It all starts with the written word, how my stories have lead to film

https://bit.ly/3mSOAim

For the Preakness, I returned to my role as reporter, publishing with the new online news outlet, The Baltimore Banner. This article tugged both at my news instincts and a visual desire to create a film about Alex Wooten who found a new life after 20 years in prisons thanks to an innovative Equestrian Vocational training program that he went through just as he was leaving incarceration and head back to the free world. As I listened to his story, his experience of training horses early in the morning and the struggle to keep on the straight and narrow I saw the film unfurl. I’ve gotten this feeling before with Fancy Clancy , the world’s greatest beer vendor, an article that I wrote in which I eventually made into a film

Hidden in Plain Sight, The Strange, Sad and Surprising Story of Baltimore's Lost River - The Jones Falls

Since we attained the grant from Women in Film and Video in D.C. we’ve been on the prowl to scamper up footage. I always see myself going through the squirrel gathering nuts phase in all stories I approach, where you just go out and get material and worry about it later, but Hidden in Plain Sight has taken the process to ferril heights. With the press of Covid-19, the outdoors being a refuge in a whole new way, the project is very much being processed through my emotions. There is the living of hitting this trail like a living mantra, day after day, soaking in the seasons, the monotony and the beauty, repressiveness and a sense of true life unabashed and so very plain, over and over. Then there is the mission of redefining the idea of urban wilderness, using the idea that nature needs to smell one way, ,look one way and if it’s not. It’s not nature, it’s urban decay. Well that’s our base line —- urban decay.

Under the North Avenue Bridge at the foot of the Falls Road, reported to be built over a Native American Trail

Heel on Red gets a remake. Get ready for Trade for Prints 2021

Heel on Red, the experimental documentary on Photographer Sam Holden as told by girlfriend and collaborator/steward/observer, Donna Sherman had a good run in 2018. It won several underground film festivals including the Denver Underground Festival. But we also believe that its running time of 29 minutes made the longish short a hard schedule. For every Heel on Red, a programer was displacing four or five other shorts by sheer time. Thus we are remaking the film as Trade for Print with a running time under 9 minutes. Trade for Prints is the saying for bartering for work.