I began learning how to capture what is commonly called an instant when I was about 10.
My parents gave me a plastic, double lens reflex camera for my birthday because I wanted to take pictures of the starlings, robins and other birds always living around our house in the summer.
I thought all I had to do was to get the birds in the frame of the camera and push the button. Easy, right? National Geographic, here I come!
My first halting attempts were instructive because the wide angle lens on my new camera took in too much of the scene and the birds were merely tiny, blurred dots on the black and white prints that my dad brought back from the camera store.
And, so I learned that the camera was limited in it’s vision when compared to the wonderful sight I was born with. I asked my dad why the birds looked so far away and, in his typical engineer fashion, he jumped right to the solution of my problem without explaining the "why" part. I needed a telephoto lens to get good pictures of the birds, he told me, which works like a telescope.
Just this tidbit of information made watching TV a lot more interesting because I began to notice that the individual shots were edited together using some closeups, while other shots were wider views, like my plastic camera.
A short time after that, my parents took my brother and me to southern California for a winter vacation from frigid northern Ohio to bask in the sunshine of the LA area. One of my parents friends, Bob Peebles, was an old Hollywood gaffer (a lighting man) who had many contacts “in the industry”, as people said then (and even now). Old Bob arranged for for our family to witness an afternoon of shooting The Rin Tin Tin TV series at a movie ranch's old frontier town set. My brother and I were awestruck.
I really can’t put into words what it was like for a 10 year old TV fan like me to watch the busy crew shoot about 6 scenes of one of my favorite shows. We even got to meet Rusty, Sargent Masters, and two of the three dogs that played Rinty. I had thought there was only one Rin Tin Tin, but there was one that did the fighting scenes, one that walked and ran around, and one that was for the closeups - the prettiest one. It all seemed surreal, even if I didn’t know what that word meant then, like looking behind the curtain of reality.
The whole experience that day had a profound effect on me. I comprehended that scenes were shot out of sequence, that the camera was moved to a new setup for every shot, that the actors had to re-say their lines for different camera angles, and that it was all rather “fake” but quite manageable if you knew how to do it. Plus, it took a lot more people to make a TV show than I had ever imagined.
From that event forward I was bit hard by the movie making bug. So, in a sense, my long film making career began while I was only 10 years old.
The thing that strikes me the most about this is that I knew what I was interested in at a very young age and was lucky enough to find my way there despite the maze of our educational system that tries to imprint what is perceived as society's needs on each individual through our industrialized, politicized, patronizing, out-dated educational system. I am fortunate in that I finally, at age 22, was able to follow my dreams and develop my passion by enrolling in a film school in Hollywood.
The vast majority of people are not so lucky.
