It's here! After nearly two years our short documentary, "The Riverside Project: Urban Archaeology of a Transformed Landscape" has been successfully installed at a popup gallery at 21 West End Ave, in Manhattan. The style is pretty straight-forward, but we were hung up for a long time with the usual issues involved in education and nonfiction filmmaking: funding.

Our client, Geoarcheology Research Associates (GRA) of Yonkers, NY, really came through with the learning curve associated with video production. Their associate archaeologist adopted the role of producing this project while Mango Tree directed, shot, scored, and edited the piece. We needed GRA to direct the content because, after all, we aren't archaeologists and we needed to make sure our facts and presentation were accurate and on par. We outsourced all of interviews to be transcribed, and handed them off to GRA with instructions on how to provide us a "paper edit" of what content they needed in the final piece. We then went through the usual process of a radio edit, selecting b-roll, and having that big discussion about rights and fair use.

Lastly, we hired the composer from our last documentary, "The Love Industry", Jessica Salzinski. She did an amazing job given the fact that although we held onto this project for almost two years, she had a window of about two weeks to compile a musical score.

The building, 21 West End Ave., is the original site of the archaeology project in which construction workers discovered dated material while digging the foundation. Construction was then put on hold and GRA was called in to excavate. It was discovered that the foundation was sitting on 18th & 19th century landfill, in essence, are historical artifacts. Our documentary explores GRA's process and their findings.

"The Riverside Project: Urban Archaeology of a Transformed Landscape" is on display at 21 West End Ave, NY 10069, open to the public by appointment...or you can check it out here: