Andre Joseph Gallant

I spent my recent Monday shivering in 50 degree North Georgia December, running around Newtown in Gainesville, interviewing 4 residents, shooting a ton of b-roll. My body hurts. My shoulders are sore from tense hand-held crouches, when I’m desperately holding my breath to keep the camera from shaking. I love it.

I love how beautiful skin can look on camera. How shy loudmouths become on camera. How loud the world is in earphones.

I watched giant cranes crush junk cars, throwing their crumpled steel frames yards through the air. Crashes. Dust. A scrapyard just inches from front doors.

How can you be normal with this thunder, the interviewees say. That’s why they get angry. Or drive around all day avoiding their own neighborhoods.

This is your home, and nobody else cares how deafening your home-life is. You can’t move. Who’ll buy your house?

I get to come home and make potato soup and kava tea. Sure, the streetlights like high-beams glare through the shades, waking me up at 3 am. But I don’t wake to a giant claw sorting through dump trucks full of refrigerators and bathtubs.

“What are you going to do about these problems?”

I’m just some white kid journalist sticking a camera in your face. Your story is compelling and our conversation will look great in my short film. But I won’t be able to change a thing. I’m one in a long line of storytellers, eager to take down your story and pass it down my network. Next year, after this new round of news stories and short films flushes through the current institutional and personal memories, another generation of newsy types will roll up, pen, paper, cameras in hand, asking the same questions.

If only my camera could cast a zoning board vote.

Straddling a wobbly wood fence, a mangy dog licking the heels of my damp boots, I outstretch my arms, extend the camera over the wire fence and try to capture the massive mechanical claws playing bocce with dented yellow vans. Van goes boom. Dust goes poof.

The Gainesville Times began a three-part series on Newtown, the first of which ran this past Sunday. Read it here. Hopefully, the short film Nik and I are producing will add substantially to the coverage Newtown still needs. I’ll be dumping most of the footage over the next few days, and I’m excited to see if it looks any good.

We’ll be up in Gainesville again this Monday, interviewing the last few folks for our film.

For now, here’s a short made recently by Spelman College Student Anissa Douglass.

Talk to you soon.