Producer Cornelius Swart and Liz Scott right before screening Priced Out to approximately 150 employees of Elemental Technologies.

I presented a portion of Priced Out for a lunch time gathering of about 150 employees of Elemental Technologies in downtown Portland today, Friday Sept. 29th.

I was there at the invitation of Liz Scott, an Elemental Technologies executive assistant and former intern at the newspaper, The Sentinel, that I ran in North Portland back in the day.

Scott said she was impressed with the turn out.

“We usually don’t see so many people come out for serious social topics like this,” she said. Scott is in charge of arranging lunch time presentations for employees that can range from professional to social issues

The audience was definitely engaged. The group threw out question after question on the issue of gentrification and the housing crisis in a 15-minute question and answer session.

“I feel like I’m a part of this story,” one viewer said. “I’m glad someone is talking about this.”

It was good news for the production, in that it’s the first market test for the film and it appears that there is an audience of concerned citizens out there that want to see a film on this topic.

The painful process of storyboarding/assemble editing is now complete.

Elemental Technologies builds video streaming software. The company has grown from a small Portland start up to an operation with offices in eight countries. In 2012 Forbe’s ranked it among the most promising companies in America. Last year, Amazon acquired the company for almost $300 million. They continue to grow and next year they will move into the Oregonian’s old office building on Southwest Broadway.

I was impressed with how socially conscious and astute the employees were. Not everyone can make it through a project in its rough form.

The work-in-progress was a 20-minute sample of Priced Out’s assemble edit. The assemble edit is a raw form of a film, in which clips are assembled into the basic story shape of the project.

The assemble edit was just completed yesterday. We’ll be doing a lot more test screenings in the coming weeks as the rough cut, the next phase of editing, begins to take shape.