LONG TIME, NO HEAR

Yes, it’s been awhile since I updated here, and yes, I’ve been slow about returning emails. But there’s a reason for that: The last six months saw the death of my mother, this after my father passed about three years ago. And I found out it’s just different when the second parent dies – it’s the abrupt end of a generation, it’s the winding down of an estate, it’s the clearing out of a house with decades of things both memorable and useless. And all that sorting – sorting of objects and emotions – just takes a little time. And priority.

One of the things I realized had to be addressed were all the old 35mm transparencies and 8mm film my dad had taken over the years. (He shot his movies on a Zeiss Movikon 8, a horizontal format movie camera. Pretty cool for the day. Space-agey. Actually, still cool.)

I made it my task to collect, collate, digitize, and Photoshop all the old stills and then digitize and edit the 8mm films as well. No small task, that. But my big-ass mistake was peeking at my grandfather’s genealogy files, stored in a variety of basements for the last 70 years or so. He was a beast about his genealogy, active for decades, and in his files I found another 1500 family photos – including daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes – that just cried for attention. Much was wasting away, photos stuck to each other in boxes. So I decided to rescue it all, stopping the degradation by bringing everything into the digital age.

It’s a bitch of a job. But the time was right.

Anyway, with that largely done, now it feels right to get back to work. Hopefully I’ll be in a position to tell everyone soon what the next movie is.

DT