DOCUMENTARIES
"Your Money or Your Life:
The American Healthcare Crisis"
Picture Editor, Sound Editor (Re-cut),
Additional Photography
This hour-long documentary was made for Australian television, using the American healthcare system as a model of how not to structure national healthcare.
I was brought in after a rough cut was completed. The film consisted of dramatic testimonials from doctors, lawyers and patients, along with B-roll footage of hospital emergency rooms. But the horror stories being told didn't seem horrifying enough. I decided to try incorporating reenactments into some of the interviews, and also made extensive use of music, sound effects, and stock footage.
For the first sequence, to visually illustrate the story of a man slowly bleeding to death in a hospital, I photographed street scenes in Compton, CA, where the story began, establishing shots of Martin Luther King hospital, where he died, and reenactment footage of bandages, dripping blood and hospital clocks. I then intercut these scenes with interview footage of a lawyer recounting the story, adding music and sound effects to heighten the drama.
For the second clip, I again tried to visually illustrate the story being told: a search through Los Angeles hospitals for a motorcyclist hit by a car. I first borrowed scenes from another part of the film of crowded hospital waiting rooms and disgruntled patients. Then I filmed additional hospital corridor scenes, and some fairly abstract P.O.V.s. Later I tracked down stock footage of a morgue.
Hopefully, these scenes work as dramatic visualizations of two chilling and tragic stories.
