Terifilms--Completed Projects

I started making films on a part time basis as a hobbyist in 2002 with a low end camcorder and no video editing software. (My first project was edited by transferring back and forth between two VCRs.) Since then I have gained a great deal of experience, taken two film classes at a local college (Introduction to Filmmaking, and Digital Video Editing), gradually upgraded my equipment, and familiarized myself with several video editing programs (Windows Moviemaker, Video Explosion Deluxe, Final Cut Pro, and Premiere Pro—I currently use primarily Premiere).

I've always been more focused on the content than the technical aspects of filmmaking. Though no doubt I'm way ahead of where I started when it comes to equipment and technical skills, I like to think my strengths lie primarily in the human areas of filmmaking: Putting people at ease so they'll open up in interviews, asking questions that go beyond just the surface events of a person's life, selecting music to fit the emotions of a film, capturing the beauty and spontaneity of a child, incorporating some humor, etc. I don't know how to say it without resorting to clichés, but I try to create films that will make people think, make people feel, make people laugh. Not just in a modern, sound bite, short attention span, superficial entertainment way, but in a way that goes a little deeper.

I've ordered this list of my completed projects starting from the most recent and ending with the earliest. (If you notice many repeat characters in the films, it's not your imagination. As mentioned elsewhere on the site, a lot of my early projects as a hobbyist were about myself and the people in my life, and even since I've started doing paid projects, those have mostly been of friends, and friends of friends that heard about me through word of mouth. So quite a few of the same people have appeared in two or more of my movies.)

[Needless to say, the sample clips have been much reduced in quality to play on the web.]

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This is one of the projects I've done where I make a video profile of a child. This is not one of the more ambitious projects I've done, though it did grow from how it was first conceived.

The initial plan was to simply transfer to DVD--with a little editing--the footage I had shot at Annalise's fifth birthday party, which was held at a kiddie salon with a dozen or so of her friends and siblings. In the end, though, that footage became roughly the second half of the film. For the first half, I shot a sitdown interview with Annalise, as well as footage of her wearing different funny outfits and costumes, ad libbing songs and dances. They're really fun clips; she's a natural at playing to the camera.

So I interspersed interview clips, song and dance clips, and miscellaneous other material, added a modest amount of music and humorous special effects, and closed with the birthday party footage.

Sample Clip: Annalise composing and performing a song on the spot, followed by a bit of our interview.

Of all the films I've done, this is one of the most important in terms of its subject matter.

On the other hand, to me the most common type of film I do--personal history films that use interviews to delve into the lives of one or more people--is very important in its own way. But it's primarily important to the participants and their loved ones. My film on the Trillium School is instead significant in the sense of addressing a crucial and controversial issue of public policy, namely how we educate our children.

The Trillium School is an example of a school that follows the "Sudbury" educational philosophy (named for the Sudbury Valley School), which is about as radical a philosophy of education as exists. Sudbury schools such as Trillium are run democratically by all members of the school community, including the kids. Students have near total autonomy to spend their time as they please, as long as they don't impinge on anyone else's right to do likewise.

I spent considerable time at several Sudbury schools, getting a feel for them from the inside. I spent the most time at the Trillium School, so when I decided to attempt a film about a Sudbury school, Trillium was the logical choice.

The project ran into some obstacles early, the most significant of which was that many members of the school opted not to be filmed, making it very difficult to get much footage at the school itself. Out of necessity, I fell back on a different approach, which was to interview three families, including that of one of the founders of the school, and give them an opportunity to tell their stories and talk about this educational philosophy.

Though I hadn't originally envisioned the film consisting of such a high proportion of interviews compared to other footage, it turned out surprisingly good in my opinion. I was very pleased at how the interviewees opened up. We cover a lot of ground in the interviews, both theoretical about the model, and personal. I have to think anyone at all open to this radical an approach to education would find this material fascinating.

Sample Clip: In this clip, two of the interviewees address the question of whether it is wise to allow young children such a high level of autonomy in how they spend their time, and democratic control over all matters of running the school, including staffing.

I met Ellen about 30 years ago. She was 6’1” and from Horseheads, New York, both of which facts never ceased to tickle me for whatever reason.

She would talk about Horseheads, and she once told me some convoluted story about how it got its name, but I never went there, so it remained a sort of comical place of legend and mystery to me.

I finally visited Horseheads for the first time in my life in 2010, armed with a camcorder. I shot some footage, edited it into a humor piece, and gave it to Ellen as a surprise after all these years. (Yes, she got a kick out of it.)

Not much to say about it, except I didn’t have my tripod, so it’s all shot with a shaky handheld camera. But really it was just for laughs, not anything that was intended to be a professional piece.

I have been fortunate enough to do several films now about one or more members of a family with whom I happen to be very close. I like to think I've become something of the unofficial family videographer. This film is about their middle daughter Abigail.

When I started the project, I had two quite different structures vaguely in mind, and I struggled with how to bring them together into one film. Then I hit on the solution. Instead of trying to force them together, I would in effect do two films.

For Part 1, I chose a "day in the life" format. I followed Abby around an entire day in June 2008, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. I then edited it down to about an hour and a half, but this was in some ways a very bare bones sort of editing job. I didn't add a lot of extras or do anything real fancy. I just wanted a pure, simple chronicle of one day in her life at age 5. A video snapshot that her family will have forever showing the person she was at that age.

For Part 2, I got far more creative with transitions and effects and music and lots of extras. Part 2 is in the form of a video essay, where I weave together home movies of Abigail provided by her family from birth to when I was putting the film together, interviews with her family, narration, and more.

Sample Clip 1: From Part 1. To some people there may be nothing earth-shattering in this clip of a few minutes of Abigail's after school play, but to me it's fascinating in the way it fits with certain themes of the kind of child she is. She loves physical play, getting down in the dirt, and animals of all kinds including the creepiest bugs and such. In this clip, she's digging for bugs and worms in the yard, and showing off her latest boo boo. I also like the fact that when she has something to tell, something to show, something to ask, quite naturally that's the time to go to Mommy.

Sample Clip 2: From Part 2. In this excerpt, I interview Abby's mother about Abby's penchant for physical play, daredevilry, and the invariable cuts and scrapes that come with it. I transition then to a scene I took from footage of home movies the family shot on a trip to Jamaica, which I use to contrast the wary, cautious style of older sister Amanda, with the carefree thrill-seeking of Abby.

This was great from start to finish. It's hard to even comment on the filmmaking, because you really don't notice it. It was so smooth and it all fit together so well that I was too caught up in it to be conscious of the filmmaking itself.

I accompanied the family from The Abby Double Feature on a ten day trip to Orlando, Florida, to Universal Studios theme park and Walt Disney World. I basically followed them around all day every day. In addition to filming them on the rides and attractions (when permitted), I tried to shoot little interview snippets getting their reactions right after they emerged from an attraction, and then back at the hotel I interviewed them at greater length for more of their reflections on the day's activities.

What they have now is a very thorough account of that whole trip, with the clips of the attractions interspersed with the interviews about those same attractions. (Though the material is not limited to the theme parks; everything is covered from their arrival at the airport to their departure from the airport.) Additional photos, music, humor, special effects, etc. are included to raise it that much more above simply glorified home movies.

Their three beautiful daughters were at a terrific age to enjoy a trip like this—6, 5, and 1 (along with their 8 year old cousin, who joined them for part of the trip). Without a doubt, the highlights of the film are seeing the joy and wonder on their faces, hearing their laughter, listening to them excitedly try to describe the rides they went on.

Sample Clip 1: A big moment of the trip was Abby being called up on stage as a volunteer at a bird show at Disney World.

Sample Clip 2: As I mentioned, what I took from this trip more than anything, and what I most wanted to capture in this film, were the way the children's faces conveyed what a priceless experience this can be for someone at that age. So I chose to close the film with a musical montage of those moments that most stood out to me from all the footage I had shot, kind of a "Here's why we do a trip like this" theme.

In this film, I tell the story of the Brazilian au pair of the family from the above two films. I finished the film and presented it to her when she was nearing the end of her one and a half year stay in this country, and she and they were preparing for an emotional parting, as she had become very much a part of the family.

Of course she was in much of the footage from the Orlando trip, but I also had shot her interacting with the children on multiple other occasions. I additionally obtained for this film specifically brief interviews with her and with each of the family members, plus she sent me a large number of photos covering her time in the United States—with the family, with friends she had met here (mostly other Brazilians, many of them also au pairs), and on her travels.

Much of the early portion of the film uses my interview with her and other material to give a little background on her, the au pair program, and how she came to be matched up with this particular family. From there there are plenty of laughs and emotional moments as she speaks of her experiences, the family talks about what she's come to mean in their lives, and various video clips depict her with the children. Late in the movie everyone gets to sum up their feelings and say goodbye.

I had a very favorable impression of her going in, but the process of doing this movie—interviewing her, talking to people about her, watching the finished product with her and discussing it afterward—gave me an even greater appreciation of what a genuine, intelligent, loving, beautiful person she is. Getting to know her better and being able to get closer to her is an example of the kind of wonderful and unexpected byproduct that can come from making these films.

Sample Clip: This sequence from the end of the movie begins with the last clips of the section where family members offer their farewells, continues with a musical montage of photos and video, and closes with Fabi's reflections on the little girls she has cared for for more than a year.

The film subject's best friend she's made in this country, another au pair, in her first text message to her after borrowing the film to watch:

I interviewed a seventy-nine year old man and his wife about his life, and then combined that footage with considerable additional material mostly provided by them (photos, documents, home movies, a video of an interview shot with him by someone else several years ago, etc.) to tell his life story. I included some humor, music, and special effects, but intentionally avoided overdoing it with the bells and whistles so as not to distract from the core of the movie, which was him talking about his life. He has had a very full life, with more ups and downs and more varied experiences than most people can claim, and once he gets going he delights in telling stories, often in a wry, self-deprecating manner if the story provides an opening to portray himself as something of a rascal, so I wanted to be sure the movie gave him ample opportunity just to be himself like that.

This one was certainly not guaranteed to go over well while it was in production. He second guessed himself frequently as to whether he should have agreed to the project in the first place (not that there was in fact any commitment that somehow bound him; he could have called a halt to it at any time), his wife had plenty of suggestions and concerns about the content and how they would appear onscreen (he had recently suffered a stroke, and while he's still pretty sharp, she knew there'd be a considerable, potentially unflattering, contrast with even his interview of a few years earlier), and his sister told him flat out that it was a big mistake to do this film.

Ultimately though, I was able to put together a version of the film that made everyone very happy.

Most important to me is that he himself was relieved of all his concerns that he'd somehow left himself vulnerable to being exploited or otherwise somehow betrayed or harmed by sitting for an interview and agreeing to have a film done on him. If someone has some aesthetic problem with something I've done—they were bored, they'd hoped it'd be funnier, it was too short, the sound wasn't as clear as they'd like, whatever—I'm not going to get too down on myself about criticisms like that. You do the best you can, and you accept that you can't please everybody. But what matters to me at a much deeper level is how the participants in a film assess the whole experience. I'm not in this to add negative energy to someone's life. So when he said seeing the finished product had completely cleared up his misgivings and second thoughts, that meant a lot to me.

We sent a copy of the film to Arne's sister in a package for her birthday.

She just called and I must report to you that her normally subdued voice sounded completely ecstatic. Why? She had just seen the film. She was positively bubbly, in fact, and even sounded a bit overwhelmed with happiness. She said she “loves, loves, loves” the film. She said “there’s a lot to absorb,” that she “can’t wait to show it to her kids and grandchildren,” and that it was “wonderfully done.” Amidst these comments, she kept repeating, “Oh, oh, oh” in appreciation.

Arne's quote, if possible, is even better: “Just her phone call—to hear that excitement in her voice—was worth doing the project.”

Thanks again for all your care. The proof is in the reaction from Arne's low key, analytical and very smart sibling, who nonetheless couldn't stop raving about the film. She said she realized that in many ways it was her life story up there, too.

The people who have seen Arne, The Life, The Stories film thus far have given it overwhelming raves, including “four stars.”

They said they were “moved,” “touched,” and all the adjectives that are a filmmaker's reward. And of course your reward is ours as well.

If I hadn't known it before, I certainly know it now, and so does Arne, that making the film with you was an absolutely wonderful idea that will live on in ways that dusty photo albums never could. You put together everything in ways that really affected people. That's no small feat, and a true gift to all of us, Arne himself included.

Just saw the film for the first time and I wanted to tell you it was great, just great. Loved your idea to end with Dad's thoughts on how he would like to be remembered. Bravo! You are a very kind and gentle soul, and a terrific interviewer.

I conducted several hours of interviews with a 94 year old woman, and then interviewed ten of her relatives for an average of one to two hours each. As supplementary material, I obtained a hundred or more photos from her family, as well as various photos and video clips and more from books and websites that are relevant to telling her story (e.g., historical photos from the 1910s and 1920s of the city in which she grew up).

The edited interviews are interwoven with each other, along with photos, music, and other items. The material is divided into two main parts. The first part is straight biography—telling the story of her life from her perspective and that of the other interviewees. The second part goes deeper into who she is as a person—her personality, her values, her politics, her spiritual beliefs, her proudest achievements and deepest regrets, etc.

This was her opportunity to create a permanent record of her life, and to have her say on a lot of topics. And it's an opportunity for her family to talk about the role she's played in their lives, and to talk about their feelings for her. As a son-in-law of the subject put it during the filming, "My own mother passed away about three years ago. And I often think, if I could say something to her now, what would it be? And I think the nice thing about this film is that we are saying those things now, as a result of your film, so that maybe we won't have such regrets later on."

I really feel like I made the extra effort on this one. I mean, I put a lot into every film I do, but I felt strongly about this project, about the way she and her sister and the other members of her family had been willing to open up and cooperate in the project, and I wanted to go the extra mile to make it really special. To the point where I was scrambling around doing things like researching and obtaining the 1932 yearbook from her high school (by a stroke of good fortune, the copy they happened to have was one she had written in and signed for a classmate back then), and even her student records from the vocational school she attended in the 1930s.

Sample Clip 2: The grandchildren reminisce about spending time with their grandparents at their vacation home on the lake.

Our family has spent many interesting hours viewing your video. We want to let you know how much it means to have a good description of our family. Thank you very much for making the video.

The film is wonderful. Thank you for the enormous amount of time and effort that you put into it. It is amazing how you managed to edit all the bits and pieces to form an interesting video.

You are to be congratulated for an incredible production ... not the least of which was the Herculean editing effort. I have done some editing in my past, and I find it amazing that you could integrate the massive footage and extensive array of content topics and bring it all together so cohesively.

I see this project as more than a tribute. It's a production that educates, telling a great story in a logical and interesting format. It engenders both laughter and tears and will be watched (and cherished) for years to come.

My personal experience with the project was filled with many surprises and many moments of warmth as I watched this celebration of the life of a woman who is cherished and loved so deeply.

I extend my thanks to our creative director, videographer, editor and interviewer. Craig took to this project with zeal and passion. It is safe to say that Craig has more than just a professional’s interest in the project; he approached it like a family member and it shows. It is hard to quantify his efforts but he put in hundreds of hours and added many excellent touches. I was personally impressed with the musical choices and his research and use of historical references that lend an archival air to the project.

This was an unambitious project compared to most of the others I've done, in the sense that once I'd gathered all the material, it only took me about a day and half to complete. But certainly it was an enjoyable one, and one that I feel good about.

The parents of young twins had given me their accumulated photos and home videos, and asked me to transfer them to DVD and maybe add a little music or something to make it interesting. I edited the video footage pretty minimally, mostly just preserving what they'd shot for them and transferring it to DVD. But I also created three photo montages set to music and incorporated them into the DVD, placing one before, one after, and one in the middle where there was a break in the home videos.

I especially like how the montages turned out. They are lovely, animated children, and it's heartwarming to see how attached they are to each other. With photo subjects like that to work with, it's not hard coming up with something good.

For my first foray into wedding videos, I made a film not just of the ceremony and reception, but about the whole weekend. I had access to the groom pretty much the whole forty-eight hours preceding the event, and I shot many hours of footage of this happy, nervous time. (I was able to get some footage of the bride as well, but mostly I was with the groom for this period before the wedding.)

At the reception, instead of the usual "ambush" style of circulating and sticking a camera in the face of friends and family to get their comments on the wedding, I was generally able to sit people down one at a time in a quieter side room and get their more reflective, thoughtful remarks.

Since I was also functioning as the best man, it wasn't always easy to switch back and forth between that and being a videographer, but in the end I like to think I pulled off both roles pretty well.

The result is something of a non-traditional wedding video. I would say somewhat more creative. Certainly more personal.

Sample Clip 1: The groom arrives for his wedding, to the tune they chose for their first dance.

I have seen a few wedding videos, and I just want to say that I think you made us something really special. The other videos I've seen have been sequential and somewhat impersonal, whereas with us, you know Jim so well, and it shows. I'm so glad that you caught the days leading up to the wedding and that you were able to add your own impressions. Plus it's funny! There are a lot of clips that show the personality of us, and our friends and family. It's really an amazing video and I want you to know that! Thank you so much for capturing our day and our love.

We just spent an unforgettable two hours enjoying the wedding video.

What a spectacular production!! I am sure that you spent untold hours, days...weeks in its preparation. Your editing skill is incredible. I come away thinking that you didn't miss a syllable of critical dialogue or a note of special music.

I shot a very fun interview with a charming four year old girl, whom I love very much, one summer while visiting her family, and I was inspired to turn it into a film about her. I obtained from her family all the home video and all the photos they had of her from birth until that point in time, plus I had some footage I'd shot over the years on previous visits, including of her parents talking about her birth and what she was like as a baby.

I used my interview with her as kind of the backbone of the film, with those clips and the other material weaved together, presenting her life partly chronologically (starting with her parents reminiscing about the delivery room and such) and partly by topic (typically playing off of the interview questions). It includes some montages of video and photos set to music that I think turned out really nice.

Of everything I've done, I'd say this is still the project closest to my heart. It's one of the ones I can say, "If I never do anything else worthwhile in my life, at least I did this." Creating a video record of her was literally a labor of love, and the experience is one of the things that made me such an advocate for personal history style filmmaking. I tell people, "Regardless of if you hire me, or someone else, or you do it yourself, please preserve the lives of the people you love with some kind of film like this. You will never regret doing so. You may well regret not doing so."

I wanted to let you know that I shared the Amanda movie with my uncle, and he raved about your talents. He agrees with the rest of us that you not only have artistic talents, but you have the ability to draw out a person's personality, viewpoints, and unique character. Those are your strengths, and they are what set you apart from anything else I've seen.

A personal history filmmaker that I happened to show the film to as a sample of my work:

I watched the Amanda film and liked it a whole lot. I love the interview in the small building outside that you go back to from time to time.

The music was excellent...what led you to choose it?

Also the still photos are wonderful...excellent photos. And there were parts of the film that gave me a hearty laugh.

In recent years I've made a determined effort to go on a major road trip at least every year or two, often covering a good part of the continental United States. It's generally not a sightseeing type vacation, but an opportunity to connect with people who are important in my life, that I see all too infrequently because they're scattered all over the country. And of course I bring my camcorder along.

My most ambitious such trip was in the summer of 2006, when I spent between one and two months on the road and logged over 10,000 miles.

I came home with a great deal of footage, not really geared to a specific idea for a film project, but just miscellaneous video of the people I'd spent time with. I decided to put together a film telling the story of that summer's travels. I added music and humor and such to make it a little more entertaining for the folks I shared it with.

This was clearly more autobiographical than my later projects, and most of my earlier ones. Usually I have little if any on camera presence in my films—maybe you hear me asking some questions as an interviewer, but that's about it. Whereas for this one, I did considerable voiceover narration, plus was on camera a fair amount, tying together the various strands of the traveling into a coherent story, offering up musings and commentary about the people I visited, etc.

Sample Clip: I shot a fair amount of footage in an interview format, which is something I'm comfortable with because I like being able to question a person and encourage them to open up about themselves. This clip features a friend of mine named Jerry that I'd met in Seattle while volunteering at a maximum security prison some years ago. He has since been released after spending the bulk of his adult life behind bars. I wrote a book about my experiences with the prisoners, and one of the connections I had with Jerry is that in 2005 he had joined me for part of a mini-book tour around the state.

On the occasion of this interview, we'd just watched a tape of one of the talks we'd given at a college the previous year.

One of the things I'd done in my 2006 summer road trip was make it a point to visit every place I'd ever lived, and every school I'd attended or been an instructor (if anything a more daunting task than it sounds, as I've lived in eighteen places in ten cities, from the East Coast to the West Coast), and I took at least a little footage of each of these places.

After the trip, before I put together my aforementioned much larger video story of my traveling, I made a shorter film on the narrower topic of my journey into the past to all my former homes. It's pretty much just footage of these houses and apartment buildings and college campuses and such, with me in voiceover talking about the memories and feelings that had been brought up in me by seeing all these places again.

There are things about this film that are important to me, but I've never felt as strongly and as positively about this film as most of the films I've done in my life, which may contain a lesson. While it's true that I'm unapologetically self-indulgent in my filmmaking, I'm most comfortable expressing myself through my style of conducting an interview, my editing techniques and the way I structure the final product, etc., not by being the actual subject of the film. I'm sure I like to talk about myself as much as the next person, but I don't think that's where my passion is as a filmmaker. I want to listen more than I want to talk. What I cherish about making films is the opportunity to get inside another person and learn about them and from them, to facilitate their being able to tell their stories and create a record of who they were as a person.

So when it came time to tell about my own life, I could do it, but it didn't inspire in me the same zeal.

Sample Clip: In wandering around a campus where I'd taught some years ago, I was struck by how little of it remained in my memory. It did, however, bring back to my mind the very positive relationship I'd had with a girlfriend, who still ranks as one of the most kind-hearted, genuinely good people I've ever been close to.

The genesis of this film was really back in 2003. As I'll discuss when I get there as I continue to work my way back through my history in filmmaking, that was my first massive, interview-based film.

As I mentioned elsewhere on the site, I took two film classes at a local college. For two of the many assignments for those classes, I dug back into my 2003 footage and decided to rework some of it into two shorts. The second was this film; the first was the next one listed below—Death, Life, and a Six-Legged Cow.

One of the topics I'd raised with my interviewees back in 2003 for that very long film was I asked them to tell me the story of the greatest love of their life. Among the better sequences in that section of the film is a married couple telling the story of their courtship and relationship. The fun thing there was I interviewed them separately, so you get to see interestingly different takes on the various events of their lives from their different perspectives.

So I re-edited those interviews of that couple for one of my shorts, adding new narration and music and such.

This is the other short I created out of the interview footage from that much larger 2003 project. It alternates between an oncologist and a man who had nearly died of cancer talking about life and death, informed by their very different life experiences.

I didn't meet John, the cancer survivor, until he was about 60 years old, but what a profound effect he had on me. Because he was in ill health off and on throughout his adult life and knew the clock was ticking, from the first time we talked seriously I perceived that he had a real urgency about sharing his stories and his life lessons with people. He not only was willing to be interviewed, but he expressed to me that he hoped that somehow as many people as possible could hear what he had to say. He was too humble to try to pass himself off as an intellectual, and he may not have always been confident of his ability to articulate the lessons he'd learned in life, but he knew it was important to try, before it was too late. In his way, he was one of the wisest people I'd ever met.

He got the most total screen time of any of the interviewees from my major 2003 interview film project, and I reworked his material into other films later as well, including this one.

My experiences with John were one of the most important factors in bringing home to me the value of personal history type films.

Sample Clip: The impact of surviving cancer, after being told in one's 20s that one has only six months to live.

Of the myriad other projects I did for the aforementioned two film classes, I'll mention just one more here.

For this assignment we were given I believe a half hour or so of raw footage that was filmed for a Gunsmoke episode. It included outtakes, the same scene shot from multiple angles, etc. We were pretty much given carte blanche with this material, told to make whatever we wanted of it—from playing it very straight and trying to edit it as we would if it were to be used on the TV show itself, to creating a humor piece, to turning it into a music video, to making something surreal with oddball special effects, etc.

Rather than describe the approach I took, I'll just let you watch it for yourself. As I said at the time, of all the hundreds of people who did this assignment over the years it was offered as part of the class at that college, I'm confident zero others did quite what I did with this material.

I had fun with this, but in a sense it was something of a "throwaway" project, rushed to meet a deadline. I wasn't able to be a perfectionist with it the way I prefer, and I cringe when I watch it now and see the continuity errors and such. But strangely enough, I've probably gotten as many compliments on this as just about any film I've done. A lot of people really get a kick out of it. I've been introduced to friends of friends who smile and point in recognition of the name, and say, "Ahh, Gunsmoke!" and proceed to tell me what a hoot this film is.

Not sure this is quite what I want to be remembered for as a filmmaker, but there you go.

As I mentioned above, and as I'll describe in the next item in this list, I did a really ambitious interview-based film involving several friends and acquaintances in 2003, asking them various philosophical questions, and questions about their lives. At the time, multiple of the interviewees suggested I include in the film my answers to the questions I posed to them. I considered the idea but opted against it, preferring not to shift the focus to myself in that project.

Some time later, I happened to be visiting one of the interviewees at his home in Las Vegas (John—whom I discussed in connection with Death, Life, and a Six-Legged Cow), and we decided it would be fun after all to turn the tables and let him interview me for a change. So I set up the camera on a tripod and I taped our conversation. He didn't ask the identical questions that we had covered in that very long film, but we touched on a lot of the same general areas.

I really never did much with it as far as turning it into a "movie" in any but the loosest sense; I did only minimal editing of the footage. But I sent it to all those who had participated in that earlier project, as a kind of unofficial epilogue to the main film.

I was willing to be interviewed, but again my preferred role is to be the interviewer, which is probably why I never felt inspired to do much with this footage. I'd rather do films examining other people's lives.

It's interesting that though this film is over 90% me—I was able to talk John into coming on camera and sitting with me only for the last few minutes—in my mind it'll always be a "John" film. He had had some additional health setbacks recently (though the prognosis now when I visited was back to fairly optimistic), and as much as ever there was that sense that any interview we do might be our "last interview." So even though he was the interviewer rather than the interviewee, the most valuable parts of this film for me are the little snippets where he shares more of his take on life, and the parts where the style of our interaction captures the feel of our friendship.

Sample Clip: The interviewer joins me on camera for the closing moments of the interview.

Though this was one of the earliest film projects I did, arguably it is still the most ambitious I have ever tried.

I filmed nearly thirty hours of interviews with nine people about their lives and about their positions on various philosophical issues and such. I then grouped the material into six segments that averaged about two hours each: Careers and some generic biographical stuff, God, afterlife, depression and suicide, the state of the country and the world and the future of humanity, and love. Each segment weaves the various interviews together, sequenced so that perhaps one person's comments sharply contrast with the comments of the immediately preceding person, or so that two very different seeming people with surprisingly similar answers are back-to-back, etc.

This was quite a bare bones project, with only a little music, humorous clips, special effects, etc. incorporated into it. It's the kind of thing that can be utterly fascinating if you're in the right frame of mind for it, if you have an interest in human psychology and can appreciate watching people dig inside themselves and wrestle with some of the most important questions of human life, in their own style and at their own pace.

I got a kick out of one of the participants' reaction when he saw the finished product: "Given the length of this, and given that it's almost all just talking heads, by all rights this should have been really dull and hard to get through. But there's a mesmerizing quality to it. Somehow it held my interest surprisingly well, and the time passed much faster than I would have expected."

The overall range of reactions from the participants was considerable. One interviewee did not watch the film when I sent it to him—and to my knowledge never has—because he said that the interview process itself had been too much like therapy. Kind of good, kind of unnerving, but not something he felt ready to go back and relive by watching the film.

Another interviewee called me a week or so after receiving the film to tell me that not only had he already watched all thirteen hours all the way through twice, but that he was getting ready to watch it yet again. Not all these people knew each other before the film—though I had known all of them—and in fact he knew zero of the other interviewees. Yet he was able to say, "I feel like these people are a part of my life now, like they're friends of mine. Each time I watch it I pick up a little more, I get to know them a little better."

Sample Clip 1: A discussion of life after death with an interviewee (whose verbal style of trailing off into muttered witticisms was compared to that of Popeye by one viewer) leads to a comic rant against modern gadgetry.

This was the first time I ever tried to take footage I'd shot and make something out of it, and we're really talking about filmmaking pre-history here. As mentioned above, I didn't even have video editing software; I was using two VCRs and editing on VHS tapes by going back and forth between the two.

So it's crude compared to my recent projects, to put it mildly. (Which is not to say technique-wise my films are perfect now: I am always improving, always striving for more professionalism.)

In subject matter, this film is somewhat similar to Highlights of the 2006 Traveling. It stemmed from a road trip where I had visited several people I'm close to, and shot footage of them—some informal, "real life" stuff of them just living their lives, along with some of my earliest interviews.

Then I compiled it into a series of vignettes only loosely tied together. Some were played almost purely for humor, and some were a more serious effort to learn and express a little more about these people.

I will say that for some amateur thing produced by a guy screwing around with VCRs, it's better than one would expect, though of course it's not indicative of my skill level today. But I still have a certain attachment to it just as a reminder of "where it all began."

One thing I find striking about it is how much of the style and substance of my later films was already present in rudimentary form here, from the photo montages set to music, to the use of humor, to interviewing people about the most important aspects of their lives (there's a wonderful segment with a new mother talking about her newborn child and how the whole experience has changed her emotionally).

Sample Clip: Two of the families I visited had had new additions within the year, which inspired me to offer up a musical montage as a tribute. (Imagine putting this together without a computer or any kind of editing equipment.)