B&W Bananas

While filming we learned that St. Lucian violence can be traced to its history as a colony of plantation systems. In order to illustrate this aspect of Caribbean history, we're looking into archive video footage to supplement our doc. I've had luck with the Prelinger Archives, the Kino Library, and Travel Film Archive thus far. What makes the search process difficult is the lack of tags attached to some videos, which renders them impossible to find without looking through droves and droves. What makes it cool is how eccentric and obscure the found footage involved can be.

One of my favorites is this video, "About Bananas," which is a silent black&white film about, well, bananas. See here: https://archive.org/details/AboutBan1935

Banana export was St. Lucia's largest source of income until recently, when shifts away from St. Lucia in the international trade put local banana growers out of work. Instead of being able to make a living on their land with their family, many Lucians now have to commute to work at the island's many tourist resorts, resulting in time away from home, money spent on transportation, children being left unsupervised, etc. This is one example of a riff that history has torn through St. Lucia and something we're going to work very carefully--with the help of archive footage--to visually explain.

Music Videos

Today I stumbled across a video on youtube of one of my favorite bands, The Killers. They released a new album titled "Battle Born" last month and today they released a tour music video for one of their songs, Miss Atomic Bomb. It is not a traditional music video in the sense that it tells some form of a story. The video is compiled using entirely B roll footage from performances and behind the scenes of their tour.

I really love what they did, combining live performances of the song with behind the scenes and a ton of other performance footage. I believe that it tells more about the band than a video with some shirt back story in it does. This shows them on the road and how they go about life while on tour as well as some of the most exciting moments that they go through while performing. This is achieved with plenty of slow motion shots of instruments, each of the band members, and crowds going wild. It must have been a lot of fun to put it together. I know if I had the chance to combine B roll and put it to a real song that I would jump at the chance.