How We Made This Segment

This segment, Band of Mothers, was put together as a trailer for a full-length documentary we started working on in early 2003 when the war in Iraq was new, fear was running high, and the act of speaking out, especially by mothers of the military, meant risking complete social alienation. The message and sentiment is even more poignant now evidenced by the disastrous war in Iraq.

To begin this project, we did an outreach via peace networks for women willing to do an on-camera interview and about twelve women responded -- about six were willing to be filmed. Two of the most brave were in the Philadelphia area, so we booked flights out there from LA for a weekend shoot. Our DP / camera / sound person met us in Philly from Colorado.

We had two days of shooting in rainy Philly - and got hassled by guards for filming Independence Hall...we weren't supposed to be doing that. We used a Panasonic DVX100. We had a travel light kit and wireless lav mics as well as a boom mic.

We edited for about a week on our editor's Final Cut Pro system to produce this piece.

Budget: Most of the cost was travel -- two of us used frequent flier miles to fly to Philly and all of us shared one hotel room. The total cost was around $700.

As for the feature length doc, after several grant requests were turned down, we decided to put it on hold. We now have about 40 inspiring mothers - who have taken the Band of Mothers name as their own - willing to be interviewed, so we hope to resume the project in the near future and expand on the themes of America, war, patriotism and the power of mothers to change the world.

Suzanne O'Keeffe
suzanne@eluminatefilms.com

Martin Bedogne
martinb2012@cs.com