Urban Roots

Editor

Prod: Leila Conners & Mathew Schmid
Dir: Mark MacInnis
Tree Media Group

Official Selection Whole Foods "Do Something Reel" Festival 2011
Inspiring Lives Award, San Francisco Green Film Festival 2012

About the Process: Detroit means different things to different people.  Older people remember a vibrant city full of economic prosperity and younger people think of it as a place of poverty.  It was important to get our audience on the same page, quickly.  I created an old-timey fake newsreel with archival footage that emphasized African American middle class prosperity and then contrasted that with a title sequence of modern imagery and present day voices to drive home how much it had collapsed.

This scene initially was the first farm of the field. I moved it to the middle as the story of urban farming built in complexity from an individual effort to an interconnected collective solution.