In the final documentary, you’ll see people carefully harvesting their plants one branch at a time, selecting each branch when the flowers are at their peak potency and cutting in such a way as to make post-harvest processing efficient. Typically, the tops are harvested first then, days or even weeks later, there is a second cut after the smaller flowers have matured fully. After that, the third harvest is usually the tiny “larfy” flower clusters that become tinctures, oils or concentrates.
One Plant Harvest from Downtown Dailies on Vimeo.
I felt I needed one scene that presented a picture of the harvest of an entire plant, even if doing so wasn’t the way it is actually done in practice, so I set up this video with the trim crew and we took one plant to the ground. Afterward, they had to rapidly pick off the big leaves and hang the plants before they got wilty and hard to process. Normally, only as much as could be quickly processed would be clipped off at once.
I set up the camera on a tripod, with lines marking out the visible frame scratched into the ground. One person would step in and cut a branch. Then the next person would wait one second and cut the next branch and so on. The whole process that took about half an hour in real time has been cut down to a minute and a half by Gretta, the film’s editor.
If you’d like to see more of this and the rest of the documentary, make a contribution and help us finish the edit. Till December 29th, 2012, you can contribute to our Kickstarter.com campaign. Or, anytime, you can send contributions directly. For any contribution, you’ll get your name on the Thank You page (coming soon) here on the website and for any contributions of $100 or more, you’ll get a thank you in the film credits. (Be sure to let me know if you want that.)
Thanks,
Mikal