today, the Island Coastal Innovation Fund. It’s a great concept—a fund that will provide loans and equity investment to businesses in island and coastal communities, as well as permit-banking for the Maine groundfish industry. We were happy to make a little video for them:
Produced by Cecily Pingree & Jason Mann. Edited by Josh Povec. Original music by Joe Nelson.
Check out the Island Institute’s website for more information about ICIF.
And be sure to check out and support all three great businesses in the video: Black Dinah Chocolatiers in Isle Au Haut, Penobscot Island Air in Owl’s Head, and Calendar Islands Maine Lobster from Chebeague.
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.
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- Lindsay Mann, Joe Nelson and Cecily Pingree shooting on the beach with students from King Middle School
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- King Middle School students search for invasive crab species
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- 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.
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.
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!
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.