Making Spaces for Creativity, Imagination, Collaboration & Art

In this photo, Emily and I are pretending, just before we enter a mixer for other filmmakers at the Ritz Carlton that none of this fancy reality which is the fabulous Cleveland International Film Festival is any big deal.  You can read more about our outrageous swagger in this old post.

The truth is though that filmmaking is not mostly about fancy receptions, it's about a lot of planning and preparing and problem solving and making things happen that defy every version of gravity.

And Emily is a magician when it comes to these things.

We first collaborated on the making of  1 and 1/2 films together over a decade ago.  One of the outcomes of that was a little film called Multilevel Relationship - a film I still love.  Another outcome of that enterprise was a film that continues to baffle us with it's post-production problems but could be released on the internet any day. You never know, really.   The final and most important outcome of that experience was something called Film Camp.

  There we are at film camp, young, happy, full of life and story and collaboration.  This is the magic that Emily works as it were actually no big deal.  Whether she's stage managing a huge production or a tiny production of a new underground super indie theatre production.   Whether she's making a table read happen, producing a short film, or hosting a fabulous Dinner Roles party,  she quietly, deliberately, exquisitely makes these spaces where people of like hearts and minds can bring a sense of creativity, imagination and collaboratively make art.

Making space where these things can happen is quiet, demanding, backstage work.  It produces a kind of wealth that is as substantial and important as it is quiet and invisible. 

I'm so lucky to know people who invest their lives in such things.