PRoduction Blog
Weekly Beesearch: France’s Neonicotinoid Ban
In the summer of 2018, France made the revolutionary step to ban all Neonicotinoids. This coming on the heels of a recent EU decision to ban 3 neonicotinoids, clothianidin, imidacloprid, and thiamethoxam, for outdoor use. France takes this a step further by also...
Week 3: Structure and Interviews
Structure is everything in a documentary. In this week’s meeting, the production team learned the importance of documentary structure and how to conduct an interview. Like with any story, documentaries have a simple structure. There is a beginning, a middle, and an...
Weekly Beesearch: What is Colony Collapse Disorder?
Every once in a while, stories pop up in the news cycle about honey bees dying or disappearing mysteriously. Often, this is attributed to something called Colony Collapse Disorder. We have no idea what causes it yet, or how to prevent it, but here’s what we do know. ...
Week 2: Research and Contacts
The backbone of every documentary is the quality of its research, as every aspect of the subject must be professionals without prior research into their fields. This also means that we can hold high-level conversations and understand what is being said to us, leading...
Bee Aware: Meet the Colony
Our colony is a BUZZ with excitement because today was the first official, face to face meeting with the entire crew! So, the focus for this documentary will be about Urban Beekeeping and raising awareness around the critical role this little creature has in our...
Weekly Beesearch: Honey Harvest
Last night we received word about the status of our trip to France. Governor Cuomo ordered that all NY state schools cancel their spring break trips, and ordered all study-abroad students to come home. We fall under this category, and our flight was canceled. However,...
Production Week 6: Coronavirus & A Beekeeper Speaks
We have all been closely monitoring the coronavirus at home, but for us, more importantly, the effects of global travel to France. What affects the world around us also affects our classroom. As of today, March the 3rd, we are clear to go to France, based on the CDC...
Weekly Beesearch: Almonds are Killing the Bees
A note about almonds: 80%+ of all almonds consumed worldwide are produced in the state of California. Almonds are also becoming an increasingly large staple of the world wide diet, and production is going through the roof. As a result, California is going through an...
Production Week 5: Locations, Equipment, and Media Management
Another week down in pre-production and we still have so many things to do before our trip. We are still reaching out to contacts and finalizing our film schedule. We are still doing research on people and locations that we are going to visit. First, we discussed Laon...
Weekly Beesearch: Food Fight! Bees and Farmers Unite
Honey bees are the only domesticated pollinator species in the world and are very important to our diet. They are responsible for approximately 1/3 of all food production while also being the primary pollinator for 80% of flowering crops. Also, fields pollinated by...
Learning the Equipment
Yesterday marks the first full month of documentary work, excluding individual research done over winter break, and it has been a wild ride, jam-packed with learning! This week we focused on going over the equipment we would be taking to Paris and Laon, how to film...
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