Orange Test

Shot in my backyard with the DSLR.  Heading to a grove in Leesburg tomorrow.

books

There are some books on my mind concerning this project. One Lisa and I already discussed. It is Bill Belleville's Losing It All to Sprawl: How Progress Ate My Cracker Landscape. I think some of the themes we have discussed are addressed here, however with a different focus and geography. And the other is Eugene Robinson's Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America. I heard Robinson on the radio yesterday interviewed about this book. I really think he is off the mark on it and has rose colored glasses. I think he is trying to come to terms with what we want to do with this film, but is trapped in a conventional wisdom about what "black" was or is. I must say I have not read these books yet, but maybe we should take a look and see if they might inform us during this production.

RICHES

As far as Lisa suggestion we get RICHES involved in acquiring and maintaining Francine's collection, it might be a better idea to approach African American Studies and UCF Library Special Collections first. They have the Carol Mundy Collection of African Americana, and Mundy is from Apopka, they might want to include that collection to broaden its content. You have to first see if Francine is willing to donate it. That to me is the greatest hurdle.

Title

I am not sure about the title, unless we planned on filming in black and white only as a way to suggest these spaces were colored with life and people at one time, but I am not sure if conceptually that will work or would be ascetically the right choice.

I like the "space" but maybe we should play around with time and/or landscape in the title. Colored with the connotation (absent of some style choice like filming in black and white) might raise some distracting discussion to the central theme. Space and time are both characters we are working with in some conceptual way, why not put them in the title and make the viewer confront what those term conceptually mean to us and to them?

But.....for a defense of "colored"......

I always had a visual idea in my head for a film which addressed race in some way. Here my idea, I don't know how or if it would work for our purposes but, I imagine a linear chronological story of race relations where by the viewer would learn that race was reductive to merely black and white and thus was blind or absent to color. I don't want to go into my original story idea to explain this, but in my head say we film in color at the beginning of the film and as the film goes on and we learn about these two places and times (Sanford and Ocoee), a color from the film is taken away and replaced with black and white, so the films starts in color and slowly without the viewer noticing the film ends in black and white because the color has been removed during the course of the story. Or the colors could become grayer until it is in black and white at the end. I sort of like the one color at a time, but that might be beyond our technical and financial abilities.

I am not sure if this is doable with our shoestring budget or if conceptually it would work, but if we play with color in that abstract kind of way then color in the title would represent a character like time and space do.

This is just an idea, I am not at all married to it.

Possible new title: "Colored Spaces" or "Spaces of Color"

CHAPTER 1:  OCOEE

a).  we take the viewer by the hand and lead them back through time.

FILM LEADER JITTER TO BLACK, CUT TO OLD FADED COLOR FILM
8mm home movies of a family's trip to Disneyworld, circa 1975 (projector sounds)
-DISSOLVE-
16mm 1950s or 60s Florida Chamber of Commerce film with nerdy male voiceover about the "thriving metropolis of Orlando"
-DISSOLVE-
1920s or 30s B&W film archive or more likely photos of 1920s Florida and Black grove workers
(we hear female voice (Kathy?) reading (Hurston?) description of Orlando or the Central Florida area during the 1920s OR reading from one of the early tourist pamphlets provided by Kathy OR both, and how the citrus was grown in rural areas and taken to Sanford for shipping to the north)

-DIP TO BLACK-
-FADE UP FROM BLACK-

Artwork map that includes Orlando and Sanford as references, but moves in to the road that connects Ocoee with Apopka
(steaboat sounds fade to train sounds fade to grove worker sounds, fade to running sounds)

b). the viewer learns that the Colored spaces in Ocoee disappeared on Election Night, 1920

CUT TO VIDEO
(soft and delicate music fades in)

Present day HDV video peaceful beauty shots of Ocoee's downtown, Starke Lake, etc.
(young male voice reads newspaper accounts of the 1920 election violence...)

pause for a beat

Present day HDV video shots of irrigation ditches, abandoned land, new development
(female voice reads letter about the massacre)

Present day HDV video with natural sounds of grove workers picking oranges, sweating, dumping oranges, climbing ladders
(we hear Stephen's voice reading poem about Ocoee massacre)

Present day HDV video shots of Ocoee abandoned grove, golf course, etc.
(poem continues to the end, we hear natural sounds of cars on the road)

pause for a beat as car sounds fade out with music

Present day HDV video of Stephen silently reading sign at Black burial ground.  Pan of the neighborhood.  Shots of an empty swing the neighborhood playground.

pause for a beat

Wideshot of Lake Apopka at dusk, time lapse of sun going down in the west, reflection of moon on the lake with nighttime cricket sounds

-FADE TO BLACK-

CHAPTER 2: SANFORD

Artwork map appears again as music fades in.  This time the map animates toward Sanford.

Old Map and History of Apopka

These images from Kathy Parry:

Research trip to Apopka, Ocoee and Orlando

Francine was our tour guide.  We met at her home in South Apopka at 10am and spent the entire day driving from Apopka to Ocoee to Orlando, looking at parts of the landscape where historical events took place.  Kathy and Francine helped Lisa and Stephen understand the chronology of the events.

Francine showed us all of the research materials her team gathered in the 1990s. We need to help her find an archival space to store these materials.  She talked about them in the video below, shot by Lisa on her phone:

 

The following photos and videos illustrate our tour on November 13, 2010.  They were taken by Francine and Lisa.  Here are two videos shot by Francine that take us from Apopka into Ocoee on Apopka-Ocoee Road past the areas where July Perry farmed the land.

Camphor tree in the front of the lot where July Perry lived.

Construction business on the site of July Perry's home.  The funeral parlor that is believed to have been his home has been torn down.

Ocoee's "old downtown."

Area of Ocoee where Blacks lived before the massacre.

Ocoee-Apopka Road looking in the direction Blacks would have fled from Ocoee.

The site of a Black cemetery before the massacre.  It now sits at a cul de sac in a small modern housing development. Ground radar has detected more than 100 bodies buried here, and many years ago there was probably a Black church nearby.  Marking the area is a sign, some shrubbery and two trees.

The grounds of the cemetery are not particularly well kept.

There is a children's community playground not far from the cemetery.  This housing development sits where Ocoee's Black community would have lived.

Imagine running for your life toward the swamps of Lake Apopka... down an irrigation ditch like this one.  You know where the ditches are and where they lead because chances are you know someone who dug or maintained them.  That's what happened the night of the massacre.

Francine explained that it is believed that the bodies of the Blacks who were killed in the massacre were dumped in Starke Lake.  The lakefront is now a city park, right across from the city government complex in downtown Ocoee.

Francine was surprised and a bit disturbed when she realized that the Orange County sheriff's home during the massacre had recently been torn down.  A mosque now sits adjacent to  the property. Francine noted the building of the mosque was very controversial.