Field Office

Reaching Tega and Tula is not for the faint of heart. 14 hours by truck, much of it super dusty and bumpy. Take a moment and bounce vigorously in your seat. Now do that for eight hours or so. But thanks to our trusty driver, Tukal, we arrived in one piece at the outskirts of the farm at a nearby tea farm. Home base would be about an hour from the actual farm that would have to slog to and from each day in the muddy back roads. Rumor had it that a lion ate a man the previous year. Our first series of films with Stumptown acted like introductions of the people and places of where their coffee originates. Perfect, now with everybody on board its time to spice content with some more technical information about the coffee farming process. By no means had we abandoned our aesthetic and formal roots, in fact we’ve ramped it up. We’ve just packed more in one package.

This is our longest piece to date. It is broken up into nine chronological sections. Each section details a specific facet of farming. Formally, each sections structure is different. This was an important element for a number of reasons. First we felt that it distilled the essence of the action in a way that most approximates what its like to experience in person. Cherry (ripe coffee beans) picking for example was unlike any other farm we’ve seen. Workers sing a joyous call and response while picking. It usually starts off with one person singing the call, then gradually more and more people answer with the response, resulting in a cacophonous medley. To approximate this we split the screen into quadrants to suggest multiple spaces occurring simultaneously. From there we added and subtracted quadrants during playback to resemble the call and response effect. We also put a larger emphasis on technical information. Each section is pre-empted by a concise description of the important facts relative to that part of the farming process.