Driving the Legacy

I got a call on a Friday night from Nelson Hernandez, a fellow producer at Cafeteria Films. We were sending a small travel crew to 4 cities in 10 days to shoot interviews for a documentary on HBCUs and the Battle of the Bands. A producer dropped out of the shoot and they needed a replacement before Monday. I took the job because I tend to say “yes” to adventure, and I was hauling my luggage through Miami International Airport before sunrise on Monday morning.

I met up with our crew, consisting of our DP, Art Nobo, camera ops, Danny Rosenberg and Chris Campa, and our audio tech Johnathan Lopez. Between all of us, we had 25 pelican cases of gear we had to check at the gate. People stared at us through every airport we traveled to and tried to guess what we did for a living.

We landed in Greensboro. NC for our first round of interviews at North Carolina A&T. We learned a lot about the history of the school; they have a brick wall preserved with bullet holes from 1969 when the National Guard shot at the dorm on campus to suppress a student protest. We also learned about the school’s rich musical history within the context of the Battle of the Bands and it was a blast watching them play.

I took on many roles during production, including ingesting and organizing all our footage, coordinating vehicle rentals and travel logistics, going on coffee and lunch runs, helping set up and striking sets, and facilitating communication between our crew and campus staff. I also learned how much I take for granted living in a major metropolitan area. Our shoots were mostly in rural areas; I often had to travel 20-40 miles whenever going on coffee/crafty/lunch runs and wifi is hard to come by.

We traveled to Baton Rouge, as tornadoes ripped across neighboring states. An elderly woman on our flight showed me a picture of an upside-down car on the roof of her house. “That’s what I’m going home to,” she said. I shared that I spent my first year in kindergarten as a hurricane refugee. I lost my house to Hurricane Andrew, so we spent the time trauma bonding as the flight experienced severe turbulence; it felt like we landed moving sideways.

I Ubered to a car rental location 40 minutes away while the crew waited at the airport. As tornado warnings blared on my phone, I acquired a minivan, picked up the crew, and our gear, and shuttled everyone to our hotel room right before the severe thunderstorms rolled in. Being from Miami, I’m accustomed to working around the chaos of weather. The next two days of shooting went smoothly, all things considered. I saw the Mississippi River for the first time and the food in Louisiana is unmatched.

We got to the Baton Rouge airport in time for our flight, but it ended up getting delayed due to the weather. We killed time in the airport lounge, telling production war stories to the amusement of nearby patrons. We finally boarded our flight and landed in ATL for our connecting flight to Gainesville, but that flight too, was delayed due to severe weather. Our weather-beaten crew dragged our luggage through the airport to the TGI Friday’s and, once again, told production war stories for the next few hours, to the amusement of nearby patrons. We landed in Gainesville at 3 am to a booming college town with students partying the night away. My windows rattled from the bass produced by nearby bars and passing cars. Call time was in 4 hours.

We shot interviews with the band director and members of the Marching 100 at FAMU the next morning. Despite the sleep deprivation, our two-day shoot went great. Gainesville was abundant with resources; crafty and coffee runs were easily executed with the help of PAs we hired on campus.

We boarded a flight before sunrise in Gainesville, caught a connecting flight in Dallas, and landed in Houston in the evening. Then we drove 40 miles west to a Comfort Inn located in Waller, Texas, population 2,796. This was, by far, the most rural location of the trip. Our hotel was located next to the only highway in a hundred-mile radius and you can see straight to the horizon in any direction; the only other occupants of our hotel were oil rig workers.

We arrived on Prairie View A&M’s campus the following morning. We only had a day to shoot because it was a weekend, and the school was mostly empty. We got a wonderful interview with the band director and some of his students and wrapped early. It was Danny’s birthday, so we drove into Houston to an authentic Texas steak house and ate our respective weights in red meat. The place had a taxidermy bear and vintage guns decorating the walls. It was everything we ever wanted out of a trip to Texas.

The next morning, we grabbed some breakfast sandwiches at Buc-ee’s. We each bought over $100 in merch, as we found our first Buc-ee’s experience to be delightful. We’ve learned the value of having a gargantuan convenience store in the middle of nowhere. Having conquered every obstacle on our journey, we were feeling victorious but were eager to make it home.

Back in Miami, I was tasked with editing the footage into 3 different episodes. Working alongside Carlos Dominicis and MariaVictoria Duque, the three of us formed a post-production team. We organized all the footage using logical naming conventions, transcribed all the interviews, and made b-roll selects. As lead editor at Cafeteria, I was also responsible for making the final passes on each episode, polishing every shot, and perfecting the pacing of the edit and the timing of music.

The three episodes were released in 2022 on Honda Battle of the Band’s official website and YouTube channel. It was received with high acclaim from music lovers and historians alike.