Mississippi film shoot wraps

When Cotton Blossoms

In mid-May, our amazing cast and crew descended upon the Piney Woods School for a day of soundtrack recording and five LONG days of shooting.  This is a brief recap of the progress so far:

SOUNDTRACK:

Five hours on a bus with most high school groups would not be my idea of fun... but with the Cotton Blossom Singers of the Piney Woods School, it was not only fun... it was inspiring!  What a great bunch of kids.  After recording for three hours under the excellent direction of Mr. Sean Austin, they had enough left to give an impromptu concert at Pizza Hut on the ride home... and followed that with some singing on the bus that made me wish we could've recorded much, much more than we did.

So now we have beautiful music to compliment Dr. Jones' amazing story... now all we need is some images and we've got ourselves a movie.  Simple, right?  We'll soon find out.

SHOOT DAY 1:

We began our first production day at the Piney Woods School with the famous Cedar Tree scene, which would've given me goose-bumps if I'd been able to slow down long enough to actually appreciate it.  To think that this really happened exactly 100 years ago is simply unbelievable.  And it's startling to see Bello (our Dr. Jones) perform these scenes looking so much like the archival photos of Dr. Jones when he first came to Mississippi.

After lunch, we shot a bunch of smaller scenes at the farm and then used up our daylight with some beautiful sunset shots during golden hour. 

After dark, our cinematographer Brad Walker and the camera department put in some overtime shooting the archival goodies in the L.C. Jones Museum.  All in all, it was an excellent first day.  The HD footage from this Panasonic Varicam HPX2700 is impressive... and so is my sunburn.

SHOOT DAY 2:

Another long one.  We started with beautiful backlit shots down by the stream and ended by creating a lightning storm in the sheep shed.  In between, we filmed modern stuff in the rock garden, the first Cotton Blossoms quartet, all of Grace's scenes, and a whole lot more.  All of this required a ton of coordination by our hard-working local production team, led by Heather and James Mathews of Greenville, who somehow made this whole shoot happen with just three weeks of preproduction.  It also required the enthusiastic and generous cooperation that we received from the Piney Woods School, including many student and faculty actors.

I think one of my favorite shots from today was Jones discovering the sheep shed... which was shot in the ACTUAL sheep shed that Dr. Jones found back in 1909.  There's so much history in this place.  What an honor it is to be involved in a project like this!

SHOOT DAY 3:

Hmm... yet another long day.  Seems that perfectionism has a price... and the crew is paying for mine!  But they're not complaining about it.  Everyone seems genuinely excited to be giving so much of themselves to this special film... which is so rewarding for me to see.

We shot all day at Small Town Mississippi in Jackson today and covered many of our interior locations, like John Webster's sawmill office, the post office, and Uncle Ed Taylor's house.  This place was a gold-mine for us because we never could've shot so many beautiful locations in one day if they weren't all together in one place like this.  And it didn't hurt that Kevin Lee, our talented production designer, was always one step ahead of us, working his magic on each interior.

Thanks also to our extras, who were mostly Piney Woods staffers (and a few crew-members who jumped into costumes to fill in last minute).

Seeing the scenes in the sawmill office come to life are a memorable highlight... because this, for me, is the crux of the Laurence Jones story:  blacks and whites working together to do the right thing as fellow Christians.  Like Dr. Jones used to say, winning Webster's support was absolutely critical to the success of the Piney Woods School.

SHOOT DAY 4:

This was our longest day yet, simply because of the amount of driving that was involved.  The two locations we shot (an old rustic church and an old railroad depot & passenger car) were very specific and hard-to-find, but they were both worth the drive.

The church was absolutely gorgeous... and the depot looked perfect (despite its current use as an optometrist's office).  Both locations required many extras, so a big thanks goes out to the folks who came out to be a part of this and endured hours of waiting for your 15 (or 1.5) seconds of fame.  When Greenwood becomes the new Hollywood, y'all will already be well-conditioned for the hurry-up-and-wait mentality of film production.

SHOOT DAY 5:

Finally, a little more sleep and a lot less stressful schedule.  We shot with a reduced cast and crew today because we only needed to shoot a few pick-up shots at PWS.  As we finished shooting our exteriors, it began to sprinkle (and rain is forecast for the next seven days!) so I can't be more thankful to God for blessing us with the past five straight days of nothing but PERFECT weather!

All that's left is filming portions of graduation tomorrow and then it's back to Michigan to start editing.

EDITING:

The footage looks fantastic!  Kevin Domer (our tireless editing intern) is currently logging all of it and marking the takes.  I can't believe how much good stuff we shot in such a short amount of time!  I can't wait to start assembling the story... combining this great footage with the incredible archival imagery, and shaping the mood with the voices of the Cotton Blossom Singers.  After years of researching and dreaming about telling Dr. Jones' story, it's so exciting to finally see this film coming together.  I'll have to cut together a brief teaser trailer soon so that everyone else can see why I'm so excited.  Stay tuned...