Kiyokawa Family Orchards

TEAMWORK BRINGS IT HOME

Finally, it was time to pitch our Foodie Kingdom stories in class. Our cohort would divide into three small teams, each producing one story. My detailed pitch for the story of Kiyokawa Family Orchards—a multigenerational farm that has survived multiple hardships and now grows over 100 varieties of apples—made the top three. It was officially going into production!

I was joined by Austyn, a veteran filmmaker, and Anna, an experienced journalist and sustainable agriculture enthusiast. Although they were more knowledgeable about the technical side of creating a film, my teammates respected how much work I had put into researching the topic and building relationships. I became the director, while Austyn and Anna contributed their significant expertise behind the scenes. This formed the foundation of one of the most successful elements of the project: we were collaborating without ego, allocating work based on each person’s skills and with the final product in mind. This also enhanced our efficiency, since we had to complete this film in less than a month.

The major things we had left to do were: gather more b roll, interview Randy Kiyokawa, create the script for our film based on the contents of the interview, and produce the video. Due to scheduling challenges, we had to do this somewhat backwards: we would be interviewing Randy less than a week before our deadline. Normally the interview transcript would form the foundation of our film. Instead, we relied heavily on my research about Kiyokawa Family Orchards, the history of the Hood River Valley, and a pre-interview with Randy to get a sense of the story.

When Randy and I discussed potential directions for the interview, I realized that I had made some assumptions I should not have. Randy had shared some of the hardest parts of his family’s history in the book Growing Tomorrow, and I had thought/hoped that he would be willing to discuss that with me. However, he was hesitant to do so on camera and was concerned about his positionality as the one orchardist who often got media coverage, among a whole valley of growers who were not in the spotlight. He didn’t want to stand out more than was necessary. Of course, I wanted to respect his wishes.

This meant that we would need to retool our plan for the story. We would need to focus on Randy, rather than the generations that came before him. Our story would hinge on challenges he has faced in his career. This was the one part that we couldn’t research thoroughly, the one part we didn’t know much about. But, this might yield a tighter story arc. We revised our interview questions and hoped for the best.

In the meantime, we had some gaps in our b roll to fill. Thanks to my prior site visits, we had a lot of footage of scenery but very little with people, movement, etc. This was somewhat deliberate (many folks I encountered over the course of creating this story did not want to be filmed) and somewhat due to my own discomfort with approaching people (being a new videographer, I was still self-conscious about the space I was taking up with my big ol’ camera). Regardless of the rationale, we needed dynamic shots of people.

Randy and I arranged a time for my team to film workers pressing cider at the orchard. Prior to our visit, I prepared my teammates with background information on the space we’d be filming in—indoors, with low lighting and no space to set up additional lights—and the human element. According to Randy, many of the farm workers were not comfortable being filmed. We had to carefully balance getting our footage with respecting their privacy.

Further, space limitations and food safety regulations meant that only two members of our three-person team could film the cider pressing. Anna volunteered to explore the rest of the warehouse and its surroundings. With her photographer’s eye, she captured some great shots of machinery, crates of sorted apples, and our iconic “sad fruits,” fallen apples around the bases of trees, and lone pears still on the branch. These moody shots proved vital in our story!

Meanwhile, Austyn and I were under pressure to work quickly and precisely. Only a few workers didn’t mind being filmed, so they were pressing the cider short-handed. They were understandably eager to get us out of their hair and get back to working at full capacity. We worked as quickly as we could to make that happen, with Austyn and me carefully maneuvering our camera-and-monopod setup in tight, dimly lit quarters.

After all these twists and turns, it was time for our interview with Randy. Our cohort worked together the day before to set up the lights, reflectors, audio, and seating in our on-campus studio. We had covered studio lighting in all its granular detail in class, so we had the technical elements down. We also came up with a way to create a more natural background: shining a spotlight through an indoor plant to cast leafy shadows behind the subject.

Since Austyn and Anna were more experienced with the cameras, and because I had built a relationship with Randy over the past few months, I was the interviewer. I knew he had been nervous about the interview, and saw that he was still uneasy when he arrived at the studio. Based on our previous conversations, I knew that asking him about apples would make him light up. As he rattled off an impressive list of his favorite varieties, he relaxed and the conversation flowed from there.

We discovered that the crux of our story was the Alar Scare, a panic about pesticides that impacted apple growers soon after Randy took the reins of the family orchard in the 1980s. You could hear and see his pain when he explained that his family did not even use the pesticides the media was warning about, but he still ended up putting out boxes of apples along the roadside for 5 cents a pound. This was what inspired him to dig deeper into sustainable agriculture, offer u-pick, and begin cultivating a dizzyingly large assortment of apples and other fruits. This was his origin story—and he shared it openly and happily.

We had plenty to harvest from the interview footage. As our most experienced writer, Anna leapt to work constructing the script while Austyn and I worked on assembling b roll sequences that would reflect Randy’s story. (This is where Anna’s poetically sad pears and apples came in.) Austyn and I shared the decision-making on b roll, but she did a lot of the editing because she was more practiced with Premiere. She was still patient and kind enough to teach me a number of skills as she worked!

It was a mad dash to the finish line, and we made it. We collaborated successfully, captured some quality footage, and told a story that we felt proud of. More importantly, Randy felt good about it, too. Getting his stamp of approval meant the world to us!