The Food Desert

The Art of Documentary Filmmaking

For the past three weeks, I’ve been working on a documentary about the access to healthy

foods. We interviewed five different people who have access to healthy foods as a large part

of their life, whether personal or helping others in their access.

For the first week we learned about the technical aspect of the product, we watched various

different documentaries and learned about what made them good. We had to know what

angles and scenes would make good content. We learned the importance of what was not

in the picture as well as what not to show. Every time we took a picture or a short video, we

had to keep in mind the light sources, depth of field (how deep the focus goes in order to

highlight what we want), rule of thirds (to try to keep the main subject in one of the thirds of

the frame, rather than the middle), the composition (What is actually in the frame and why)

as well as many more things. After learning all of these tips, I think I will be able to take

much better pictures in the future.

After we had learned about the technical aspect, we moved on to our documentary. The

theme of the studio was accessibility, and I chose to be in the accessibility to healthy foods

group. We started off by emailing various different health food groups and waiting for a

response. We finally got our first interview with a person from Farmers to You, who works

with various different farmers from Vermont to bring farm fresh food to the cities to help

people eat healthier. Our next interview was a manager of the Cambridge Winter Farmers

Market who worked with SNAP Match to help people with lower incomes to be able to

purchase farm fresh produce while still letting the farmers get their full price worth. SNAP is

for lower-income people who do not have the money to buy fresh produce pay the full price

(it is very similar to food stamps). Our third interview was with a woman from the Greater

Boston Food Bank who works very similarly to SNAP Match in helping lower income people

get healthy food. Our last two interviews were with an administrator of Fresh Truck as well

as a customer. Fresh Truck is a food truck/mobile supermarket that drives around to

different neighborhoods in order to help people who are located in a food desert (a place

where there is nowhere nearby with affordable healthy food) to get healthy food at a pretty

low price. Fresh Truck also lets people with food stamps/SNAP Match to use the benefits

that come with them. The place that we went to was near a retirement home located in a

food desert, before Fresh Truck, they had to take a subway or a taxi to a supermarket

because they most likely cannot drive themselves. Fresh Truck allowed to just walk about a

block or so to the truck and buy all of the produce they want.

After taking all of these interviews It took my group and I about four days worth of editing

with Adobe Premiere Pro, making me thoroughly sick of the program for a long time. I

learned about many different peoples problems with accessing healthy foods and I wonder

how these companies and programs will progress as well how many people will they help.

Link to Movie