From Snowstorm to Screen: PBS NC Director Morgan Potts Describes the Making of Swan Song
I, Bernie Harberts, did not use generative AI to write or illustrate this article. Spell check and grammar check, yes. AI, no.
During a snowy winter storm that buried eastern North Carolina in a once-in-twenty-years storm, my mule Polly and I set off in a hundred year old covered wagon to explore Hyde County and Lake Mattamuskeet.
Joining us was a film crew from PBS North Carolina. Mule Polly got snowed in in our covered wagon, the film crew struggled to keep their cameras rolling in the icy conditions but in the end, they produced a documentary masterpiece, Swan Song. This is the story of how Swan Song got made.
Swan Song premiered on PBS NC. You can stream Swan Song for free on PBS and YouTube.
Making Swan Song With Morgan Potts
In this audio recording, I interviewed director Morgan Potts about how he came up with the idea of sending mule Polly and I off in the middle of winter to explore a giant, largely unknown lake. Morgan and I go way back. He booked me as a guest on D.G. Martin’s NC Book Watch in 2005. Then, in 2013, he and a PBS NC film crew followed me through Pamlico County as I interviewed fishermen, farmers and net makers for a piece called Mule Rider. Mule Rider won an Emmy Award for Morgan. You can watch it here.
The PBS NC film crew included Morgan Potts, Brooks Bennett, Mike Milstead, Emily Frachtling, and Sadie Maddock.
If you’re a fan of PBS, documentaries, or are interested in making your own movies, this is a must-hear interview.
Links:
More from this ramble at North Carolina Mule Rambles.
The full transcript of Morgan’s and my chat is below.
The speakers are:
- Morgan Potts (PBS NC)
- Bernie Harberts (me)
Note: transcript is a rough approximation of our conversation so be prepared to forgive the occasional spelling/grammatical/formatting errors. Dialogue has been lightly edited to improve readability
Bernie Harberts How did you come onto the idea of doing a piece on Lake Mattamuskeet?
Morgan Potts (01:07) I was born and raised down East North Carolina and I’ve got family, extended family, that live in Englehard, Hyde County. And so I grew up going to visit them and we would never really go out and visit it much but we’d always drive by the lodge and it’s always had this haunting feel to me. Yeah, it’s almost like a memory that just would pop up. But it didn’t make sense just because I didn’t understand what the place was. But you would still see the imagery of it. It would play out my dreams and I never made sense. And I never really got the full story about what it was.
I grew up and started telling stories. And I realized, hey, this is a pretty amazing bit of history here and it’s still standing in Hyde County. But I was contacted by my cousin, Suzanne, who lives in Englehard. It’s been almost two years now. And she said, hey, you should come do a story on it. So I just tucked that into my back pocket as far as this is something I needed to check out.
So I did and I was like, oh, this would be fascinating to tell the story of this lodge that was built to drain Lake Mattamuskeet and it’s still standing. And they want to turn it into a community center and all that good stuff. Great for the county. But I really couldn’t figure out how to go about telling that story. It’s a lot of history.
And I thought about it was, okay, how are we going to do this? What’s going to be the voice? I mean, am I going to be the one telling the story?
And I didn’t think that’d be such a good idea. So I thought, how about my friend Bernie? We’ve been looking for this adventure. It’s flat land. It’s wide open. The destination is there. It’s the lodge. It’s just like, how could we start? Where would you start from? What’s the route? What’s the adventure? And I think I sent you an email and I said, Bernie, what do think of this? And I mean, you fired back pretty quickly.
Bernie Harberts Yeah, I wrote your right back. Hell yeah!
Morgan Potts (03:02) You said you had a memory of your grandfather holding his hand on the causeway. And I got chills soon as I just read that one sentence of you having that memory. And that was enough for launch. I could tell you were invested in just because you had that childhood memory of that and you were gonna get into that
Bernie Harberts Because it goes to the core of everything I love. Nature, animals, outdoor, traveling, by hoof and wagon, when possible. But you’d already thought about the logistics of doing a mule thing with like the mountain roads and stuff.
Morgan Potts And that just scared me to death. I remember talking to Sadie who was on the trip and I talked to her probably months before that because she had just gotten there. She’s an associate producer and I was like, I did do one called Mule Rider and you know what I probably won’t do another one of those. And then the next month we’re saddling up, you know, getting ready to go to Hyde County.
Bernie Harberts (04:46) Talk to me a little bit about the logistics of going down to set up, finding people, places, finding stuff that’s usable but not fakey fakey. You and I made a trip down, but you did a lot of work before that.
Morgan Potts I reached out to the Mattamuskeet Lodge Society and obviously I needed their blessing to film there. I needed the blessing of the Mattamuskeet Wildlife Refuge because they typically don’t let people film there. One story I heard is like Charles Kuralt wanted to camp out on the refuge and write poems. And they were like, nah you can’t do that. So I think he had to go to Englehard and camp out somebody’s front yard and do it.
Bernie Harberts So Charles Kuralt got bumped! Wow. But we did not.
Morgan Potts So I went down and met Kelly Davis, big bird lover. So she was like our main contact. I went down there and got a tour of the lodge. I was like, this is going to be fascinating. But you know, the lodge is just this big cavernous empty place that’s full of memories. You know, we need to lead up to it. We need story before we get to that.
And we just went around a little bit and toured the area and just threw around some ideas. But I remember when you and I went back there to start scoping out a potential plan. I remember early on there was the Mattamuskeet apple lore story popped up. And I remember it really hit me when we were sitting at lunch. We stopped at lunch in Swan Quarter. And then we got chicken sandwiches or something. But it had been mentioned. And I was like, and tell me that again? So the story of the Mattamuskeet apple, the lore, was just, to me that was what really struck and started this story. So it started with the apple. We were sitting at that little diner.
Morgan Potts (06:06) It was like, that’s gold right there. And we’re like, does anybody have any those apple trees? Sure enough, somebody did.
That became a block for the whole story. It started with the apple. In the doc, you see the apple all the way through. And I tried to play it out several times. Like when you get ready to pass Thomas the apple, you see Walter passing you the apple. You see Betty passing you the apples.
Bernie Harberts (06:17) Amazing. It started with an apple.
Morgan Potts (06:36) Yeah. And that’s about just passing the story down from generation to generation.
Bernie Harberts So that came in the preparation. So you’re already thinking at that point that might be a through line to the apple.
Morgan Potts It starts to percolate. And because it’s such a small, tight-knit area, people know one another. Stories overlap and people overlap and it starts to happen.
Bernie Harberts So how tightly did you hold on to that original idea at that point when we’re filming that?
Morgan Potts We spent the first night at Osprey Nest campground. We needed to kick off the adventure, right? I didn’t use it all, but I think I interviewed you right there on the side of the wagon after you set up your wagon. And in that conversation, you mentioned the fact that, I’m here because of my grandfather, way back. This is Polly’s last adventure. We’re taking together. You told all those massive things, but I really didn’t use those in the opening.
Morgan Potts (07:40) Because I didn’t feel like you needed to yet. The fact that we started off the piece with you talking to the story about your grandfather, that was enough. And that was enough to also see you trying to bed down in a wagon. You didn’t need to say everything else. You’ve got everybody glued because you’re doing something 99 % of us would never do. I don’t need to tell everybody about Polly yet.
Bernie Harberts It’s easy to try to front load it for impatient viewers, but you didn’t do that.
Morgan Potts Maybe you have to do that print, but that’s not the way I do it in video, documentary, storytelling. The first thing I did in editing the story was I got everything, all the footage, and I went through and I harvested every interaction that you and Polly had together. I wanted that to be massive on this story.
Bernie Harberts (09:21) You’ve got all the footage that you found. And then did you watch it all? Did you do it from memory to look for those interactions? Like how did you pull that stuff aside?
Morgan Potts Every day I just build my folders in my post in Premiere in little folders. And so each day got a folder. And then from that, I would break it down into, oh, I don’t know. Osprey Nest Campground. Wake up in the morning. And that helps me slowly break apart this massive amount of footage that I’ve got.
Bernie Harberts Was it wagon stuff or just Bernie-Polly interactions?
Morgan Potts It can be wagon. It can be interaction. I’d have a timeline. And so as I’m whittling through, I’ll watch everything. And then immediately start just tossing things that don’t speak to what we’re doing. You’re looking at stuff and you’re taking pieces and just throwing it into a timeline and just stringing together stuff that catches your eye at that point.
Bernie Harberts So how long would that have been for day one? How long would the timeline have been?
Morgan Potts (11:08) The first whittle at the apple. You and Walter spoke for I think 28 minutes on the Mattamuskeet apple. The sequence of you guys actually talking on camera about that apple. I think it’s like two and a half minutes. We had two camera people on that shoot, but my second camera person hadn’t shown up yet. And the temperature was plummeting. You know, I had to hold camera for that. And literally, felt like my fingers were about to fall off. I was like, there is no way we’re using 90 % of this footage, but we got to let Walter tell, talk about the apple. We got to let you finish talking about the apple.
It was brutal.
One thing that I wanted from that was obviously the story about the Mattamuskeet apple, that lore. It fell from the sky in a bird. In a goose’s gizzard. The first day would be Bernie and Polly. That would be one timeline. And then let’s say on the second day you would have like apple scene or whatever. The first night was Osborne’s campground. That’s a whole timeline. All the footage we shot there strung out. In Premier you have audio layers and video layers. Video that pops out, I’ll stick it up on like a higher video track just so it shows itself.
Pulling footage of Polly and you, I wanted every interaction. So if you go back and look at that before it’s even mentioned that this is Polly’s last ride, when you’re telling Thomas, you can go back and see some of those interactions. They mean more. If you said from the beginning, this is our last ride together, it would steal the show a bit. It’s important and needs to be said and it’s coming. But if you let it out front, you would get maybe too melodramatic about it.
If you go back and look, I include shots that show nice moments with you and Polly, but without hitting you over the head that this is the last time they’re doing this together. But you can see it if you look at those shots. Like right after the apple scene, you’re about to get on the wagon and take off from that spot. You have a moment with Polly right there that nothing is really said. It’s just you’re having a moment before you get in the wagon and you head out.
You sent me footage of your old documentaries that you’d done. So I went through that and I pulled out those shots of you two interacting. You arrive in some place. You go in some place. So those will just be into a timeline, stuff to pull. I didn’t know how I was going to use those.
Bernie Harberts (15:05) How did you select those? Based on the relationship or the feel or the scenery?
Morgan Potts The feel. The feel in general.
It’s like the first time we started seeing those archival clips from your documentary. You’re heading into Fairfield and you’re talking about how you have to knock on doors to find a place to stay. So I just wanted to get you guys walking from place to place together in a different environment other than what we were doing just to show you guys are putting some miles together. Planting the seed to really establish y’all’s relationship.
Bernie Harberts Seems like you have a very definite way of putting things into like day one, a timeline.
Morgan Potts (16:11) We needed to show something at a promo meeting, and they were like what you got? I didn’t have anything. I was just still in trim down this section, trim down this section mode. The apple section is still 10 minutes long. I was like, my God!
Bernie Harberts How long to broadcast? Wasn’t it getting close?
Morgan Potts One month. I mean things were starting to congeal. It’s like it gets to a point where it’s just like this is never gonna come together. But I needed that ping from work saying we want to show something at a meeting tomorrow what you got. So yeah, I just went crazy and just had to take it to another level and that’s when I edited the fruitcake. That was the first thing that was edited with Swan Song and then I was like, okay, let’s build to that.
Bernie Harberts (17:14) It sounds like you had a whole bunch of these timelines. So is that where you started pulling some from this timeline and some that timeline?
Morgan Potts Yeah, because they got to merge, right? They got to get stuck together somehow. And Fruitcake was the beginning of that. And I edited the opening and the whole thing went together non-linearly. I did Fruitcake and I can’t remember what I did next. But it was just cinching all these little mini stories.
If you add up all the stories, I think they’re like four to five minutes apiece. That’s the frame I had to work with to get us to an hour. The first rough cut was 59 minutes and we hadn’t even gotten to the lodge yet and I hadn’t even done an open yet. So I immediately cut 10 minutes out of my first rough cut.
I didn’t show you that to you. Just cause you might get attached to something or whatever and you’re like, what is this? Is this a joke? So I had to share that with the ops and they’re like, who is this Bernie guy? Because the story didn’t make sense yet because I hadn’t done those big pieces yet.
Bernie Harberts I’m starting to see how this got put together.
Morgan Potts (19:06) In the case of Fruitcake, there’s an opening. You’re saying that you don’t really know a place until you’ve met the people. And a guy named Pascal comes by the wagon and says, are you okay in there? And then he asks if you like fruitcake. And then we got this shot of Pascal and you talking about fruitcake. I think that probably happened on different day, and. I just crunched them, you know.
I guess you knew in your head I was talking about fruitcake or was that in a timeline somewhere? Well, you know, just going through all your footage, I just know you’ve done that. And then I saw that footage of Pascal standing by saying, we made fruitcake and, you know, she makes all that with the jars and all this like Dukes. It’s got twang!
Another big thing about this doc is this. What’s really popular these days is slow motion and all that stuff. Which is great. It looks great, usually, when you do slow motion. But you’re not hearing audio that’s taking place. And to me, you’re missing out on a lot. Because a lot of what Swan Song is about is a lot of natural audio occurs that’s not scripted, but it’s gold.
Bernie Harberts (21:18) So you’re building these pieces on the timeline out and then starting to build modular clumps. And do know how they fit together?
Morgan Potts I was fortunate in the fact that we had the route. The route dictates the backbone, the structure of the story. We’re starting north of the lake. We’re going to Fairfield. We’re going to spend the night at the church. And then we’re going down the causeway.
That’s all predetermined. So that’s the road. That’s the road we’re going down. I don’t want to put you meeting Thomas before you get to the church and all that. So when we come across him, it seems to logically play along with the route of the road that leads to the lodge.
Luckily it was not a big long voyage. It was 15 miles? I was a concerned going from our first stop, Osprey Campground, to the apple. Because it was like a mile tops. But in that first leg, I wanted you to establish that, hey, driving on the is risky. You got to watch out for cars and all that. I want to establish that. It’s your first day out on the trip. The roads are salted. It might snow. It might not. Who knows what’s coming? Just tease out little things like that.
You know, these are little checkpoints you want to get structurally or story-wise across before you get to the apples. And then once we left the apple scene heading for Fairfield, the snow is starting to come down. So we pivot more towards what’s actually taking place, like just weather, as opposed to other bullet points you might want to hit.
Bernie Harberts (23:43) Did you have a sense of these, a bunch of these five minutes segments at that point? Or at the end was it like just, I’m going to use that and use that and use that and fill in between? Or was it something totally different?
Morgan Potts Those four or five minute little chunks just started to reveal themselves, like this is a major block in the story. Whether it be the church. I know we had to go in there and spend some time with Betty because we wanted to listen about the stairs, her playing piano and the church. The impetus for the trip, your grandfather.
And then, just driving in the wagon and getting to the apple location. Getting the apple story out. The lore story. And then making it towards your first overnight you’ve been traveling. So I wanted to hear a bit about where you hunker down each night. I wanted to get that out of the way before we get to the church. And then of course when it snows, that pulls the rug out from everything you’ve planned. And you just roll with it at that point.
At that point, I didn’t know what was going to happen. What we were doing. What we planned. Everything that was set up was what we were going to to do and then, like, it snowed six inches. So I thought, I guess he’s still alive at the church. We can’t get to him. But you know, things were still rolling because you had your camera and you were filming and documenting. Those four minutes, you know, they just became four minutes just because they had to be. Just to get through the whole story.
Bernie Harberts (25:29) How long did you originally want to spend at the Mattamuskeet Lodge at the end?
Morgan Potts Originally I wanted to spend 10 minutes on that. You know, we didn’t even mention New Holland, the settlement.
That would have been a whole another four or five minutes easily. What happened in the snow slowed down our trip a little bit. But it demanded time to tell that story because it’s so important.
Bernie Harberts How do you decide what gets killed during the editing process?
Morgan Potts (26:04) There was amazing stuff that we didn’t use. The interactions you had with everybody were so nice. It was so tough to strip them down to the length I did. But I thought they were all instrumental in the story. I had to leave a lot of what I originally set out to do, which is spend a lot of time at the lodge.
What we got was so real that happened in those few days that it’s just like, people want to see this. You can look up history. You can Google history. You can learn all about that lodge. Maybe we introduce people to the lodge that hadn’t known about it and they can learn more about it if they want.
You can’t Google what you did and capture that. That’s a living thing. You interacting with everybody along the way and you can’t write that.
Bernie Harberts (27:17) So tell me about the importance of sound. How did you get that sound and that sonic texture and how did it guide the making and the building of it?
Morgan Potts I wanted to hear lots of birds and just a lot of mule feet clomping. A lot of wagon wheels turning. I wanted that to be a character in the story. I think music is a secret weapon in this particular story. Hopefully it’s not distracting. Hopefully it elevates what you’re seeing without being too much. I didn’t want to do like the adventure-y soundtrack. It’s too melodramatic. I wanted to be a little moody.
Bernie Harberts How would you typically handle the music?
Morgan Potts (28:19) Typically we would source that out and somebody would score it. At PBS I have a music library service where we can go and listen to tracks and download them. So that’s what I did.
It was hard choosing. Out of every song that I ended up using in Swan Song, there are 30 that I didn’t. When I do the big reveal in the snow, you see it snowing out of the wagon. You’re sipping your cup in the wagon and you say, it sounds ike sugar hitting the canvas.
The music does something there and that’s by design. That’s where I put that little swell to happen with the music. The music in that scene started about two minutes earlier. So that music’s building for that one moment to crescendo right there at the snow reveal. And it happened to work where I started way back. So it’s building towards that one particular moment.
Bernie Harberts (29:38) Did you hear that music and think, boom, that’s the snow! I need two minutes off the front of that. Or did you have the scene and then find the music?
Morgan Potts I had to construct the scene first before I got that music. But there were probably 10 other tracks that I was auditioning for that area in the story. I don’t always know immediately, ooh, that’s exactly what I’m gonna use.
Another moment was where you’re talking about the apple and you’re hitting the road and it’s starting to snow. You got a semi coming up behind you. You’re like, let’s hold on a second and let this semi pass. You can barely hear the semi, but you’re hearing an undercurrent of like this drone from the music. It’s just heavy here.
So it’s a foreshadowing – this big truck coming up behind you. But also the impending snow and the edge that that’s bringing. So that’s what that’s layered under there.
Bernie Harberts How do you listen to music for soundtracks?
Morgan Potts (30:53) I probably had six rounds of looking for music for this story. It wasn’t all on same day. The first month I pulled probably 20 tracks and started playing around with those. And a month later, I’ll go hunting again because they all didn’t work. And I’ll just keep doing that.
As far as mixing my stories, once the editing is done, or close to being done, I’ll put on my headphones and listen to the story. And I’ll ask myself, does it hold up just listening to it? If it does, I’ll know that I have something.
Bernie Harberts (31:41) Tell me about the apple animation. It’s a very stripped down, basic little story. And I think it lasts like 30 seconds.
Morgan Potts Originally, I wanted Walter to tell it to us. He mentioned the essence of it. But then I had you tell us the story just so I could get it in the can, so to speak.
When you shared that story, I could just just see the imagery in my head. Even that first day we heard it when we were having lunch, I saw that in my head.
I did a story on Ann Hobgood, who’s a local artist. We have a fairly new hire at PBSNC. She’s very talented with stop motion. And she did a stop motion piece for me for the Ann Hobgood story. And so I knew she could handle something like that. I thought she’d be perfect for doing this animation.
Bernie Harberts So that was an in-house production?
Morgan Potts (32:53) Yeah. And that was not me at all. That was Izzy Daniels who came up with that.
Bernie Harberts. Did you give her parameters? Because I noticed it had a canvas texture. It looked like cutouts. So what were the parameters?
Morgan Potts The parameters were, let’s keep it with the spirit of that bit off shadow puppetry you did early in the show on the side of your wagon. And we used a little bit of that in the story. I wish we could have used the whole bit, but that was one of those things that had to get cut.
I wanted to maintain that look, that aura of, of shadow puppetry on the side of the wagon. So I sent Izzy still frames of what you had done with the shadow puppetry at beginning of the show. I went ahead and had it scored with the music that I’d already picked out for that. It was already in there and I had it edited so it timed out the way it timed out. So it was like, fill this hole with that animation, that story.
I wanted to layer the shot so you see trees in the background and a couple in the foreground.
Bernie Harberts (34:18) You didn’t make it too graphic. That part about cleaning the goose. It’s the only moonwalking Indian I’ve ever seen! The Indian’s feet never touch the ground.
Morgan Potts He’s floating on the Mattamuskeet apple lore story! It was okay to be primitive in the movements. That’s okay, because that’s the way it is with the shadow puppetry stuff that you did on the side of your wagon.
Izzy asked me, what does a Mattamuskeet Indian look like? What do they wear? Which are great questions. I told her I wasn’t sure. So she did the best she could to make sure it that it looked appropriate, and not your typical stereotypical look of an Indian. So we kept it as basic as we could. She nailed it.
Bernie Harberts (35:19) So you go from this scene of the animation, which is very clean and bloodless, to the scene where I’m cleaning a pintail duck in the lobby of the Carawan Lodge. I could see where the easy path would be just delete that scene. To just show the me cooking duck on my stove.
How did the scene of cleaning the duck survive the cut? What’s the first cut and what survived?
Morgan Potts The film crew and me, we were all taken aback by them plopping the dead pintail ducks down right there on the countertop with the two children right there. And then you and the kids start cleaning the duck right there on the counter.
We had just spent a long day in the freezing cold weather on the causeway. The crew was exhausted and we finally got you hunkdered down at the Carawan Lodge. And suddenly we’ve got these kids showing you how to breast ducks on a counter and I thought, oh, wow.
Bernie Harberts Describe the film crew’s reaction.
Morgan Potts (36:31). I mean, who knew this was waiting for us at the end of the day? We knew you would have ducks and oysters waiting for you. But the ducks needed cleaning and none of us knew that was coming. We didn’t know you’re gonna start cleaning ducks on top of the counter. People have different sensibilities about that sort of thing. Of what they can handle. When you guys started cutting that first duck, breasting it, that was just too graphic for the film crew.
Bernie Harberts So what happened. I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that some cameras got put down. But that scene showed up in Swan Song. Did the crew keep filming? Clearly somebody filmed. Did you film it?
Morgan Potts (37:24) I had to jump in and grab a camera. We had two camera people there filming that. When you and the kids started breasting the duck, I saw you turn around. You’re looking at me, and you’re looking at everybody in the room, And you’re like, okay, we’re rolling with this. This is what’s happening.
Breasting a duck is just a natural thing to them there. It’s not a big deal to them, it’s just part of life.
But it’s not part of our camera guy’s life. So it was tough for them to watch.
And so I was like, this is obviously a moment here. This is important.
So the two camera people had to tap out. I just grabbed the camera. And you can see my camera work. My only camera work in Swan Song is right there. Otherwise, it’s completely captured by our very talented camera folks.
The end scene is a lot shorter than what took place. And I had to be sensitive about it and just knowing who was going to be watching. But it was important to see that take place.
Bernie Harberts (38:33) What were the versions?
Morgan Potts There was a first version where it was just a little more graphic. You actually saw your thumbs going into the breast of the duck. It went on a little longer than you see in the actual finished cut. And that was flagged by my supervisor. She said, hey, you might just want to look at this area if you can tighten it up a little bit.
But that was totally how they lived there. I’m glad we were able to get it in there because it was so important just to see that take place. Not because I’m trying to make everybody queasy. But just because that’s how it is.
Bernie Harberts I did not know that was the only part that you filmed.
Morgan Potts (39:22) That was it. I need to put myself in the credits! Duck-breasting footage performed by Morgan Potts
Bernie Harberts (39:31) The other thing I was curious about is how do you deal with imperfections that you could have taken out but you decided to leave? The one that’s just classic, and I absolutely adore this, is where I’m talking to Thomas. He’s giving me the turnips, and I give him the apple, and he says, Polly like apples? And I said, she loves apples and bananas.
And there’s a little voice that’s not Thomas that says, bananas?
Bernie Harberts So why did you leave that?
Morgan Potts (40:12) I love it. It was just such a natural volley of back and forth between you and our camera gal, Emily. It’s like the things you can’t script. You can’t think of that. Bananas? I mean, that’s gold. I It’s because Emily was never introduced. It was like a spirit. She shows or reveals herself three times in the documentary. One is when you’re heading out for the first time and ask her, have you ever been in a wagon? Emily had never been in a wagon before. She was just like completely new. And so she had several expressions on the wagon that were just, it was just like so real. It was just her excitement about being part of the project. And so I put them in there.
Another one was her laughing. After you heading out from chatting with Thomas, you tell him to hang on. And she’s like. whoa! You can hear her saying that. I thought, why not include that because that’s what if feels like when you’re on the wagon.
In certain scenes I wouldn’t allow that happen. If, like, you strike a match in the wagon by yourself at the beginning. Obviously, we don’t want Emily in the background talking about bananas or saying whoa! That’s your moment for sure.
But it was such a surreal experience To just be a part of an adventure with you. Maybe that’s part of you, sharing with the people at home. The whole doc’s got that in there as part of its juju. I hope you’re cool with that!
Bernie Harberts Yeah, totally!
So now, of course, what do my wife Julia and I say walking around the cabin? Bananas! It’s a quote from the film. I know, it’s about swans. And yet, we’re talking about bananas. Bananas? I just love that.
Morgan Potts (42:16) It just shows not to take ourselves too seriously every moment of the day. A little levity is always good.
Bernie Harberts How did you use AI?
Morgan Potts I don’t.
Bernie Harberts Do you rely on transcripts to read stuff?
Morgan Potts (42:36) No, I didn’t. I just had all this footage. I just went through it all by myself, frame by frame, minute by minute. The only outline I had was the structural outline going from where we started to where we ended. I didn’t script anything. I didn’t write anything down. That was the process for this story. It completely flowed like that.
Bernie Harberts How many hours of footage did you have to work with?
Morgan Potts (43:08) I have no idea, Bernie. I have no idea. We filmed for five days. I’m starting to get amnesia about how hard it was to edit, but it was hard. Really hard. But I loved every second of it. It was that hard.
Bernie Harberts Did you take a lot of the footage where we’re speaking, like the Mattamuskeet Lodge interview, and throw it into AI, and then say, when Bernie talks about apples, pull those pieces?
Morgan Potts I didn’t know you could do that, Bernie!
Bernie Harberts Never mind, Morgan. That AI stuff is bullshit! So it was literally manual labor, watching all that footage?
Morgan Potts (43:48) Yeah. I mean that’s me. I guess me being over 50 and not being not stuck in my way of doing it, but that’s my process. There’s new ways to go about doing this thing. Maybe I should dabble in some of that and start to explore. Because obviously that could probably help me time wise. But I feel like it would miss some things.
Bernie Harberts I remember calling you one day and you said, Bernie, I was up at 3 in the morning working on this. You were working these mad hours. And the other thing you said was, I’m ready for you leave my house, Bernie. Because you were living in my head as I was editing.
Bernie Harberts (44:37) Which is really funny, Morgan. Because, like, I’ve crawled back in your house. But what were those days like? What was the manic craziness like? Because you were crazed, Morgan. You were freaking crazed!
Morgan Potts If it was up to me, I’d still be working on it. Swan Song’s not done. I could open back up the project and just keep going on it. And it would evolve a little bit and continue to grow. With my gig, it’s like you have an air date and it’s done. It’s like you might not be done with the show, but it’s due. So you’ve got to give it up at that point. Otherwise, again, I’d still be working on it.
Like that last month, I was working on this thing. I couldn’t sleep. My brain is just playing sequences out in my brain. And it’s all Swan Song. It’s all these little four minute blurbs I have to pull together somehow. And they do not stop. And so I’m like, damn, if I can’t sleep, I’m just going to get up and just sit down and work on it.
To me, that’s the only way you finish. You just got to keep sitting down at it. And some days I didn’t get a whole lot accomplished because my brain didn’t always fire like it should.
My brain works best from three in the morning to noon. That’s my most creative window. So I have to alter my schedule to allow myself to get up at three in the morning. Editing Swan Song, I damn sure was thrown off like schedule wise, day wise. I’d be parked right here on the table or in my garage editing.
It was a flurry. It was a craze. And my wife Joy gets to a point in my life where she almost can’t handle me anymore, because I’m just ravenous with the story. Because that’s what I have to do and everything else just falls away. Everything just has to fall away so I can think.
I havn’t done an hour documentary in quite some time. To make an hour sustain itself, make every second watchable, is a hard thing to structure. That’s a hard thing to pull off. For a while there I was like, I have bitten off more than I can chew. I might need to call in somebody.
Of course I thought that when we were filming it out on the side of the road and it was 20 degrees. I would wonder, am in over my head? I said that a bunch during this project. Did I mean it? I don’t think so. It was just part of process.
So this was not nine to five.
My brain doesn’t work nine to five when it comes to editing. It cannot work like that. Once it gets noon onward, my brain is thinking about other things. I really can’t edit much after that, especially in the early evenings. That’s when I’m doing other things, other interests.
Bernie Harberts (47:49) So do you go to bed early and then then up at three and start working?
Morgan Potts That’s exactly right.
Bernie Harberts It’s like working with Keith Richards!
Morgan Potts (48:00) I was brewing coffee, that’s for sure.
I hear people say that you have get in the zone for a project like this. I sure had to to pull this off.
This was the hardest thing I’ve ever done work-wise, story-wise.
It was a monster for me, in a good way, to work on. These scenes are playing out every day. We filmed this in January and here I am in May and every day it’s like, there’s Bernie. There’s Polly. There’s the sequence that they’re in. It plays out over and over and over until I get it right and I can move on from it.
I go into work and I see people that are on my crew. And they’re moving on to all these other projects they’re filming. And they’re like, how’s it going?
And then I mention something that happens in the story. And they’re like, what? Because they’re not living in it like I was.
When it comes to editing, you just have to immerse yourself in it. I’m reliving the same moments over and over and over again. And that’s part of the rub about editing. You get stuck in time with the story you’re telling. It’s a weird dynamic.
Bernie Harberts (49:31) So what does the energy come from that guides that or sustains that or powers that? Where does the juice come from?
Morgan Potts My mom was able to hyper focus. She would totally get into projects and not tune us out but she could she could go down the rabbit hole with a creative project. She loved music. If she was learning a song forget about it. You had to leave her alone and let her just cook. Let her go Maybe I got some of that from her. I love taking something and then not morphing it but constructing it. And then it becomes its own life. It’s not me that’s putting the shots there anymore.
It becomes like a feeling. You can see it. You can hear it. It’s just the way the story starts to shape itself. And then I’m just along for the ride. And that’s when it really becomes magic.
Like the last few weeks of editing Swan Song, I was riding a goose’s back. I was flying. When it was really starting to take flight, the music was hitting at the right spot. You’re really starting to fine tune the mix, the audio. All that is starting to go to the next level and become something.
You start to see it and then that feeds you wanting to work at it even more. So you just become more obsessed with it. Obsessed. That’s a good word. You have to become obsessed with it. I do.
Bernie Harberts So is there one scene that sticks out where it became like this giant goose that you grab onto and now it’s taking you up in the sky for a ride?
Morgan Potts (51:06) It’s just little bits as the story starts to congeal. These little four minute stories within this bigger, hour documentary. Like the open. I can watch that and it’ll give me a chill. Not because I put it together. But just because it hits right. Or the reveal of the snow of you in the wagon. I get a chill from watching that now, just because it works. So there’s little moments throughout that really hit,. That knock you a little bit.
Another one we hadn’t mentioned yet is Thomas. Just coming across the causeway. It’s not just a visual dance, but it’s also about what’s shared right there. That spot tears me up and has multiple times. Putting it together and watching it play out now as a finished product. We saved it for that big reveal.
Originally, when we were stopping to meet Thomas, he was going to bring you produce. The plan was that Thomas takes a ride with you. And he was going to share a story about Sesame Street.
I knew that Thomas was going to meet us on the causeway at some point and give you some collards. I didn’t know what interaction was going to happen. I did hear that there was a story he wanted to tell about a mule and a Sesame Street story. And I was like, okay.
Bernie Harberts What did you think was going to happen?
Morgan Potts (52:32) Thomas popped up on the causeway about two miles before I was ready for him. I thought he was going to be down the road a little bit. So it gave me a minute to think about what’s coming. But he pops up early on in the causeway. So here you guys are, talking. I didn’t know once he passed the collards, he was going to go into talking about what he talked about.
And you asked him, how do you cook these collards? Then, as a side comment, this wasn’t planned or anything, he mentioned that he made greens for his 90 plus year old neighbor. He said his neighbor wouldn’t eat anything except the collards.
Dealing with older parents and trying to get them to eat and all that thing. That little story hit me like a ton of bricks.
When it was happening in real time, I was just worried about getting hit by a truck. I wasn’t listening to the content you guys are talking about. We were just in capture mode. So I told Mike Milstead, with the microphone, your ass is hanging out in the road a little bit. So I couldn’t really think about what y’all were talking about. So I didn’t know that story has been shared. Nor did I quite get the fact that you told Thomas that this is your last trip to mule Polly.
So you invited Thomas to get on the wagon. I thought, well, here comes the story we’re going to capture. And it came. You guys tell the story, and Brooks is trying to film it. But right then, a car comes by real close, and he’s got to pan off. So we didn’t get the shot wed’d hope for. It was on audio, but not video.
Well, I get back to the edit room and see the footage for the first time. And I’m like, oh man, no! Because I was looking for the Sesame Street story that Thomas was going to tell you on the wagon. But it wasn’t there because we didn’t get video for it.
So it was like, oh well, we can’t use that story.
So I thought we can still use shots of Thomas riding in the wagon with Bernie. There is some interaction there. You’ve got a pone bread and you’re shaing it with him in the wagon. But I’m wondering what’s the meat of Thomas’visit, other than that?
And so I went back and listened to your little chat when he gave you the collards and it just blew me away.
He mentioned that story about feeding his neighbor ninety year old neighbor collards and I was like, that’s Thomas! That’s his heart right there. That was just gold. He’s a pure heart fella. That was a huge moment in the whole doc. I didn’t see it coming, but it was there for us.
Bernie Harberts (55:35) It’s fascinating looking back on it now, hearing what you planned versus what we got. There’s a lot of just magical, soulful stuff that came into the spaces between all the things we had planned.
Another unplanned, golden moment, was the kids. I was setting up the wagon. You guys were in the motel. And then these kids Charlie and Carter come out. And I’m just dilly farting around with them, showing them Polly and the wagon. And all of sudden you guys show up. The original plan was to get to the Carawan motel and get a duck and some oysters to cook something. But in the middle of all that plan, all this magical stuff popped up.
Morgan Potts (56:44) It had been a real long day. I could see it on the film crew’s faces. I only heard this later, going back through the footage. But at one point on the causeway, our audio guy says, this is a train wreck. And I was like, damn, man. I didn’t realize you thought we were just like a mess
And to the normal person, it might seem like that. Because filming is organic. You gotta flow with it.. That’s the way filming goes when you’re on the road.
Anyway, it was the end of the day and we were all just toast. It had been a long day, and it was freezing cold and we were just trying to keep warm. And then Sadie, the associate producer, went out back of the Carawan Lodge, and she saw the kids interacting with you and Polly. And she came in and said, hey, you know, there’s good stuff going on out there.
And I looked at my crew and the last thing I wanted to do was tell them, hey guys, let’s go film some more! Oh, and by the way, it’s still 15 degrees outside. And there’s snow on the ground. And yeah, we have just filmed for 12 hours. But hey, let’s film a little more!
Those are always tough asks. And I was probably done for the day. It was well after dark. And one of our crew said, what are we gonna get? And I just about said, don’t worry about it.
But Sadie gave me one more little push. She said, but it’s such a nice interaction going on out there between the kids, Polly and Bernie.
So that’s when we went out there. And I was like, oh my God! The kids are hanging around the pond. You’re showing them the wagon, and the apple and the little boy is looking at you like you’re Superman. You can see it in his eyes and you can tell they’re digging the whole experience.
They’re gonna remember that experience with you and Polly just like you remember holding your granddad’s hand on the causeway. It also passed the story of the apple on.
Bernie Harberts More and more, I’m learning that you need to see between the all things that you plan in life. A lot of stuff that happened that was magic for this was not planned. There was snow, Thomas and the kids. Even Kelly Davis. She was going to talk to us about birds but she didn’t want to appear on camera. In the end, she did.
Morgan Potts She was phenomenal. I can’t imagine doing it without her.
Bernie Harberts (59:17) Tell me about the plan to get to the final product, while, at the same time, leaving some place for the weeds, the unscheduled.
Morgan Potts I still didn’t know the plan when I got back. And I still hadn’t seen the film footage you’d shot in the wagon. At the time we were filming, I wasn’t going through the footage daily to look at it just because I didn’t have time. We were busy dumping all our memory cards and saving our other footage. And you were busy filming by yourself on the wagon during the snow.
And then, when I got back, I had a chance to look at the footage you shot and I was like, Bernie, this just knock my socks off
You’ve been filming your adventures by yourself for years. So you know what you’re doing. You know how to frame a shot and everything. You gave us gold. That was the point where I knew I got something special. Despite everything we had already filmed, once I saw your stuff and being able to incorporate it into the story, I was just like, oh my God, we’re gonna take flight here.
Bernie Harberts (51:44) It was so fringy on my side. I shot the footage on the wagon with a 10-year-old iPhone. And I didn’t have my battery charger. So the battery on the phone would start to die, and I would plug it into my laptop to charge it. But I didn’t have a place to charge the laptop so I had to be real careful not to drain the laptop battery.
So I would set up some of those shots and worry about both my phone and my laptop dying. Like the one where I’m coming out of the wagon in the snow. I had the phone on my tripod and it was attached by a long charging cord to my laptop which was sitting in the snow. I was so woefully unprepared, and yet, it worked.
Morgan Potts There were only two shots that I didn’t like. That’s not critiquing your camera work. Those were the first two shots we see you at your stove. They were just a little muddy just because it was dark. But it worked fine. I played around with the color a little bit. But I’m still frustrated every time I see those two shots. There’ll always be something you pick at.
Bernie Harberts I thought the audio on the phone was surprisingly good. There is one scene I’m thinking of where I’m talking the wagon. The phone is just set on a tripod. No external microphone. I was nervous the audio would be bad, but it came out plenty good.How much did you massage the audio off the phone. Do you do your own sound?
Morgan Potts (53:29) Yeah, I did the audio mix, too. You just tweak it a little bit, EQ it a little bit. I’m surprised it came out as good as it did as far as your audio.
In hindsight, I wish we had forseen a better setup for you as far as filming audio and video. We had another camera we wanted to give you, but I think it would have been too complicated to fire up quickly, to get rolling.
And you know, phones these days, even though your is 10 years old. You know, it’s HD quality. It’s good enough. And especially for this, This is an adventure thing. So it’s okay if it’s got a little grit to it, especially when you’re in the wagon.
Bernie Harberts How did you put the emotion into Swan Song?
Morgan Potts I operate in what story moves me. Doing something for the last time and knowing it. Doing something for the last time with somebody you love but not knowing it. All that is layered in there. A lot of it has to do with losing people you love or saying goodbye to people, friends, family or animals you love.
I wept a lot when I was putting this together just because it’s emotional.
I lived through your adventure. But it’s my adventure, too, because it was your grandfather. I’ve got memories of my parents and that thing, too. That’s why it touches people. Because they see that. They can see Thomas cooking for somebody, sharing their stories, sharing those memories together. That’s baked into my mindset these days.
Bernie Harberts What person did you think of most as you were editing it?
Morgan Potts (54:48) My mom and dad.Their spirit. I don’t know how to go any deeper than that. But it’s all baked in Swan Song. Yes, it’s your adventure. But my heart is baked in that. From the music you hear, from the moments you share, just about being with your grandfather on the causeway.That stuff hits hard. It’s hard for me. So it just oozes out of this story. And yeah, not everybody’s gonna be on the wavelength to pick it up. That’s okay.
The moment at the snow-covered bridge, where Pollys afraid to cross it. That’s the emotional peak for your story. That’s where it all comes together. It’s not just the sadness.
Bernie Harberts (55:35) Again, a totally unplanned event.I didn’t know that bridge was coming. I didn’t know it was going to be a problem.
Morgan Potts But it presented itself and that’s where we’re going to bring you guys home emotionally and together. We set the structure for it. And then you just got to be open for things to happen and be there to capture it.
There are points throughout the production where I was like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m in over my head. This is crazy. Why let this guy with this mule talk me out here in the wilderness again? But you have to keep filming.
You plan and then you just roll with what you get. You have to see that and be able to roll with that and be like, okay, this is taking over part of the story now.
Yeah, we could be talking an extra minute about the Mattamuskeet lodge and the giant pumps they used to drain the Lake Mattamuskeet. We could talk some more about the nuts and bolts about the pumps. We could show some more photos of that. But this happened out here with this wagon. This was actually the magic when you think about the story/
Some people might say, we ain’t using none of this because this ain’t part of the story we set out to tell. So we’re going to stick with what we originally thought.
Morgan Potts (56:44) But you just have to roll with what’s coming and see that. So yeah, it wasn’t so much about a pre-scripted story as about your experience with what’s taking place.
Bernie Harberts How did the ending come together?
Morgan Potts I cut the whole ending in a day. I cut that last and it went together really fast just because I had to. I submitted the rough cut to my supervisor and the last scene was you crossing the bridge. It had not included the flashback shots in there which pushed it over the top. And they were like, where are we going with this? What are we doing?
So I cut you arriving at the Mattamuskeet Lodge and you getting the tour of the lodge very quickly. I could have used another week editing and fine tuning it. But I had to get it done so quick just to get it done.
But you know, the whole arc of the story had already occurred. It’s like it was baked. And then it was like, we gotta land this sucker. The original point of the story was to be at the lodge and spend a lot of time there. But that’s not the way it ended up.
Bernie Harberts (57:55) If you could just do anything, any project, what would you?
Morgan Potts I’ve always wanted to do something on the Pamlico River, some sort of narrative story, just because that’s where I grew up. A river-based story.
But doing Swan Song checked a lot of boxes. Getting down east, seeing those cypress knees, feeling those folks, and feeling my relatives as I was filming this.
I don’t know if I’ve said this before about other projects, but if I’m not able to do another story, this is a doozy to go out on.
I hope I get opportunities to tell a lot more stories, but for this point in my life, Swan Song was just…it was a beast.
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