For my Ethnographic Film course I am required to create a film treatment. A treatment is essentially a proposal that outlines the subject matter, audience, and style of my film.

For my film, I wanted to explore various ways people in Vancouver have taken food production into their own hands. This could mean baking bread at home, growing your own vegetables, hunting & fishing, or harvesting wild foods. The central question I’m asking is what kind of knowledge goes into procuring those kinds of foods. What kind of knowledge does one need in order to say, bake their own bread or grow their own vegetables? What kind of knowledge does one need in order to hunt successfully?

So far, I have shot a few scenes which I think will make to the final cut of my film, however as I gather more footage I’ll have to be selective about which scenes I choose to include. Some of the scenes I have in mind for the film are:

• a scene of getting into the bush where my participants are looking for signs of animals, with a voice over about what they’re doing and why.
• a scene of the bread making process from start to finish
• a scene of a participant caring for the vegetables they’re growing followed by a sit down interview explaining why they decided to grow their own food.
• a scene on a boat of a participant catching fish

These scenes are of course, very roughly outlined. I can only control the narrative so much as I move through the filming process.

For the style of the film, I really would like to rely on ambient sound which I recorded during the filming, and follow it up with voice overs and sit down interviews. I may include some initial narration to get the narrative ball rolling, but because the film is only a few minutes long, any spoken information needs to be short and concise.

When I was filming over this past weekend, I had a lot of trouble controlling the action of the shots because there were so many people talking and moving in and out of the shots. As I continue to gather film for this project, I’ll need to pay more attention to the background noise, and people, who may make an appearance in the shot.

Here is a more formal film treatment document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VNkVN45teKcoVfTYztmRB7V8-y7Tr0el6rA673liUh4/edit?usp=sharing