Sprouting Seeds

Local filmmakers bring botany to life with a new web series

Story by Elizabeth Piseczny

Photos courtesy of Plattsburgh.edu and Betty Lavoie

An acorn has only a one in ten thousand chance of growing into an oak tree. A great idea becoming a reality risks about the same chances. But for web show Growing Better, the odds are looking good. Now, with only two episodes, the award-winning series concentrating on plant life, is not only "growing better," but stronger.

Growing Better, a webisode series dreamed up by botanist Chris Martine, waited years to come to fruition. Still in its early stages, Martine hopes the show will do for plants what most nature programming does for animals.

"I grew up watching a lot of nature programming on television and always loved all those nature shows,"says Martine, a biology professor at SUNY Plattsburgh. "I find that now with my own kids and their friends, they often talk about what they’re seeing on Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel and I can’t help but notice that all of those shows are all about animals. Being a botanist, I felt as if somehow the plants were somehow getting left out of the fun."

So, Martine, the writer and host of Growing Better, came up with the concept of television programming that would show how enchanting plant life can be. "I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had plant related programming that would maybe eventually be just as exciting, just as engaging, just as interesting as the animal shows that are already out there?’"he says.

But just like a seed waiting dormant, Growing Better lacked the perfect conditions to really take off. Then, when Martine moved to Plattsburgh, NY in 2006, a chance meeting put the conditions in his favor. "I had this idea for years and I went to a neighborhood party when we first moved to Plattsburgh,"remembers Martine. "So Deb, the host, said, "Hey, Chris, this is David Fleming. He’s a producer."And within about thirty seconds, I was telling him my idea for a botany show. He could have easily dismissed the idea, but it turns out he has an interest in gardening, in plants, that comes from his family. So it ended up being a pretty good match.”

"Being a botanist, I felt as if somehow the plants were somehow getting left out of the fun.”

"I started to learn from talking to him that he had a real passion for botany, and more than that, his personality could pull off something a little extra special,"Fleming says of his intitial interactions with Martine. Fleming, a commercial producer for a local Plattsburgh news station, turned out to be the missing ingredient that allowed Growing Better to get off the ground.

Together, Martine and Fleming handled all the necessary work that goes into creating and producing the show. Fleming works behind the scenes, running the camera and managing the audio engineering, while Martine writes and hosts the show.

"It's a lot of fun being behind the camera, in this case, because I'm the just a one man band,"Fleming explains.

Although producing the show, which typically is about five or six minutes long, is a lot of work, Fleming enjoys having input in the creative process. "There's a real advantage to putting it together myself, as well, because I don't have to shoot it and hand it off to an editor and say here's what to do,"he says.

Just as the pilot episode had been finished, Martine discovered Chlorofilms, a competition that hopes to make plant biology more interesting and accessible to the public by bringing plant-related video content to the internet. The Chlorofilms website says, "Our objective is to promote the creation of fresh, attention-getting and informative video content about plant life and to make the best of these videos easy to find from a single website.”

The pilot episode delved into the topics of oak trees, their growth and their nuts, more commonly known as acorns, in "The Oaks."So, Martine and Fleming were pleasantly surprised when it was posted as a prime example of what kind of submissions Chlorofilms was hoping for.

"It was neat because when they posted the contest online, they put our first video up as an example of what a good botany video would look like. So, we were really excited,"says Martine of their initial reaction to the contest.    

Being honored as a model for a good botany video inspired the two man team to work on a new video to submit to the contest. The video series grew with an installation about the adaptation of some plants to hold onto their seeds until they will have the highest chances of survival, which he explores in "Serotiny in Jack Pines.”

"It's a very well done video, and it should have won first place."

"There must have been some pretty good ones that came in because we ended up getting second place. Hopefully we inspired someone to do some really good stuff,"Martine says.

Fleming remembers being very critical when viewing his work, but still believes "it's a very well done video, and it should have won first place."He believes Martine's personality is the primary draw for new Growing Better viewers. "He’s got real talent," Fleming says. "To be honest with you, I feel fortunate to work with him."

"He gets people to learn about it and to remember it,"says Josh Domenico, a junior ecology student at Plattsburgh State and member of the Botany Club under Martine’s advisement.

Martine, it seems, is "the same in videos, in class, in person,"carrying his engaging personality to all parts of his life," says biology student Betty Lavoie.

Growing Better is still a seedling, but Martine hopes to expand the series and make a larger impact by filming enough episodes to pitch a season of the show to Mountain Lake, the local PBS station in the North Country. For now, Fleming and Martine hope to continue pitching ideas to each other, hoping to make unique videos about topics that aren’t often covered.

As for now, the series will continue to bloom with the production of more webisodes. "It hasn’t exactly gone viral but it’s neat that people are watching it,"he says of the success of the series. "And the second one is at 750 views. So, that’s 750 more people than would have come to my class, ya know?" he says with a laugh.  "I’m hoping that I’m educating other people outside of what I can do in a lecture hall."

What's your take on the Growing Better series?