RECOGNITION
DOWN-TO-EARTH Jerrod Niles’ project earns national acclaim By Charlie Reed
W
hen Jerrod Niles heard about a local artist who painted a mural with pigments made from the soil, he knew someone who would dig the idea. “The first thing I thought when I heard about the mural project was, ‘My mom would love this.’ She’s a bit on the hippie side.” With the blessing of mom, Niles chose the work of artist Amanda Brazier for his multimedia project, “The Field Below.” A senior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Niles shot 35 hours of video in more than a dozen locations throughout the city, documenting Brazier’s work on the mural at Gaining Ground Grocery, which provides local and sustainable food to the Highland Park neighborhood near downtown Chattanooga. In the fourminute video, he explores the intersection of art, food and community service. He did it very well. Niles won a spot in the Top 10 in the national 2021-2022 Hearst Multimedia Narrative Storytelling Competition for college students. Established in 1960 and named after long-deceased newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the competition is among the most prestigious in the country.
24 | The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Magazine
“I didn’t understand the gravity of it at first,” says Niles, who produced “The Field Below” for Rising Rock, a course in the UTC Department of Communication. Combining dozens of hours of raw footage with a written script and photographs epitomizes Niles’ ability to distill complex material into compelling but easy-to-understand stories, says Billy Weeks, who created and teaches the Rising Rock course, “He’s a gifted student and a class favorite,” Weeks says. “It’s because he genuinely cares about the work he’s doing. Jerrod understands that nobody gives you anything. You’ve got to go out there and get what you want in life.” For his nationally acclaimed video, Niles liked the idea of a nonprofit grocery store and a local artist teaming up for a mural painted by community members using soil from the local farms where the store’s produce is grown. “It seemed really cool to me, so it made me even more invested. In life, if you’re interested in it, you become more willing to put the time into it,” he says. Simply filming the mural being painted or unveiled at Gaining Ground would have yielded a pretty good story, but Niles did much more, filming the process of how Brazier
