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 My first experience with ethnographic film happened spontaneously. I was at the Dixon Cattle Auction, where my Ethnography class had been assigned the task of building an understanding for how cattle move from birth to slaughter (the system is surprisingly complex, and involves breeders, or 'producers', 'backgrounders', feed lots, slaughter houses, and several auctions along the way).

During my exploration I met a retired producer who frequents the auction out of general interest. While we were speaking I turned on my Canon Elph's low-grade video recording feature and was able to capture some of his story.

When I got home, I pulled out iMovie and (over the course of an evening) put together this 5-minute piece. When I was finished I actually teared up. In spite of the low technical quality, the ostensibly boring subject matter, and the utter lack of a narrative, there is something very powerful about capturing and presenting the 'essense' of a person or place on film that I profoundly enjoy.


Click here or on the picture to watch this film.



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 A few years ago I had the opportunity to go to the Bahamas with my wife and some friends. I brought my camera and a waterproof housing I had bought on eBay and experimented while snorkeling in the reefs.

The camera was the same one I described above, with a very low-quality movie mode. I shot some video footage anyway and experimented with color correction and sync-editing to music when I got back on the mainland. This 3-minute short is one of the resultant pieces.


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 While on that same trip to the Bahamas I also experimented with time-lapse video, using a digital SLR with a repeating one-second shutter timer. Each hour I shot 3600 stills, which were combined like stop-motion animation at 30fps to produce one minute of video.

I originally shot the footage with the hopes of producing some Ron Fricke-like sequences of natural beauty at high speed. An unexpected bonus was the traffic patterns of sailboats and other watercraft that, on a normal scale, go unnoticed. There are four 1-minute sequences in this clip -- the four best from my experiments.


Click here or on the picture to watch this film.