We’re All Going to be Filmmakers: Lee Bob Black Interviews Greg Roden of “Food Forward”
Opinionated, fast-talking and 6-foot-4, filmmaker and storyteller Greg Roden is imposing and infectiously optimistic. He’s also a man on a mission. With his new series, “Food Forward TV,” he’s out to help people “discover a whole new you through food.” He believes that food should be fun, cool and celebrated. He also believes that advances in technology enable us all to be filmmakers.
In this interview, Greg explores how he scored sponsorships from multimillion-dollar companies, the technical nitty-gritty of creating TV shows and what flying experimental planes can teach you about filmmaking.
Lee Bob Black: Tell me about your show.
Greg Roden: “Food Forward TV” is a response to a lot of the problems in our food system. Thankfully, a lot of passionate people are transforming food in America. We found them and profiled them in a positive and solution-oriented way.
LBB: You wear lots of hats. You’re the director, showrunner and executive producer. What have you learned about creating a TV series?
GR: Creating a series from scratch — especially one that’s independently produced for PBS instead of, say, for cable — is exhausting and terrifying. But it’s also exhilarating and rewarding.
I’ve learned hundreds of things. One thing relates to the creative process of editing. I learned how to trust people to get the job done. Deep down, I want to do it all. But as much as I want to manage every step of the process, it’s physically impossible. I can’t be everywhere at all times. With several editors working on different episodes all at the the same time — we’re all hunkered down in the editing studio in my apartment — I learned that I had to give my team the vision and the structure so they can do their best work. The key is for me to communicate the big picture so that my team can execute that on the screen. It’s more than just delegating and letting go of control. It’s empowering people.
My father builds experimental planes. So I think a lot about how creating a TV show is like building a plane. One of the pitfalls of building planes is the urge to constantly improve your process, but doing it in a way that prevents finishing the actual plane. In flying, it has to be good enough to not fall out of the sky. In television production, it has to be good enough to pass editorial muster with our distribution partner, PBS, and also our own high editorial standards.
The analogy of flight is also helpful in terms of perspective. From a plane at 1,000 feet, you can still see the people on the ground. As you climb in altitude, you get further and further from the earth and the perspective changes. When you apply that to filmmaking, especially in post-production, it’s like looking at your timeline and being able to zoom in and out of the edit. Look at one shot, one scene, or many scenes. The further out you zoom, the more complete and whole the episode appears. So up at 60,000 feet, you’re looking at 13 episodes all at once, and you’re able to see the complete vision for the series.
LBB: For your show, you interviewed a wide variety of people, from a rancher to a CEO to a wild food expert to the secretary of agriculture. What tips do you have for filmmakers that want to interview people who might seem to be out of their reach?
GR: It takes commitment, persistence, but also finesse. It’s the art of persuasion. For the secretary of agriculture to become available, I presented an opportunity that would be beneficial for him, not just for me — communicating to millions of people on public television about things that are important to him. The key is to present people with opportunities they can’t get from anyone else.
LBB: Over one million people watched your Food Forward TV pilot on PBS. How did you go from that one episode to raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to selling 13 more episodes to PBS?
We knew that most shows on PBS aren’t typically paid for by PBS but rather by grants or foundations. That money is really competitive. Obviously, corporate America has more money, and we wanted to build a show that would be a good fit for the right brands. Our current sponsors are Chipotle, Applegate, Clif Bar, Annie’s, and Lundberg Family Farms. I played the long game. I got on their radar and stayed there. My job is to be politely persistent. I’ve been called a shameless optimist. I like that. Especially when it gets results. After many months of courting Chipotle, I finally met their marketing group in New York. They basically said, “Hey, we appreciate your tenacity, sorry it took us so long to get around to this. Your show looks great.”
LBB: After “Food Forward TV” came out, how was it received?
GR: More than 80% of PBS stations carried the pilot, which was great. We were nominated for a James Beard Award, which is like the Oscars of the food world. We were up against Tony Bourdain’s “Mind Of A Chef.” He didn’t win so it was okay that we didn’t win.
LBB: In filmmaking, what separates good from great?
GR: The people watching the film are always going to be the judge of good versus great. That said, I can give you my versions. Good filmmaking is entertaining and educational. Great filmmaking is all that, plus the ability to pull the viewer out of their seat. It’s compelling and hypnotic … and riveting. You can’t turn away from it. And each time you re-watch a great film, you see something new.
LBB: Who are your filmmaking heroes? Who do you follow for inspiration and learning?
GR: The Coen brothers, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Herzog, Hitchcock, Kubrick. These are the mavericks that have defined cinema, for me. My obsession with film started when my father gave me permission to stay up late on school nights to watch classic films like Dr. Strangelove. But it wasn’t until college that I learned to deconstruct all of the elements that go into making a movie. Writing, producing, acting, directing, lighting, set design, props, mise-en-scene [all the camera sees in a shot], everything. I took the same class for four semesters where the instructor, Greg Kahn, would show a different classic film each week, and we learned how to see what works in the narrative structure, character arc, everything that affects the emotional response of the viewer. Each element of filmmaking is a craft, but it’s the director’s job to pull all of that together into a work of art.
A pivotal moment in my career was when I attended a class taught by Berkeley documentarian Les Blank. He showed a packed classroom Burden of Dreams which is perhaps his best film. Afterwards, he said he wanted each of us to write a paper about our dreams and the burdens of those dreams. That was the spark that lit a fire in me. I had wanted to go to El Salvador to make a documentary, but I didn’t know how, and people were telling me that I shouldn’t go to a country in war. And Les Blank, in a very real way, made me rethink what was possible. So I maxed out my credit card, went there, and interviewed guerrilla fighters, refugees, you name it.
LBB: Your editing room is filled with computers, monitors, external drives and lists pinned to the wall. What are some of the applications that you and your team use to turn hundreds of hours into 13 episodes that are 24 minutes each?
GR: Right when we were setting up production, Apple stopped supporting Final Cut 7. They had moved to Final Cut X, but it’s more of a consumer-facing platform. So we were lucky that Adobe Premiere Pro had graduated to a high-end professional editing platform. The Adobe Creative Cloud Suite of applications is the brain and heart of our operation. Our main editing tool is Adobe Premiere but we also use Photoshop, Lightroom, After Effects, and Illustrator.
LBB: What’s one “Food Forward TV” episode that you’re particularly proud of?
GR: For the school lunch episode, I spoke with Betti Wiggins, who is in charge of all of the food in Detroit’s public schools. She’s a true food rebel. She’s ripping up unused playing fields and turning them into prosperous mini farms. The kids are growing the food and cooking the food. She’s using food as a way to help rejuvenate Detroit. She’s got this great quote: “The USDA gives me a set of rules. But they don’t tell me how to play the game.” That relates to how she’s using federal money in ways to ensure that every student in Detroit, regardless of their background or situation, gets fed. And therein learning begins.
Also for that episode, I spoke with Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture. He walked me through the Farm Bill and the history of how the government feeds people. He talked about an amazing yet little known fact that the school lunch program was created to ensure that the country would have enough soldiers fit to fight. President Truman created the School Lunch Act [of 1946] to feed youngsters because, back then, one in four males were ineligible for military service because they were malnourished. They were too lean to be fighting machines. Now, we have the opposite problem. Children are getting too many calories and many young men are too fat to fight.
LBB: In filmmaking, there’s a lot of jargon. I’m thinking of words like assemblies, rough cuts, and final cuts. Can you explain some of the process that you go through creating an episode?
GR: I’ll give it a try. We do an ingest, which is importing the video into Adobe. Then we do string-outs of all the footage. We then take those string-outs, with or without a paper cut, and assemble the story as chronologically and simply as possible so that the basic pieces are kind of in the right order. Then we move from an assembly to a rough cut where we frame up the story. In some cases, we’ll do up to 20 versions of rough cuts before we get the story right. Then we do a fine cut. Then we lock picture, which means no more moving of the pieces editorially, then it’s cut for time and cut down to the frame. Then we do a bunch of finish editing that leads to the final mastering. We send the final locked picture out for a sound mix in an export OMF format. We also send the picture out for color. Then we remarry the picture, drop in our sponsor pod, drop in the final graphics, animations, archives, or stills. We up-res from 23.98 frames per second to 29.97 frames per second. We print that to a tape, which we send out for closed captioning. We do a final QC, or quality control. Then it ships to PBS.
Greg Roden is the executive producer, director, and co-creator of “Food Forward TV.” He has worked in TV and print journalism as a photographer, writer, director and producer for more than 20 years. He won the International Television and Video Association (ITVA) “Best Documentary” award for his coverage of the Sandinista elections in Nicaragua.
Notes related to this interview:
- Two of the five sponsors of “Food Forward TV” were Applegate Farms and Chipotle Mexican Grill. In 2012, Applegate had “almost $200 million in revenues,” according to Donna Fenn, “How I Did It: Stephen McDonnell of Applegate Farms,” Inc Magazine, Oct 30, 2012; archive. In 2013, Chipotle had revenues of US$3.21 billion according to (A) Brendan Mathews, “Chipotle’s Recipe for Success,” The Motley Fool, April 21, 2014, archive; and (B) “Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2013 Results,” press release.
- Will Harris, Rancher at White Oak Pastures, “Food Rebel: Will Harris.”.
- Yolanda Soto, CEO & President of Borderlands Food Bank, “Food Rebel: Yolanda Soto.”
- Langdon Cook, wild food expert, forager, and author of Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager, “Food Rebel: Langdon Cook.”
- “Food Forward” was nominated for the 2013 James Beard Award for best documentary. “Food Forward” is on page 4 of “2013 James Beard Award Nominees” (PDF); archive.
- Greg Kahn was a film professor at San Diego State University for twenty years, according to Molokai Arts Center’s “Meet the Board” page; archive.
- In 2014, Betti Wiggins was the Executive Director of the Child Nutrition Program at Detroit Public Schools (DPS); “Food Rebel: Betti Wiggins.”
