filming

We’re Out In the Field and On The Road to Completion!

April 29, 2019 By Andrea Palombella Leave a Comment

Our all-female crew gathers footage of Dr. Patisaul in the lab.

Here’s the Scoop from the Field

We’ve been on the road in Raleigh and San Francisco meeting with incredible experts! We interviewed and spent a day in the lab with Dr. Heather Patisaul at NC State, who specializes in how endocrine disrupting chemicals affect the brain and behavioral. We then scooted over to Durham to interview Dr. Linda Birnbaum, the Director of both the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program at the National Institutes of Health to talk about the toxicity of ingredients like lead and formaldehyde.

[Read more…]

A Pretty Ugly Progress Report

January 24, 2018 By Andrea Palombella 2 Comments

January 2018 is almost over, and we can’t believe it! We are LONG overdue for an update, so without further adieu, please enjoy these production highlights from the past several months.

Many moons ago, we shared about the exciting teaser shoot we did with a great two-person crew in our April 2017 blog post. Since then, we filmed two additional interviews and B-roll at the fabulous Take Care Shop in Georgetown with Andrea behind the camera. Then, we finally had what we needed to begin the editing process of our teaser!

We transcribed our first eight interviews by hand and began writing our script. The world was our oyster, but we had one, “tiny” problem: an outdated laptop that couldn’t handle 4K video files on an old editing system.

[Read more…]

Field Production Has Begun!

April 4, 2017 By Andrea Palombella 1 Comment

Happy Spring! We’ve got so many great updates to share, so brace yourself for excitement and read on…

First off, Pretty Ugly has raised enough seed funding to begin field production. This is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn’t have done it without the amazing generosity of many supporters!

In March, we filmed two days in Washington, D.C., collecting three interviews and gathering stunning B-roll. Our interviewees included Nneka Leiba, M.Phil, MPH, Director of Healthy Living at the Environmental Working Group, a leading nonprofit helping consumers make healthy choices based on environmental health research and education, Ky Washington, professional green-beauty makeup artist, and last but not least, Alessandra Palombella (my mom!), two-time breast cancer survivor and the reason why we’re making this film. It was through her finding out about carcinogens in personal products that spurred me on to dig deeper into the topic, and that is where I found the inspiration to share this story with the world. [Read more…]