Una Pura Verdad – A Simple Truth – is a Photographic Narrative of New Mexico by Daniel Milnor. In September 2012 Daniel asked me if I would film a mini-documentary about his long-term New Mexico photographic project. I am happy and proud to now be able to release the documentary movie Una Pura Verdad.

Una Pura Verdad Credits

• Directed, filmed and edited by yours truly, Flemming Bo Jensen.
• Original soundtrack music composed and performed by David Goldberg of Santa Fe, NM.
• Additional Zozobra footage by Amy Kawadler (you nailed it! and thanks for the equipment).
• Audio mixed at Moremax Studios in Copenhagen by Frederik Birket-Smith – thanks so much my friend.
• And a big thank you to my friend Laura Gerwin and her family who let me use their holiday home in Santa Fe as my editing base. Most of the editing took place over 8 days around the clock in this great house.
• Thanks to Charlene Winfred for great constructive feedback

Making of Una Pura Verdad

The movie was filmed over a period of 4 days in New Mexico, September 2012. True documentary guerrilla shooting. I basically stalked Daniel with a camera like a fly–well not on the wall– but Daniel’s shoulder. Shot entirely handheld, on a Canon 5D Mk II, primarily on the great run-and-gun doco Canon lens 24-105mm f/4 IS. Audio was captured on a Zoom H1 recorder mounted on the camera. We used the Zoom with a lav-mic for the recording of the voice-over.

There was very little time to prepare for this shoot, but I had some rough ideas in my mind. I wanted it to feel cinematic, to look cinematic and to have a stream-of-consciousness style voiceover instead of the standard talking-head interview style. Daniel is a master storyteller and it was important to me that his narration, his storytelling in raw unscripted form was the driving factor. I also wanted the movie to be as much about New Mexico as our hero. My decision to not record any interview shots did add a few extra challenges in editing, as you cannot just cut to a talking head when you go from one scene to the next, but I am happy I stuck to my idea.

The very important voiceover is a story I pieced together from hours of recording Daniel. I basically had Daniel sit alone, turn on the audio recorder and record stories about himself, the project and New Mexico. Then I listened to hours of audio over and over and over again (NOT recommended if you want to stay sane!) and wrote down all the bits I really loved. I then assembled the voiceover from small stories, small snippets. Sometimes just a sentence here and there and pieced all of this together and created the final voiceover for the film. Took a lot of time but I wanted a non scripted raw voiceover.

I edited entirely in Adobe Premiere, the movie only has minimal colour grading using Premiere’s fast color corrector, wanted a raw documentary look to the movie. Entire movie is shot handheld, some clips stabilized in Premiere.

David Goldberg, a Santa Fe based photographer and musician composed and performed the beautiful original score, thanks David, a great collaboration. Have a look at David’s music website – and also his photography.

I arranged and mixed all the sound effects, voiceover and music – these final tracks were then exported and brought into the amazing Moremax Studios in Copenhagen where my friend Frederik Birket-Smith worked his magic on the audio resulting in truly crisp gorgeous sounding audio. Thanks so much Frederik.

I have been involved in documentaries before but just as a camera man. Being the first documentary I directed, edited, filmed and produced I made hundreds of errors, good old fashioned learning-by-failing. But many things also worked out well, I loved working on this movie. I have poured hundreds maybe thousands of hours into it and I am happy with the result. I feel it is one of the best things I have ever done and am pumped for more.

Thanks to everyone involved in Una Pura Verdad, it was truly a labour of love for me, and more documentaries and movies will definitely be forthcoming.

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This post was originally written by Flemming Bo Jenson. For more stories, be sure to follow our blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel.