I Want to Know Why (3 min. 2016) Words by Rob Steinman. Aerial photography by Sean Daniels. Produced and edited by Lester Alfonso, developed through CNFW.
Day 28 of 360 videos from my archive. Today’s video is from the first CNFW (Creative Nonfiction Filmmaking Workshop) we ran. Participant Rob Steinman, a retired school teacher, wrote this piece based on a prompt I provided in class.
I created the workshop in response to an invitation from Kate Story to participate in The Bernie Martin Festival: A Certain Place in Peterborough 2016. We invited seniors in the community who had an interest but had no previous filmmaking experience to create a short film using only personal stories, photographs, and found footage.
We met once a week to screen a film and the participants were sent away with homework assignments. At the end of six weeks, I gathered everything that we had developed during our sharing circles and slammed together the sounds and images based on our plans.
Originally, Rob’s idea was to juxtapose his words with memes from the internet. The idea of using the drone footage was an inspired way of re-purposing footage from a previous project. The added line “I want to know what wisdom the ancient trees have to offer us” — although it doesn’t follow the convention of starting with “I want to know why…” — works because it’s at the end. It pulls everything together with the aerial footage and Kevin McLeod’s performance of Bach’s Prelude in C (BMV 846).
This is one of many short pieces created for the workshop and was previously included in the compilation film A Certain Place. If you’d like to sign up for the next class. Please send me an email.
I’ll be uploading the rest of the shorts very soon. — LA
P.S. If you’re liking these daily posts, perhaps you can consider becoming a monthly donor for a year or making a one-time contribution. It would seriously help a lot. Your money goes directly into supporting an artist committed to continually become the best version of himself. Thank you so much! Much love, LA