Beginning

Every story has a beginning, middle and end. It is so simple when the story unfolds as you are living it, but when you want to share the story with others, it is trickier. If you want to engage your audience, you sometimes need to reconstruct the story, choose where to begin, which twists and how many turns to follow. The ending is easy if the story happened in the past. But if you stand at the beginning of a story as yet untold, conjuring the ending requires imagination.

This story begins here: immersed in the view from an open boxcar on a freight train carving itself through a monumental landscape somewhere in the American West. Here, drenched in an intoxicating freedom, absorbing the iconic experience of hopping freight trains, I am inspired to make my first feature length documentary, CATCHING OUT .

And now many years later I find myself facing the challenge of finding a new subject and making a new film. The story of my search for ideas, my efforts to find funding, and eventually shoot and edit will unfold here in this blog.

The ending that I imagine is simple: bringing a new film to fruition.