The NExt Acre

In 2018, I was working full time as a video editor at a creative studio called Pixel Farm and one of the longest projects I worked on was this short documentary about multi-generational farms in the Midwest. The project was sponsored by Syngenta, a multinational agricultural corporation, who brought a two terabyte hard drive of footage to my desk and gave me free reign to shape the story and visuals as I saw fit. Once I went through the 60+ hours of raw material, I outlined a script to take a snapshot in the lives of two farmers and then spent a few weeks creating a working rough draft. Once that was completed, the director who had shot the initial footage came in and we worked together pare down the doc to 15 minutes and match the style to what he had in mind when shooting. More than any other while I was working at Pixel Farm, The Next Acre was a project that required both the technical skills of building a long edit as well as the storytelling skills take raw material with little direction and find the narrative at the heart of it.