Exploring ethics with the Westminster Town Hall Forum

The Westminster Town Hall Forum has been bringing serious people to a Minneapolis pulpit since 1980, and I have been listening to the broadcasts on MPR for about as long as I have lived here. So when the Forum asked for a series of videos around its season on ethics, I said yes before I heard the budget.

We interviewed NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg and former Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page, two people who have spent their lives thinking carefully about right and wrong. Lindsey Seavert led the interviews. I lit and shot them with two cameras so Renny McCauley would have options in the edit, and we stayed out of the way while MPR's engineers did their thing for the live broadcast. Watching a radio crew capture a room that cleanly is its own kind of education.

The deliverables were practical: a website banner video that plays silently and still makes sense, a set of vertical social highlights, and a longer short documentary that lets the conversation breathe. That mix, a hero piece plus the cuts that actually get seen on phones, is what most Minneapolis organizations need from a video shoot now, and we plan for it on set rather than trying to crop it in afterward.

The privilege of this job is meeting people who have thought harder than you have. The craft is making sure the light and sound are good enough that nobody notices the camera was there.