It Begins with a Conversation

I missed going to any of the shows at the Heartland Film Festival yesterday to join the fun at the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival. Minda had left a message for me Friday night that she and Luz would be here by 8:30 if I called her at 7:30 Saturday morning to confirm. They did not get here till after 10. I was already talking to Tony about canceling the trip and moving it to this morning when M's BMW slid into the parking lot in front of the house. I made an executive decision to go and miss the film festival.

I don't regret the decision. Maybe having time away from the film festival would give me time to process the heady ideas coming from the shows I saw on Friday and what I heard from the filmmakers at the end of the screening.

Paul Murphy was one of the directors available to answer questions Friday night. He directed the New Zealand film, Second-Hand Wedding, his first feature after doing commercials for 20 years. He told us that the movie "started with a conversation." After you begin working on it, the project "takes on life of its own." 

These comments connected with me. I complain that we don't have dramatic geological formations and landscapes in Indiana. We are cutoff from the movie-making industry. Movie people are few and as far between as any scenic wonders in the country's heartland. But one does not have to look far for a story to tell or for an image to shoot. The crucial step is to take the step.

For years now I've been collecting inspirational stories of how other people made it, how they started. Movie actors, fiction writers, scriptwriters, visual artists, computer software geniuses, website entrepreneurs, film directors and producers, photographers: these are my heroes, theirs the story that intrigue me no end. Each one's story is different. I can look for the correct mixture of ingredients to make my own start and may be looking the rest of my life. The crucial step is to take the step.

The last two Saturdays going out in search of local images to photograph have moved my interest in photography farther than maybe the last year put together. Shooting models tops the experiences but more than this shooting ordinary scenes like the orange Oldsmobile in my front yard or M's son, Ken, peering at the honeybee he had been shooing away and decrying just minutes earlier suddenly seemed examples of beginnings to get started so a project, any project, can have a life of its own.