Greening of the Guard
COM student part of documentary crew filming National Guard green initiatives
Megan Masur was sitting in class with her phone on silent this fall when she got the voice mail she had been waiting for all summer. The message was from Dreaming Tree Films: Masur was one of the 16 students, chosen from a pool of 1,500 applicants, to help create a documentary on the National Guard. The College of Communication film major had applied by writing a couple of essays about why she wanted to be picked and why she likes doing film.
“I wasn’t intimidated as much as I was excited,” says Masur (COM’11). “I got to work with producers who have been in the industry for years. Just to hear about it and picture myself doing it someday was exciting.”
The National Guard Docs Program selected young people from 17 to 22 for its four film crews. The young filmmakers traveled to Minnesota, Nevada, South Carolina, and Texas to explore the Guard’s green programs and produce a documentary.
Masur spent seven days, September 29 to October 5, at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, filming, interviewing, and researching with her team of three other students.
Their focus was on the Guard’s Artificial Reef-X Deployment Program, in which the shells of tanks are dropped into the ocean to create coral reefs. Masur sailed out of Charleston with a National Guard crew to the area the tanks were dumped, where she saw tanks that had already formed reefs, as well as tanks being dumped. What was once a sandy ocean bottom with a hunk of metal was now an abundant reef.
“We had to have a camera in the officers’ faces nearly 24/7,” she says. “They were good about it.”
The documentary is scheduled to be released in December or January.
Anna Webster can be reached at annaweb@bu.edu.
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