Reel Work pays off, dog

We won -- a team I worked on for the International Documentary Challenge was awarded "Best Use of Music Genre," for our seven-minute mini-documentary, "Old Soul." This is especially rewarding for me, as I'm the one who found our subject: Musician, photographer, philosopher, and world-traveller Jason Hamacher. Jason and I go back quite a ways, to my first music video, in fact (Decahedron's "No Carrier"). Jason rang me up in the spring to shoot some video of his gallery opening of photographs from Syria, and when I was offered a role to shoot and help edit a project for the IDC, I suggested Jason. He was, I knew, great on camera and had a compelling story. This project was part of a five-day project: To write, produce, edit, and finalize a short documentary over an extended weekend.

We interviewed Jason about his mission to document ancient chants from Syria, a representative of the Syrian embassy, and a priest from a local Syriac Orthodox church. Shaz Mallick produced -- can't wait to work on the next one.