17 Aug About the Trailer

view the trailer

When my father died 3 and a half years ago, I was in a bit of emotional shock for quite some time. Despite taking on his role as the family leader during the turmoil that followed his death, I managed to shoot a couple of short videos on my brother’s little photo camera.

A couple of weeks later, as I started to get my self back together, I thought of making a short film about his passing to help me process and focus on the information. I messed around with it a little bit- and when I went back to my hometown for a public service a month after he died, I shot a few more videos with that same camera. I liked that the grainy videos felt almost like super 8, and that they had a home movie quality that made them feel intimate.

I got myself one of those same point and shoot cameras and began to use it liberally, documenting my new daughter’s birth, and my older daughter’s new songs.

Periodically, I would sit down and try to work with some of the footage, trying to find some way to honor my father’s memory and connect with my sense of loss (which was something i was having a lot of trouble doing). A few months after my daughter’s birth I ran into my friend, Lois, who told me I had to go for a boy to round out my family. That’s when the little film morphed into a much bigger film about much larger and more complex issues. Still, I knew that it would begin with my father’s passing and explore the nature of family.

Since then, I have thought about this film a great deal, and shot a little bit more. Like this exercise in blogging, the trailer pretty much tumbled out fully formed since it had been gestating for years, but it’s only the jumping off point. This 4 minute trailer will probably spread out to about 15 minutes in the film.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rest of the film, but it will be some time before I pull it together. In the meantime I’ll continue to write about the process.