Projects
Finca el Injerto
Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Inc.
Stumptown coffee is good, damn good. And if you want to roast the most dynamic coffee in the world, you’ve got to source the finest coffee farms in the world. El Injerto is that farm. Tucked in the mountains of Huehuetenango, Guatemala, El Injerto is one of the crown jewels of Central American coffee. Stumptown champions these farmers who grow their coffee and commissioned us to create a short film to introduce this farm to not only their clientele but their staff too. Stumptown are aesthetic minded folks so they didn’t just want some random video footage strewn together. They wanted something that people could savor all on its own- art in sense, sans a sales pitch. Stumptown has gotten a lot of mileage from this piece, using it in a myriad of ways including: streaming website content, one-on-one wholesale account meetings, employee training, in-store display at the Annex (a coffee tasting café), the “Meet the Producer” screening series, and even film festivals (more notably the Portland International Film Festival).
Armed with three formats (16mm, super-8, and DV) we had all but two days to collect as much content as possible since we would be creating more than just one piece from all of the footage. This was all verite style filmmaking except for the semi formal portraits of workers addressing the camera that is threaded throughout. We strove to make a simple and eloquent piece, one that serves almost as an introduction to the place and the people, one with lots of texture and subtle emotion. Like a lot of our work we wanted there to be a formal sense to the structure yet balance that with some more organic elements.
In the end this was part of larger effort to begin a dialogue with their customer base. Stumptown pays premium prices for coffee, sometimes three or four times fair trade prices. The theory goes that if people have an appreciation of the bean they will pay more for the product. In the Stumptown model, that means more money to the farmers, who in turn keep standards up to producing top-notch beans.