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Film Sprint: Homebound Edition

With shelter-in-place orders in effect, come check out Film Sprint: Homebound Edition! We’ll be doing all the Film Sprint challenges you love… all from the stifling comfort of your own home!

www.filmsprint.com

(also we dropped “Santa Rosa”. Just Film Sprint now. It’s cleaner. )

Santa Rosa Film Sprint!

I haven’t posted as regularly because I’ve been traveling most of this year, but I just created the Santa Rosa Film Sprint! It’s a great new local filmmaking competition for filmmakers of all ages. Learn more by visiting www.srfilmsprint.com.

FREE TREES!

Last August, I started working with City Plants, Save the Drop, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on a series of short videos promoting an exciting initiative - sending a free tree to any resident of Los Angeles who wanted one. The service delivered one free tree to your door, and some key components to get started in planting it yourself. The videos were designed to introduce citizens to the initiative, and to show just how easy it can be to plant a tree in your backyard.

There's information on how to grow your tree tall and strong for years to come.

We even examine how trees fare much better in a drought than a lawn, consuming less water and providing a significant benefit to any homeowner. 

I'm excited to have been a part of this project, and glad that programs like City Plants exist to help bring shade (and fruit) to communities in LA that need it the most.

If you want to learn more, check them out at cityplants.org, and savethedropla.com.

I also made versions of all three videos in Spanish!  Check them out here!

Star Wars Night!

Star Wars fireworks night has quickly become one of the great annual events on the A's calendar. Since 2011, the scruffy-looking nerf-herders of the East Bay gather in the Coliseum for a night of baseball, a momentous and exciting pyrotechnic display, and most importantly, lightsaber bats.

Thankfully, this year was no different. I made this (thoroughly silly) video for the A's using 5 minutes of random highlights provided by the team and clips from the Star Wars films. I even threw in some footage from the Episode 7 teaser trailers.  Holler if you hear me, Ball Droid fans!

I also designed these holographic-styled scoreboard animations. 

I traveled from LA to Oakland just to enjoy the game and the fireworks show.  The game was back-and-forth throughout with an electric and delightfully nerdy atmosphere, big home runs for the A's, and a great diving catch from center fielder Billy Burns leaving fans with a moment they won't soon forget. The night was capped off by bombastic booming pyrospectacular from geniuses at Pyrospectaculars. The A's might not be headed to October this year, but a ticket to an A's game is still a guarantee for a good time.

Oh! And my finished graphics looked, if may be so bold, gorgeous on the A's brand-new Daktronics video boards!

Introducing Sara and Delilah

Enjoy this brief profile of Sara, the subject of an upcoming Annex Eight project!

Sara and Delilah have been together almost two years.

Sara and Delilah have been together almost two years.

I met Sara when she was panhandling outside L.A. Live.

L.A. Live - the scramble of LEDs and commerce surrounding STAPLES Center.  It boasts restaurants, bars, but most importantly, the Regal Cinemas L.A. Live, the only theater within 15 minutes of my apartment that was showing Taken 3 that night.

She was posted up across the street from the theater, at a busy crossing.  She had a small black cat, with big green eyes.  The cat saw me reach into my wallet to check for singles. Sara smiled wanly at the group of us waiting at the crosswalk. She had a small cardboard sign propped up; a cartoon of herself and her cat, both smiling. Anything helps. 

My smallest bill was a five. I put my wallet back into my pocket, but I got all of ten feet before I heard a voice in my head pointing out that the five bucks I was about to spend on Milk Duds while bakedly watching Liam Neeson punch guys might be better off in the hands of this woman.

After Sara introduced me to herself, and her cat Delilah, we struck up a brief conversation. Where was she from, how long had she had the cat.  After a few minutes, she dropped this on me:

"I'm currently trying to start a non-profit to help provide kenneling and foster care for homeless people's pets!"

How do you not love that?  This woman, who was on the street asking for change, wants to make a difference.  She wants to take action.  I was inspired and in awe.  We exchanged emails, and last week I sat down to interview her on camera (EDITOR'S NOTE: Keep your eyes out for that project, coming soon!).

When Sara was born, she had two small holes in her heart.  She had open heart surgery when she was three years old.  Still, she learned how to read before kindergarten.  She amassed a 3.5 GPA in high school, and wanted to pay her own way in college.

"I only ever wanted to be a writer," she explained. She went to the University of Cincinnatti to study English Literature.

The dramatic turn, Sara says, came in 2007, when arson claimed her apartment.  She'd just moved into a new place, and says she was going to pay for renter's insurance with her first paycheck. Sadly, before she could, a jealous ex-boyfriend of another tenant burned down the building.  There were casualties, and massive property damage.

Sara lost everything.  She eventually made her way to Los Angeles with her boyfriend.  The two lived in a tent, with nothing, outside downtown L.A, for over a year. Sara rescued Delilah, her sweet and playful black cat, in 2013.

Sara's face alights, and her fingers run through Delilah's soft fur, as she lays out ideas for programs to provide everything from kennel services to dog park access, all for the pets of L.A.'s most marginalized population.

Many homeless people have mental issues or, at the very least, good reason not to trust other humans. For them, a pet is more than a friend, more even than family. Sara smiles as she tells me she's happily gone hungry but still fed Delilah.

"Her love saved us," Sara says earnestly. "Our love saved her.  I just want to help the pets God sent to help the least of us."

Do Something!

Fear is a mirror in front of you and a mirror behind you.

When I moved out of my last apartment (where I lived, alone, for 2 years), the hardest part, by far, was packing up my stuff.  It wasn’t a particularly big one-bedroom, but whenever I looked around, it simply felt like too big a task.  How can I, by myself, pack all of my stuff into boxes?  I’ve never done this without at least the help of my mom and my sister; I’m just one person, and the box I’m in is so much bigger than me.  Two weeks out, I hadn’t packed a thing, and I remember sitting on the floor of my living room, head in my hands, frozen with anxiety.

Enter my best friend Ric.  Ric is a large and charismatic man, who had his own key. Ric asked me what was wrong, and when I told him I had no idea how I could get all the packing done in time, he laughed, went out to his truck, and returned with a cardboard box. He pointed to a shelf.

“See that shelf?  Pack up all those books and video games.”

I packed up the box, and the moment I began moving and quit thinking, the fear was, if not gone, certainly deflated.  I could see the strings!  This is what I was afraid of?  Of course I can pack, there are days to go.  Everything will be okay, as long as I don’t just keep sitting there afraid.

To many people, this may seem obvious, but to me it was a revelation!  All I have to do is shrink my problem to a size I can deal with, and then deal with it in manageable bites.  One box.  One day at a time.  One foot in front of the other.

I have spent a lot of time afraid. Trapped in anxiety, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for a month. I have lost so many days to the idea that no one will want to hear what I have to say. 

There’s a reason a lion roars before he tries to eat you. Fear will freeze you in place, bolt your shoes to the floor when you want to run, make you run when you ought to fight. 

A chemical reaction.

Instantaneous.

Jolting.

I have often found myself caught in a loop where everything makes everything worse. I know I am not alone.

I have “set” a lot of goals for myself by saying, “starting tomorrow, I’ll ________” and it’s pretty much a sure thing that whatever I say will not happen. It’s a way of acknowledging the problem I have without ever acting on it.

No more.  It's time to get up off the mat and try something, try everything.

Seriously, make something!

Seriously, make something!

Today, I went to the store, bought copper wire and pliers, and made something. I'd never tried anything like this before, which only made it more exciting to try, but there's so much more I want to do.

Someone I respect immensely told me to write down everything I wanted to do in my life, and when I wrote down the thing that made me sob uncontrollably, that's the thing I'm meant to do.  

I want to tell you stories, to share my thoughts. 

I want to examine fear and love, and any moment we can get lost in together.

As I wrote, before I found The Thing, the thing that I found so empowering was that looking at it on paper, all i had to do was change "want to" to "can" and suddenly, rather than a list of dreams or wishes, it was almost a resume of a million futures I could build for myself.

I can find an audience, find people who feel the way I do and talk to me.

I can find new adventures, meet people, try something new and smile every day.

I can be heard.

And so can you.