MENU DE SUCRE — A Travel and Food Diary in Sucre, Bolivia

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

A video diary of the best foods I found on my travel through Bolivia. At Mercado Central, everything is worth trying.

*CASE STUDY*

*OVERVIEW‍
Sucre was the original capital of Bolivia and remains one of my most cherished cities among the ones I’ve visited around the world. It’s not a city I was very familiar with before departing in the Spring of 2015, but one I was determined to share with everyone I met after visiting.

I had the chance to visit Sucre while traveling for three months through much of Bolivia and Peru. With what I had packed was my camera which I had brought hoping to rekindle my long-dormant documentary video skills. For years, I had worked tirelessly in various post-production facilities and worked only with other people’s footage. And before leaving on the trip, I had calculated that it had been over seven years since I had produced a video on my own.

In South America, I was determined to make something with my camera.

*POST-PRODUCTION
After months of not seeing the footage while spending months conceptualizing what the video might become, I booted up the drives to discover just how much footage I had shot. Again, my experiences in reality television post-houses kicked in and I began the process of watching down, marking, and organizing the footage.

For every unique location or event, I created a string out of that footage. Using detailed markers, I then trimmed those sequences down to just the best of the footage from those events. As I edited, I’d pull up these trimmed sequences to select shots, cut in selects, and review footage again.

Throughout the edit, I began to see the video was lacking a visual element that could tie all the meals and food vendors together. While watching the footage, I discovered footage of a plywood board spray painted with the daily menu of the cafeteria. I had shot this board from every angle.

I got the idea to recreate the board, or at least show the creation of the board. This new footage would provide me with some very visual close-ups and help me create a design for the lower thirds shown throughout the piece. I set out to spray paint a plywood board with stencils using the colors of the Bolivian flag.

The lower thirds and the texture behind them were created in Photoshop CC. The stencil font was found here after searching and testing multiple similar fonts. The texture was pulled from the footage of the painted plywood board.

All editing was handled using Adobe Premiere CC.

*TAKEAWAYS
In the end, my biggest takeaway was my renewed interest in production. After eight years of not making any videos and remaining entrenched in post-production, I felt this project gave me the confidence to once again work behind the camera.

My time in post-production has brought some necessary lessons to bear on my shooting style and a rigor to my media management while shooting. I see some flaws in the actual video shoot, but these “mistakes” will only help improve my skills and be reflected in the videos to come as I continue to improve and grow as a filmmaker.