To Bloomington: The Making of 'The Making of a John Mellencamp Album'

These telecommunications students are, according to their professor, "the top... for whatever particular focus they were into the class to do." The class they had signed up for -- more than signed up for, as they had to apply, and on the application tell why they wanted to be in the class and what talents they could bring to the class -- is a demanding, senior-level course in which they would combine their individual talents to create one final project. This semester, though, their professor had a surprise for them, a challenge that surpassed in difficulty of the projects of previous semesters, and went far beyond what any of them had expected the class to be.\nOn the first day of the spring 2003 semester of Documentary Video Production, Professor Ron Osgood told his class of 16 students that he had a unique proposal for them. The class, as described in the syllabus, was one in which students would pitch ideas for a documentary, one idea would be selected, and the students would spend the rest of the semester working on turning that idea into a completed documentary. But Osgood hadn't brought in the syllabus, because he wanted to know if the students would be willing to deviate from that plan: would they be willing to forgo the ability to choose their subject in exchange for the chance to play for much higher stakes?\nA week earlier, he had been approached by Tim Elsner, local business manager for John Mellencamp. Elsner said Mellencamp would soon begin work on a new album, called Trouble No More, and was Osgood interested in shooting documentary footage of the recording sessions? Osgood was interested in theory, but, because of his obligations to Indiana University, he was unable to commit the time necessary, unable to "camp out and move into the studio, basically, from maybe noon until midnight for a minimum of a month." Still, he was unwilling to let this sort of an opportunity slide by without a struggle, so he offered up a counterproposal: his Documentary Video Production class would take on the task, and create a finished documentary for Mellencamp, produced and directed by Osgood. Mellencamp agreed to the idea, and now Osgood was bringing the idea before the class that would have to do the work. Were they interested? \n"We were all like, 'Yes!'" student Will Deloney says. Professor Osgood adds that although people in their late teens and early twenties -- the age group of the students in the class -- are not the typical John Mellencamp fans, they almost unanimously felt "this is a great opportunity, so we went forward and started the project."\nWith the help of photographers Ron Prickle and Jason Pear and audio engineer Stuart Norton, all three professionals from local public television station WTIU, the students shot over 100 hours of footage of Mellencamp and his band recording at the studio in Belmont, Indiana. While there, the students were impressed both with how friendly Mellencamp was to them, and also with the professional attitude everyone maintained. "The album was really recorded so smoothly," student Matt Bockelman says "They recorded songs, just cranking them out every day — they had worked through everything so well that they knew what they wanted everything to sound like and they didn't really have any big problems."\nThis band cohesiveness that worked so well for Mellencamp proved a problem for the students once all the footage had been shot. Those on the writing team, people charged with organizing the footage into a comprehensible, gripping narrative, found themselves confronting a story with no drama. Student John Bava, who served on the writing team, contrasts it to Wilco's documentary, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," in which a band member is fired. Nothing so drastic happened during the making of Trouble No More, so the writers focused on turmoil from outside the band.\nThe song "To Washington," which Mellencamp has released ahead of the album through his Web site, www.mellencamp.com, became the focal point of the album. The song has a message that "if you're just complacent and just allow anything to happen that the government says is correct, you're not doing your American duty," Bockelman says. Despite this, the song drew attention for a perceived anti-patriotic slant. Bava says this controversy is what gave the documentary the conflict and structure it needed, with the first part being about the recording process, the second following the "media discussion" and the third part focusing on Mellencamp's own opinions on world events.\nWith this script in hand and those themes in mind, the editors moved in to four editing bays in a room on the first floor of the Telecommunications Building and set to work. After working for a week, they discovered conflict was not something confined to the story they were working on: they faced criticism from the documentary's subject. Mellencamp came in to view a sample they had made up for him, and left the editors and Professor Osgood wondering what they were going to do. They soon got over the natural inclination to resent criticism, and looked objectively at what Mellencamp had said. After all, Bockelman says, "it's the same way he ... is with his band ... he'd say, 'You're doing it all wrong, do it this way,' and it would come out sounding better." Although he had only viewed a sample, many of the problems he had with the sample were valid for the documentary as a whole -- for instance, the pacing was off, the story didn't move like it should. "He's very demanding," says Osgood of Mellencamp, "And he knows what he wants -- he's got a good eye, and he's very intelligent, and when he makes a comment ... you have to be humble and listen." The team sighed and returned to their editing bays, and two days later they had a new rough cut that elicited a complementary response from Mellencamp, and only a few, smaller comments such as, Osgood says, "he said this cut here, I would suggest starts a second sooner, that kind of detail." Says Bockelman of Mellencamp's criticism, "He's pushing us to a level of professionalism that I think none of us have ever really been to or even strived to be at, because we're students." He says he feels the class has benefited from the experience of working on a full-scale documentary and being held up to rigorous, professional standards.\nWhile editors are still working to piece it together, the documentary Trouble No More: The Making of a John Mellencamp Album is scheduled to air on WTIU at 9 p.m June 7, and at 4:30 p.m. June 8, WTIU has three other unscheduled viewings, and then, Osgood says, "John Mellencamp owns the rights to the video and is currently in the process of marketing it. There's a tentative national broadcast for July . . . there's going to be a DVD, we think, that he'll market and sell as well"