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Episode 269: The Visionary Life of Cecilia Brown, Making Pictures, and This American Life
193 Plays3 years ago
Cecilia Brown (@cecilbrownn on IG) is a filmmaker based out of Portland, Oregon.
She produced a beautiful piece for This American Life, so we talk about that and her life making pictures.
Social media: @CNFPod
Patreon: patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
And so for me, it was like the only way to know was to do it.
Taking Action for Fulfillment
00:00:04
Speaker
And of course, like I'm really glad I did because that was sort of my ticket out.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey, that's this week's guest for episode 269 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:24
Speaker
Now in its ninth year, it's the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Cecilia is a documentary film and audio storyteller.
Cecilia's Background
00:00:36
Speaker
In 2020, she graduated with a master's in multimedia journalism from the University of Oregon.
00:00:42
Speaker
She has freelance as a videographer, editor, and producer for documentary production companies that include Expedition Studios, Storyline Media, and Blue Chalk Media. She has worked with the producers of This American Life, Listener's Podcast, and The Portland Mercury, and has received multiple awards, including Best Oregon Filmmaker.
00:01:04
Speaker
And it's that little credit about this American life that made me want to reach out to her.
Sponsorship and Promotion
00:01:11
Speaker
But first, support for the Creative Nonfiction podcast is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's low resident CMFA in creative writing.
00:01:21
Speaker
Now in its 10th year, this affordable program posts a low student to faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. Recent CNF faculty include Random Billings Noble, Jeremy Jones, and CNF pot alum Sarah Einstein. There's also fiction and poetry tracks with recent faculty including Ashley Bryant Phillips and Jacinda Townsend as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple.
00:01:43
Speaker
So no matter your discipline, if you're looking to up your craft or learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. That's mfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
00:01:58
Speaker
and it's getting close. Promotional support for the podcast is also brought to you by Hippocamp 2021. It's back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Registration is still open. It's a conference for creative nonfiction writers and aficionados. Marion Winnick will be this year's keynote speaker. We've got debut CNF author panel featuring Lily Danziger, Greg Mania, Carol Smith, and Janine Millett. It's August 13th to 15th and if you use the promo code CNFPAW21,
00:02:28
Speaker
you get 50 bucks off your registration fee. You dig? Still recording on my second string microphone here in South Jersey on Eastern Standard Time. And I'm so crunched for a time this week that I can't offer up much by way of insights, parting shots, and the charismatic magnetism on mic that you've come to love from the greatest podcast in the world.
00:02:56
Speaker
I will put a prompt of some kind in the outro to this episode based on this interview. It's not homework, but if you're one of those people who loved homework, then you'll find your bliss.
Cecilia's Documentary Work
00:03:08
Speaker
Show notes and links to Cecilia's work, as well as ways to support the podcast are at BrendanMera.com.
00:03:17
Speaker
So Cecilia talks about her entree, if that's how you even pronounce it, into documentary film and doing dirty little secret jobs to fund the work she wants to do. And we get into the behind-the-scenes production of her piece for This American Life, this one about her grandmother who was quickly succumbing to dementia.
00:03:37
Speaker
You can follow Cecilia at CecileBrown with two N's on Instagram and see her short films at CeciliaBrownMedia.com. So with that, it's a one and a two and a rear.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, so I actually am reading this book right now that I normally, I'm kind of surprised that I'm reading it. I'm almost done with it. It's called The Empathy Diaries. And it's a memoir by Sherry Turkle, who used to be my total hero. And it's nothing against Sherry Turkle now. It's just that my work has changed a lot in the last few years. And I stopped reading her stuff, but she
00:04:32
Speaker
is an MIT professor. She's an academic and she studies social psychology and technology and kind of like how technology impacts our minds and the way we communicate and how it either like inhibits the way we communicate with people or understand ourselves or maybe makes it better. And so I used to read all of her books obsessively
00:04:59
Speaker
when I was studying psychology in undergrad and when I was working on my honors thesis and I stopped reading her when I kind of like started shifting away to other things and then I turned 30 a couple of weeks ago.
00:05:13
Speaker
And my mother gave me this book, and it's her memoir. And I was like, oh my god, mom, why would I want to read about Sherry Turkle's life? I only care about her research. And I am surprisingly really into this book. And I'm just realizing how much the two of us have in common, more so than I ever thought.
00:05:35
Speaker
And it's actually reminding me why I was interested in that work and why I should, and like, you know, that I still want to work on trying to bring that into my documentary work. That whole idea behind like technology and how it impacts how we communicate face to face.
Career Shifts and Motivations
00:05:53
Speaker
And you said your work has changed a lot in the last few years. So in what way has it changed? Like, where was it, you know, a few years ago? And, you know, what's the kind of path you're on at the moment?
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, so I, like I said, I studied psychology in undergrad. And I, while I was there, I did this thesis, it was like 120 page paper on, you know, how basically technology is making us more socially awkward. And
00:06:23
Speaker
It was around the time that people were starting to do things like break up with people over text message. And I was just alarmed by that. I remember that was one of the questions that I had in my survey for all my subjects. Like, have you broken up with someone over text message? Kind of like, how could you do this? Which of course now it's like everyone is doing that. It was sort of the beginning of social media.
00:06:45
Speaker
I was such a Luddite and I was just so negative about how technology was going to essentially ruin us as a society and inhibit our ability to connect with people because we would stop practicing.
00:07:00
Speaker
Um communicating face to face and then we would forget how to do it and so that was a lot of my research and then like I left college and In at the beginning of college. I thought I wanted to be a therapist I thought I wanted to be a therapist when I was like 15 and decided that that was my path and um Towards the end of college. I kind of became a little bit um disenchanted with the whole like psychology field and
00:07:30
Speaker
you know, just how much it's about over-diagnosis and over-medicating people. And I decided to pivot and try my hand at market research, which is something that like most people have never heard of, I think. It was what I jumped into when I came out of college because it was like this way for me to still talk to people and have like intimate conversations with people. But
00:07:56
Speaker
not have it be grounded in this sort of like scientific medical setting. And so I did market research work for like six years and a lot of that work, like me going into market research was kind of inspired by all of this research I did about like how we use technology and how it affects the way we make decisions,
00:08:19
Speaker
because my first job was in usability research. So I was studying how people use websites, studying how people interact with their phones and how they use apps, and then essentially taking the information I would gather from these interviews or focus groups and then giving that information to consumer companies who were curious how people use their products.
00:08:45
Speaker
So I was in a very different world before I entered documentary filmmaking and audio storytelling. That all came into my life pretty recently. So that's kind of what I mean when I say it was a real pivot. And it really feels like something from a relic of who I used to be, this book, or Sherry Turkle as a person.
00:09:10
Speaker
That's great. It's so important to kind of underscore that a lot of people might want to do, I don't know, XYZ, they might want to write a book or do some film, but they've got this day job that they feel like is in the way.
00:09:27
Speaker
but you found a way to do it in your off time as a way to see if it was you know test the waters to see if it was something you like and you made the time for it and you made like a really cute insightful movie about your mom which is really about yourself like you were saying and i think it's just real important that if it is important to you to experiment with this kind of stuff that you have to prioritize it and make the time for it and it's just it's uh it's encouraging to to hear your story behind that yeah yeah and i i think i'm
00:09:56
Speaker
you know, I'm proud of myself for making that work and for doing that experimenting. I had also been thinking about, I had been thinking about leaving market research for years. And so it took me a long time to get to that point where I actually had the motivation to like, to do this on my oft hours when I was exhausted. And, you know, to spend all this time on a project that maybe wouldn't go anywhere, and maybe no one would ever see. And then finally, you know, I just like
00:10:25
Speaker
and was like, I have to, I have to know, I just have to know if there's something else out there for me. And I'm so indecisive. And, you know, for so long, I had been trying to figure out what that other thing was. And so for me, it was like the only way to know was to do it.
00:10:43
Speaker
There's a reason I didn't go into this work for so long because my, well, first because my parents told me never to go into journalism. And this is why, because there's no money in it. My dad is a writer.
00:10:59
Speaker
My mom was a photographer until she quit her job to go into publishing. All of my parents' friends are writers, photojournalists. My whole upbringing, I was told not to do this work. And so I didn't for a long time, or what I consider a long time, like six years. And I'm actually kind of proud of myself that I was able to find a way to come into it
00:11:27
Speaker
What's sad is, here we have journalism in the free press is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Journalism's Challenges and Passion
00:11:35
Speaker
It's the Fourth Estate. It's this thing that is so valuable to our democracy that it's in the very First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.
00:11:44
Speaker
And yet it's kind of like a vanity project because it's not supported in a way that enough people can do it for a living and to hold the right people accountable and to tell the kind of stories you want to tell. You want to be able to do it for a living, but oftentimes it's starting to become more like being a short story writer.
00:12:04
Speaker
where it's just like, okay, here's this thing you can do for fun on the side if you have the chops and the skill, but it's not going to pay the bills. And that's really sad for something that is so integral to the fabric of this entire country and this democracy. I know. I know. I know. It's really sad. Like, I hate the idea that journalism
00:12:24
Speaker
is dying. I don't think it is. I've been told that. I mean, there's aspects of it that are dying. It's harder to find full-time work, which is why we're all freelancing and taking on these random gigs to pay the bills. But I'm an optimist, so I have to believe that there's a way to make this work for myself, I think.
00:12:50
Speaker
So what is it about documentary film that really lights a fire under you? When I was in high school, I became a documentary photographer. Actually, when I was eight years old, I became a documentary photographer. So I have always been a visual person. Like when I was eight, my godmother, who's a documentary photographer, put a
00:13:14
Speaker
really heavy Nikon film camera in my hands. And was, you know, just told me to go make pictures. That's what she says. Make picture, make picture. She doesn't like the word shoot. She thinks it's violent. And so make pictures. And I started photographing when I was eight. And it was this way for me to see the world differently. It was a lens that I could hide behind. It
00:13:41
Speaker
kind of enabled me to be in spaces that maybe I wouldn't otherwise feel comfortable in as a kid. You know, I was one of, I've always one of those people that like,
00:13:53
Speaker
awkwardly stares at people because I'm a I'm a people person and I'm an observer by nature and so I'll stare and people will kind of like my friends will be like stop staring you know but I can't I just can't help it and and so like the camera to me was this thing that I could hide behind and observe the world and
00:14:17
Speaker
from a comfortable distance where people weren't made uncomfortable by it. I've always loved documentary photography for that reason. Documentary film, for me, merged this interest in the visual landscape and composing the world into pictures and making sense of the world through the lens.
00:14:40
Speaker
visually and this sort of interest in psychology, which I've always had. And for me, that interest in psychology has always been grounded and also just an interest in people. And I'm really curious about people. And I like talking to people. And that's why doing interviews like this is so weird, because I'm always the person doing the interviewing and asking me questions.
00:15:05
Speaker
Like, I really prefer to be in that position where I'm hearing from someone else, I'm listening, I'm getting someone else to open up. I'm the worst interviewee. It's as much as I do this. And it's always a challenge for me to interview people who are really good interviewers because I know that they know the game. And it's like, you always want to make it in such a way where you feel like you're
00:15:30
Speaker
Valuing their time and and you want to play on that level So if I ever got a chance to interview like say and I've interviewed some great interviewers But if I interviewed someone like an hour glass, I'd be freaking out because it's like he's been interviewed a lot He's there's nobody better than him. So it's just like oh my god. How do you how do you do that? But I totally gross. Oh my gosh. I can't even oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah It's yeah, it's just these people who are just such great
00:15:58
Speaker
miners of information, great conversationalists and great askers of questions and it's super intimidating for sure.
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's really intimidating and it's a really fun challenge. Yeah. Like getting someone who you've never met to just be comfortable enough in your presence to open up to you. And like to me, that is what's so beautiful about documentary work and audio storytelling is like, that's so much what the work is about for me, is about like,
00:16:37
Speaker
getting people to tell me something that maybe they haven't shared with someone else. And I, that's sort of like the therapy aspect of it. I feel like I bring to all of my interviews is like, how do I make someone comfortable enough to really tell me what's on their mind and not just like give me a spiel? How do you get there? How do you get them there to crack that egg? Yeah, it's a puzzle. It's like, what questions can I ask to, you know, you're thinking as an interviewer and like, I'm sure you understand this, like,
00:17:07
Speaker
you're thinking down the line, especially, I mean, this is different, but especially when you have a story in mind, it's like, how do I get them from A to Z? Because I've got Z on my mind. And like,
00:17:21
Speaker
I've got to go through 26 steps to get there. So it's like there's a craft to it to be able to ask someone a question that gets them to say what you want. And then the beauty of it is that it never goes that way. And it always ends up, you always end up in some place that you didn't expect and someone says something you didn't expect. And then the beauty is like using your creativity to work with that.
00:17:44
Speaker
to try and make something amazing out of it. Like I guess going back to your question about the beauty of filmmaking to me is that it just merges these two loves that I have. So I get to talk to people and then instead of like market research, I actually get to share what they're saying in a really meaningful way. And then it isn't just based, I'm not just working with audio. There's this other creative element of like,
00:18:10
Speaker
telling a story visually where if you can tell a story without words, it's like, to me, unbelievably powerful if you can kind of like oscillate in one film doing both of those things where like maybe someone shares something overtly, maybe you're revealing something without hearing them actually say it themselves.
00:18:36
Speaker
And it's just incredible to be able to do that work, I think. Well, your Tuesday at the Track film is kind of like that, where you're not explicitly there on mic. There's very little dialogue of anything. It's a lot of very expressiveness, and it really captures the track. And I'm someone who writes a lot about horse racing, has written a book about, two books about horse racing.
Portland Meadows Film
00:19:02
Speaker
And one published, one not published, one was an MFA project that I still have my fingers crossed for because I think it's one of the better things I've ever done. That's neither here nor there. But the fact is I've covered a lot of horse racing. And so it was really cool to see the video, the movie you made about Portland Meadows.
00:19:24
Speaker
But the point being, that one's very expressive, it's very ambiance driven, and to your point, it's almost like a wordless film in a way, even though there is some. It's very evocative in the mood you created.
00:19:40
Speaker
That's funny that you picked up on that because it was actually for an assignment in my master's program. It was the first film I made in the master's program I was in. I was in this master's for multimedia journalism at the University of Oregon. And the assignment was to tell a story without words.
00:19:59
Speaker
So that was the story that I created with my friend Tim was to tell a story of like who were the people frequenting this place without using any words. And obviously I loved the assignment because it's a really good challenge.
00:20:21
Speaker
and gets you to think visually about storytelling in a way that's maybe not the most natural to someone who comes from a world where we're inundated with podcasts, news podcasts, and a lot of traditional documentary storytelling is
00:20:39
Speaker
really heavily relies on talking head interviews and stuff. So it's a really hard skill to develop to be able to do that, to tell a story without words. But I loved it.
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's there's fewer environments that are more nuanced and textured than than a racetrack. You've got the degenerates who are the gambling degenerates. And then there's the high class people. And then, you know, there's high, low, middle class. There's, of course, the the sheer beauty and the athleticism of the horses, not to mention the the jockeys who are pound for pound, some of the best athletes in the world. Oh, my God.
00:21:21
Speaker
And it's just, there's so many great sounds, the hooves and the dirt, the explosion of exhalation of the horses as they're turning for home and they're really sprinting. It's just like an air cannon. And it's something you can't experience unless you're on the fence. And it's so cool that you're able to just capture so much of that. It was really cool for me to watch as someone who just knows that world inside and out.
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I'm really sad, too, that that place is gone. It's no longer with us. That's right, yeah. Because it was clearly an establishment. Like, you can tell from the characters who were there. Like, the old couple, oh, my gosh. Like, the old couple, I think it was the man and his mother. He'd been taking her there for so long. They're the only people you hear speak, I think, in the whole film.
00:22:18
Speaker
And talk about expressive, like, oh my gosh, that old woman, her face. It was just like, she, you know, meeting people like that and being able to just like, they're the kind of people whose story you can share without hearing from them in a way. Like you really get a sense of who she is without even hearing her speak, which I loved.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah. And you really fill the frame with her face. And is it something like, are you far away and zooming in or are you almost in her lap when you've got the camera that close? I'm right there. And that is something else that I learned from my godmother, Stella Johnson, the woman who taught me how to photograph.
00:23:06
Speaker
You know, historically just will never use zoom lenses and her whole role was like, you never shoot vertically and you never, um, you never use a zoom. You always get as close to the people as you, as you need to get in order to make the frame work in order to make the composition you want, because using zoom lenses is cheating.
00:23:31
Speaker
And using Zoom, it can be a form of voyeurism, where you can stand far away from someone and capture them without them knowing. So if you really want to make a picture, you've got to get right up close to that person and photograph them in a way that what you're seeing in the frame later is actually what was being produced in the moment. You're not cheating, essentially.
00:23:58
Speaker
So, you know, of course I went into this journalism program and they've got tons of zoom lenses. And so I was like, you know, working, I obviously had like a 700, 70 to 200 millimeter lens, which is like a crazy long lens, to photograph, to film the horses, because like you can only get so close to horses.
00:24:20
Speaker
And so I kept switching back and forth my lenses so that when I was actually spending time with people, I could get really up close and personal with her. So I got really close. Nice. What are some films and filmmakers that inspire you that you try to model your work after?
Inspirations in Filmmaking
00:24:43
Speaker
So there's a bunch, I mean, like, I'm thinking right now about this film I saw this past week called Uncertain, which is an incredible documentary about, it's sort of a portrait of a town. And it was made by this couple, what are their names?
00:25:05
Speaker
Oh, Anna, Anna Sandelands and Ewan McNichol. I'm so bad with the names. When everyone's always like, who are your heroes? Who do you model your work after? I'm like, that movie, you know, in 2015? I have no idea who was made after. I don't know who edited it. But it's this couple that actually lives in the Pacific Northwest and they made this
00:25:29
Speaker
beautiful documentary about this town called Uncertain in Texas. And it's really just like a beautiful portrait of a couple of the people in this town. There isn't like this big news story or issue at the center of it. It's just like who lives here and what are their tiny little struggles that they go through on a daily basis. And each person has their own sort of like narrative arc
00:25:59
Speaker
But it's small, it's like this guy trying to, this one guy who's a hunter who's trying to kill this one wild hog that he's been tracking for years. And this other old man who's a fisherman, and this lake that he fishes in, there's an algae bloom problem, and so the fish are dying.
00:26:23
Speaker
And so there's all these like tiny little vignettes inside of this story that's just like beautifully shot. And it's really slow. There's no talking head interviews. It's very, it's the kind of filmmaking that I really love. Like true verite style filmmaking where you're just kind of like the filmmakers are just kind of a fly on the wall and you're just living life with, you know, with these people.
00:26:52
Speaker
So that's one. I really love Garrett Bradley. She is the director of the film Time that was nominated for an Oscar.
00:27:05
Speaker
this year. She's made a bunch of other shorts for the New York Times. And she, I think, I mean, I think Time is another documentary that I just fell in love with. She kind of uses old, she uses old home videos and blends them with footage that she's filming with this family who is waiting for
00:27:33
Speaker
someone in the family to get out of prison. And it's kind of a love story about this woman and her husband who's in prison as she waits for him to get out. And so it's like really creatively done and feels really different than, again, it's like, it's a verite documentary. I feel like you don't see as many verite documentaries these days as once upon a time, like a lot of the documentaries that are being made are very like,
00:28:02
Speaker
you know, the kind of stuff you see on Netflix, it's a lot of it is true crime. And like a lot of it is, you know, very talking head heavy. And so when you get these documentaries every once in a while, like uncertain or time or the Sensitives is another one that was a film about people who have chemical sensitivities and have to live this very isolated world. When you get those like
00:28:27
Speaker
true verite films, I think they're really special when they're done well, because they're really hard to make. And there's a craft to it that you just don't see as much anymore, I think. I would think the real challenge with that is getting the right capturing the audio and capturing the dialogue. Yeah. Yeah. So what is the challenge to do that when you're trying to do that kind of, like you say, verite filmmaking?
00:28:57
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I was just like, for example, I'm working on this audio story and I was just out this morning recording and I was thinking like, Oh my God, it is so easy by comparison to just be worrying about audio. When you're making film, when you're making documentary films, I mean, when you're, when you have the budget, usually you have like a team. So there's one person who's running sound, one person who's running camera.
00:29:23
Speaker
one person who's talking to the characters and sort of like producing and keeping track of what's what. But all of the work I've done has been by myself for the most part. I mean, there's some projects where I've had a second camera person who will help out some days, but like a lot of my projects have just been without budget and I'm just kind of making it work.
00:29:51
Speaker
I'll do a lot of it on my own. And it's like so hard to try and talk to someone, like make conversation with someone.
00:30:06
Speaker
while getting the shot, you know, having this like incredibly composed shot, and then also making sure that, you know, checking your audio levels, making sure they're not peaking, let alone if you have like two people who are both wearing mics and you're trying to make sure that the audio is going well for both, like, oh my gosh, it is, it is a remarkable day when everything goes right.
Freelancing vs. Teamwork
00:30:31
Speaker
It's like so rare. So I don't know. I mean, now that I'm moving in, like I'm moving out of, you know, I graduated from my master's degree right when the pandemic started. So I've been freelancing for the last, like I've just been freelancing for the last year and a half and starting to feel a little bit more what it's like to work with other people. And it's just incredible. Like I am a collaborator by nature and I'm really excited to
00:31:00
Speaker
have that opportunity to just make that you know you just make better work when you're working with other people like because you can just focus on a singular thing and while i think it's like a skill i can tout that you know i'm a one-man show and i wear a lot of hats um like you're gonna get a better
00:31:17
Speaker
piece of work if you just hire more people and just like that's hard in the documentary filmmaking world when you know it's really hard to get stuff funded and so you're often having to cut corners and just make it work.
00:31:32
Speaker
And speaking of audio, what really prompted me to reach out to you is the wonderful piece you had done on your grandmother for This American Life. So maybe you can just tell me how you arrived at that story, how you landed it with This American Life. And maybe just tell people who maybe haven't heard it what it was about. Yeah. I mean, should I not give anything? Maybe I shouldn't give away the ending for people who haven't heard it.
00:32:00
Speaker
We have spoilers. Sure. We can tease that out. We can say, all right, we're not going to spoil it and go listen to it. Yeah, it's a beautiful piece that you did. But maybe you can just tell a little bit about the backstory of it and how you came to land it with This American Life.
00:32:18
Speaker
So at the beginning of the pandemic, I had this phone call with my family where my dad was basically, my dad made this call to action to everyone in the family saying, you know, we need everyone to call grandma day as much as possible over the next few weeks. Cause of course at the beginning, no one knew how long this was gonna last. We thought it was a couple of weeks. And my grandma was in assisted living
00:32:46
Speaker
She was living in Colorado, and most of us were on the east or west coasts, so no one was really nearby. Not that it mattered during a pandemic, but she was alone because they shut down her assisted living.
00:33:01
Speaker
And she was completely isolated. She wasn't allowed to go outside. The only people she would see were staff. And then every once in a while, they would open up the door and let people walk in the hallways. So she was lucky if she could come in contact with people that way. She was totally alone. And so when you have dementia, which she had,
00:33:28
Speaker
Isolation is really bad. You need that constant stimulation to keep your mind intact, essentially. And so we were all really worried about her. And so my dad was like, we all need to be calling her as much as possible, getting her on the phone, talking so she doesn't feel lonely, so she's not isolated.
00:33:54
Speaker
And I recorded my phone calls with her. And I did that because there's a lot of reasons for why I did that. My grandmother, she's 87, and I wanted to have a piece of her. I thought, in a sense, maybe this could be an oral history project. I'd recorded stuff with my other grandmother before I have a box of,
00:34:23
Speaker
tape recordings that my great-grandfather recorded of himself. So I just wanted to have a piece of her. So I was recording these phone calls with her with her permission and we were talking about like every week or twice a week at the beginning and her dementia deteriorated really rapidly so
00:34:46
Speaker
it was like in the matter of a month that she started to drop like just go way downhill and we were all really surprised and it was pretty devastating and so
00:35:03
Speaker
I continued recording with her and essentially decide, I won't say what happened, but at the end of it had all of these phone calls, recordings that I was trying to figure out what to do with. I was having some conversations with
00:35:20
Speaker
friends and you know they suggested like maybe you should turn these into a story and you know I was grappling with a lot and I had a lot of questions kind of about like given that my grandma had dementia and that her dementia was deteriorating rapidly like there were a lot of questions around consent
00:35:46
Speaker
you know like was it right what was okay for me to do with these recordings so i took a i basically decided you know why not try so um a friend of mine had a connection of invisibilia and she connected me with yoe sha there and i pitched the story there
00:36:07
Speaker
they turned it down because they had done a similar sort of dementia story, I guess, like recently enough and suggested that I reach out to This American Life. And like at the time I was just like, what? I can't reach out to This American Life. Like I had nothing published, like no audio work published with the exception of this one podcast called Listeners Podcast, which I worked on last spring.
00:36:33
Speaker
which no one listens to ironically even though it's called listeners podcast like it's it's a podcast that the University of Oregon puts on and i just like had a lot of fun with it and was allowed to produce like four episodes for them and did that but apart from that like i had no not much of a professional audio journalism resume and so i was terrified but i started working on a pitch and
00:36:59
Speaker
Luckily, I knew someone who knew someone who was a producer there and they offered to connect me over email so I could send my pitch directly to someone on the team. So I did that and I got a response. And so there was some hesitation at first about whether they wanted to do it because it was a personal story and it was sort of
00:37:26
Speaker
You know, they don't really often work with contributors on personal stories because it's hard to determine what the story is going to end up sounding like, I guess, as opposed to a reported story. So there was a lot of hesitation. There was a couple of months of back and forth. And eventually they were like, you know what, we're just going to pay you to do it. So I started working with Lily Sullivan there. And oh, it was incredible. She was so amazing to work with.
00:37:54
Speaker
like the work that this particular story was you know it was like involved a lot of really sensitive material and there were a lot of like ethical challenges around consent and there were it was it was just like it was fresh you know there were a lot of like
00:38:13
Speaker
Complicated emotional feelings about the story for me and working with her was great. She was super respectful and You know, we really work together to choose all the tape we were going to use for the story And to write the story so it was a really collaborative process How did you record your phone calls Was it with an app or how do you how'd you go about that?
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah, that was with an app. Tape a call, is that what it is called? Yeah, tape a call. Okay, I think I've heard of that. Yeah, yeah. Highly recommend it. Yeah, tape a call. Tape a call pro, I think is what it's called. Nice. And so what was the process and given that you love collaboration so much, what was the collaborative experience like between you and Lily and maybe someone else? I imagine there wasn't probably another cook or two in the kitchen too.
00:39:07
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
Story Editing with TAL
00:39:08
Speaker
Oh, yeah. The whole I had no idea what went into this American life story. It is wild how many people they involve in the process. So the editor that we worked with was David custom bomb.
00:39:21
Speaker
He is Lilly's editor, so that's who I guess she works with on a lot of stories. And then Tobin Lowe was also helping edit the story. And so it was mostly Lilly and I kind of at the beginning, we both on our individually
00:39:37
Speaker
chose the tape that we liked the best so chose kind of the pieces of recordings that we liked the best and then came back and talked about like where that tape overlapped to try and whittle down the amount of tape we were going to use and then we sort of laid it out into a structure it really made sense for the story to be chronologically I think
00:39:59
Speaker
to both of us, so there wasn't a huge conversation there. And then Lily helped me out, and I guess they do this with all their contributors, is she kind of talked me through what should be written in between the tape. So it's not like she would write it, but she would be like, maybe write something like this, this, or this, and we would have a conversation about that. And then I would walk away and write it.
00:40:23
Speaker
Um, and then, you know, we went through a couple of drafts like that. And, and then what happens is you dive into these edit sessions where you get on the phone on a zoom call with, um, you know, I'd be Lily and David custom mom, and then they would bring in a couple of people from their team.
00:40:43
Speaker
to listen to a live reading. And so I would read live, and then Lily would play the tape as it would pop up in a real audio story. So you're trying to recreate the real audio story setting without actually having to edit it all together. So as a live reading,
00:41:04
Speaker
And then you would go through these critiques with all the people on the phone. And then you would walk away and make edits. And then you would come back. And sometimes it was like 24 hours later, we're doing another one. So it was like a kind of whirlwind of two weeks in the month before the story aired, where we were just like doing these edit sessions over and over again, rapid fire. And then towards the end, they bring an IRA.
00:41:30
Speaker
and he reviews every word of the script pretty much. So you spend a lot of time with him walking through it, talking through differences of opinion, talking through structural changes, and then eventually you decide it's a locked script.
00:41:51
Speaker
And I make some room in my closet and record the whole thing. And even that process, I'm on the phone with Lilly while I'm doing the recording, and she's saying things like, do that line again, but with flatter affect, or a little less dramatic on that one, or maybe start in a lower octave when you say when. Really specific voice coaching stuff.
00:42:20
Speaker
And then, yeah, and then, you know, a couple days later I'm hearing it on the radio.
00:42:25
Speaker
Wow, that's amazing. It's so cool to hear kind of an insider's take on the experience of what it takes to put together a show of that caliber. And it really is such a brilliant essay and story that you're able to, that you piece together. And it's so evocative and telling and sad and just deeply, deeply moving and emotive. And that's just a testament to your reporting and your skill.
00:42:53
Speaker
with you and everyone around you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it was a really difficult story to build just because it was personal. And I don't do a lot of personal storytelling, especially not in documentary film work. So that was really hard. You have to
00:43:16
Speaker
deal with a lot of vulnerability, putting yourself in a story. And this story in particular, like there were a lot of concerns too about like, okay, well, you know, I'm, I'm airing these conversations I had with my grandmother who has dementia. And, you know, there were a lot of concerns, one of which being like,
00:43:36
Speaker
You know, are people going to judge me for things that I say to my grandmother? Like, did I say the wrong thing? Because it's really hard talking to people who have dementia and there's no right way to talk to them. It's really, it's really difficult. Every day is different. And sometimes you just have no idea what to say because they are in a totally different world than you. So there's a lot of like.
00:44:00
Speaker
vulnerability in their recordings and, you know, this American life, like they pushed me to put a lot of vulnerability in my writing as well. And that was something that was new to me. So it was a really cool process. And also, like, just to be someone who's relatively new to audio journalism and getting to see what their process was like, you know, how the sort of like the step by step, how they build scripts in what order they pick tape and just like hearing from
00:44:29
Speaker
really skilled audio storytellers on these critiques about, you know, how they think about story. It was so cool to get to do that and then get to walk away and think about how I can kind of like incorporate that now into my own work. You know, even though I'm often working by myself. So it was just like I learned so much through the entire process.
00:44:54
Speaker
As a storyteller yourself, what was the biggest takeaway and the greatest lesson you learned from that process that you're going to then take to your projects, whether it be audio or video? That's a really good question. There's a couple of things. I think one would just be in terms of the process of editing. I have so often edited my audio stories
00:45:24
Speaker
in which I don't spend a ton of time in transcripts. Instead, I will throw everything into Audition, which is the editing software that I use. I will listen to tape and pull selects as I'm listening. Instead of writing, I'll just narrate something on my phone. I'll just do a voice memo and then throw it on.
00:45:47
Speaker
My whole process before this was working inside of audition. And that's because I'm not a writer. I'm really not a writer. So many people come to audio storytelling and audio journalism because they're in print journalism. I've never considered myself a writer.
00:46:05
Speaker
For me, working in that format where I am just working with recordings and not necessarily looking at words made the most sense to me. But after doing this process where everything they do, it's all in the script. So you're making all of the changes in the script. You don't even record anything until a day before the story airs or a couple of days before the story airs.
00:46:28
Speaker
And that process just makes so much more sense. And maybe that's what all professionals do. And I'm just learning this for the first time because I'm pretty new to it. But that was a big thing I learned. And then the other piece is just about how to write for radio. They write how they talk. And I know everyone says that, write how you talk. But their writing is so simplified. They have really pulled out
00:46:56
Speaker
They helped me learn how to pull out all of the unnecessary language that I really didn't need in my stories and to just really rely more heavily on the recordings themselves and the tape that you're choosing to tell the story instead of as a narrator.
00:47:16
Speaker
trying to write about it. It's like, just let them listen to it and let them take away what they want to take away from it, rather than, you know, writing as a narrator, like, this is how you should feel about this thing. And so it, I think it really changed the way that I wrote, working with them.
00:47:36
Speaker
just to write in that much more simplified way. And the other thing is, like, this was a really sad story, too. So for, you know, I think for other stories, they might have done it differently, but, like, a lot of the coaching I got and the feedback I got on this story was just that it's such a sad story. Like, you don't want to step on the emotion of it, and you don't want to prescribe emotion. So, like, because of that, you know,
00:48:04
Speaker
I was probably taking more out of my writing than I would if I was writing like a comical piece for them. I think it would be really different.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah, in conversations I've had with editors, it's because sometimes the weakness I've had is to try to be a little too forward as a narrator, to try to be very pyrotechnical in the way I write. And I've learned over the last, say, five years or so, probably in the last three, to really just surrender to story and just tell it straight.
00:48:37
Speaker
And if you do enough good reporting or, you know, collect enough tape, collect enough footage or whatever, if you do enough of that legwork, then, you know, your style still comes through, but you're doing it in such a way where the story is the star.
Surrendering to the Story
00:48:53
Speaker
And you just kind of surrender to that. And if you can do that, it's all the more powerful because then you're really in service of the reader or the listener or the viewer.
00:49:01
Speaker
Mm hmm. Oh, absolutely. I think that's so true. And that's like what I'm most comfortable with. Like, I think as a filmmaker, I'm not putting myself in the story often. I see myself more as like a vessel, I guess, or, you know, or a facilitator of someone's story.
00:49:23
Speaker
So I'm, I'm, and that's why like, you know, I've been more comfortable making films than audio and that feels more comfortable to me just because it's.
00:49:34
Speaker
I'm sort of the silent observer in the piece versus when you're making audio, the expectation is to put yourself more in the story. At least that's kind of what I'm learning. And that's been uncomfortable for me to learn that process and become okay putting myself in the story.
00:49:54
Speaker
And so writing really simply and just kind of letting the tape speak is what I would prefer to do. And so I think it just kind of like affirmed some of the things that I feel most comfortable with anyways in my work.
00:50:10
Speaker
And what do you make of the filmmakers that are more, they try to make themselves, or maybe not try, but it's hard to say that they're not trying to kind of make themselves the star of the show, like you're Morgan Spurlock's or Michael. Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, what do you make of those, you know, very director forward movies?
00:50:32
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I think it's like to each his or her own. You know, there's like the world needs Michael Morris and Errol Morris's. And I think that, you know, Werner Herzog puts himself in there a lot too. Like, I think that that style of storytelling is, you know, important. I think there's a lot of benefits to doing that. You can, especially when you're doing more of like
00:51:03
Speaker
an investigative piece where you're trying to like hammer facts out of a person that you're interviewing and trying to get the story straight and trying to like, I mean, I guess just taking that approach, it sometimes makes sense to put yourself in the story because you're this investigator who's like following the story and become a character yourself because you're kind of shaping the story by
00:51:32
Speaker
the way that you move through it in this kind of investigative way. I think that's great. It's not for me. I don't really like doing those huge investigative stories, at least not yet. That hasn't been my style. I'm more interested in the people and having really intimate conversations that
00:51:56
Speaker
make viewers feel more understood, or make them feel less alone, or that shed light on the fact that someone on the other side of the world has this emotion that you have, but that you haven't told anyone about. That's the kind of storytelling I like to do. And I don't need to be in those stories. The story isn't about me. It's about the person who's sharing it. And so I'm there to try and help them share that story.
Collaborative Filmmaking Approach
00:52:24
Speaker
so that I can get out in the world. So for the stories I want to tell, I think putting myself in it doesn't necessarily make sense, especially just with documentary filmmaking.
00:52:38
Speaker
Right, and a perfect illustration of you doing that is in your award-winning film, Root Shocked, this 15-minute brilliant little film that tells about the property blight and the systemic racism in Portland that led to some of that and the inability for
00:52:58
Speaker
a family, namely black families, not to accumulate the kind of generational wealth that allows people to rise through the middle class and maybe even higher. And you do that so well in this 15 minute pill of a movie. Thank you. I appreciate that. That was a hard film to fit into 15 minutes. I can't imagine. It was a lot of information. And like that story, you know, as a white person,
00:53:27
Speaker
definitely don't need to be in that story. Like that story is definitely not about me. I had a lot of conversations with Cleo, the main character, before we started filming about, you know, like he didn't feel comfortable with, initially he did not feel comfortable with me being the person to document this story. You know, I'd heard about it on the radio. I reached out to him.
00:53:52
Speaker
like in a million different ways because I was just like the story is incredible and I think it should be documented visually and shared because this is a really important part of Portland's history and something that is still happening today that people don't know about and you know I heard that he was going to try and move this house as this sort of like
00:54:15
Speaker
monumental feat that would be really symbolic to just like the amount of blight and redlining that had ruined the black community's ability to generate wealth through property ownership. So like he was going to do this big really visual thing and it was for the black community. And like as a, you know, white journalist,
00:54:42
Speaker
He had, when we spoke, like he told me he'd been wronged by a lot of white journalists before and he had
00:54:50
Speaker
been featured in stories that he just felt weren't really true. They weren't told in a truthful way. And he felt they harmed his community. And so I totally understood that. And we had ultimately decided on a pretty collaborative approach to telling that story for that reason.
00:55:13
Speaker
So, you know, Cleo was involved in terms of like, we had conversations about who he thought I should interview in the community to tell the story. And there were times where I was like, oh, I'm thinking about interviewing this person. And we would have a conversation about why he thought that person wasn't good to interview. And so I ended up showing him drafts and he would give me feedback. And ultimately, it became a piece that
00:55:39
Speaker
and his family have been using, they're still using it to fundraise for all of the renovations they're gonna do on this house that's been moved to this new location. It's gonna be turned into like an artist residency and community center for the black community.
00:55:55
Speaker
And that's really exciting for me that it ended up being something that they felt like they could use. So it was a success in that sense. But a lot of history, a lot of complicated history to try and jam into 15 minutes.
00:56:16
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, unbelievable. Well, Cecilia, I want to be mindful of your time, and I always like to end these conversations by asking guests for recommendations of some kind. So I'd extend that question to you. What's out there that you wouldn't mind recommending to the listeners?
00:56:33
Speaker
Well, I mean, I would have to recommend some of the documentaries that I think I've talked about during this conversation. I mentioned The Sensitives, which is a documentary about people who live with chemical sensitivities and have to live in isolation.
00:56:51
Speaker
I would recommend Time, the documentary that was nominated for an Oscar, about, you know, waiting for someone to get out of the criminal justice system. And then, you know, those are both kind of like serious films. There's this other documentary called Dina, which is incredible. And actually, like, I watched when I was working on a story about a family who is struggling to treat their son with autism. And this story is this really, like,
00:57:23
Speaker
wonderful romantic comedy documentary. I feel like people are always recommending really sad documentaries, but this one is, you know, really lighthearted. It's called Dina, and it's this romantic comedy about two people who have autism who are falling in love, and it's just such a sweet and beautifully shot documentary. And so, like, yeah, those three documentaries definitely have informed some of the work that I've made, and I think everyone should watch them.
Connect with Cecilia
00:57:51
Speaker
Fantastic. And where can people find you online, Cecilia? So my website is CeciliaBrownMedia.com. So CECILIA, Brown Media. And my portfolio of all my work is on my site, so you can check it out there.
00:58:11
Speaker
Fantastic. Any social media that you routinely use? Oh, yes. So I'm not a Twitter person. Like I said, I'm not a writer. So like words, not totally my thing, but I'm on Instagram. My Instagram handle is at Cecil Brown.
00:58:27
Speaker
I think there's two ends in the brown. I was like, all they gave me is my only option. So you can find me there as well. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for the time and great talking to you so soon. Thanks. It was great talking to you too, Brendan. Have a good one.
00:58:51
Speaker
If you're listening to this on CNN Friday, I should be somewhere across the Midwest, probably the godforsaken stretch of I-80 in Nebraska, heading back to Oregon. Oh, what a stressful trip. I mean, because hotels, even shitholes like Super 8's, are several hundred dollars a night.
00:59:14
Speaker
We've decided to borrow a three-person tent and are hitting three KOA campgrounds as we go west. La Salle, Illinois. Laramie, Wyoming. And then Jerome, Idaho. And then last day we will get into Western Oregon. Yeah. And after working from the East Coast and seeing family, which if we're being honest is never rejuvenating,
00:59:41
Speaker
Learned a lot of a lot of things. I wish I didn't know and also being vegan is something It's just that it's a challenge and being vegan among people who want to tell you how it is all day long it's just exhausting so we dispense with much of the smiling and just nod now so it's just nodding and
01:00:07
Speaker
We don't comment. I'm just I'll just leave it that it's exhausting anyway Thanks to Cecilia for the time and her great insights into the creative life of making pictures and that cool making pictures I kind of dig that and thanks for listening seeing efforts. Thanks for the support. Thanks to WVWC MFA In creative writing as well as Hippocamp 2021 for the support and thanks for being along for this ride. I mean that
01:00:34
Speaker
If you want to be a member and get access to all kinds of goodies and the chance to ask questions and get credit for it, go to patreon.com slash cnfpod and sign up for the lowest tier. And of course you get access to transcripts of which I'm horribly behind on transcripts. I'm really sorry. I just haven't had the time to clean up the transcripts. I am getting on it and hopefully we'll start refreshing that reservoir as we get through the July pods in any case.
01:01:01
Speaker
Nobody took me up on the offer to ask Cecilia any questions when I put out a feeler for questions on the patreon page Okay, nor Daniel call call. It's who I'm speaking with Soon miss that chance, but the opportunity stands For the he's the bonus out of his episode not that that matters If you want in on that action hit up patreon to help with the podcast utility bill the podcast is free But it sure as hell ain't cheap
01:01:30
Speaker
And I'll leave you with this. So Cecilia produced the film So Mom, which is really cute. I hope you get a chance to watch that. And we talked about it in the show. But she produced that film in the cracks between her life and the day job to see if it was something she could do, something she would love doing.
01:01:46
Speaker
So what is the thing you're putting off that you could be doing for 20 minutes a day and that slow accretion will build the body of work? Something you've always wanted to do but maybe were afraid to do. You know, take inspiration from Cecilia and give it a shot, alright? So stay wild, seeing Evers. And if you can't do, interview Cecilia.
01:02:28
Speaker
you