Minnesota Housing: a short documentary on home and hope
Forty-five minutes on the simplest big idea there is: everyone needs a home.
Minnesota Housing, the state's housing finance agency, asked for something more ambitious than a promotional video: a real documentary about what a home means to the people the agency serves. We made a forty-five-minute film with Commissioner Jennifer Ho and families from across the state.
Lindsey Seavert produced. I shot and edited. We traveled from the Twin Cities to small towns in greater Minnesota, filming people in the first weeks of new homes and in the long stretches before. The format gave us room to slow down, which is the thing most commissioned video never allows and the thing audiences respond to most.
A film like this is a Tiny Window production, start to finish. But it also shows what a single cinematographer can carry on a long project: consistency of look across dozens of locations and months of shooting, and an edit that knows what was shot because the same person was there for all of it.
