Massillon Premiere

Thelma Slater has always been a proud citizen of Massillon. While the majority of her career was spent serving in Canton City Schools, she continued to live in Massillon and contribute to the community both financially and through many different kinds of volunteering. Thelma founded the Mayor’s Literacy Commission in Massillon and has worked with many of the community institutions to eradicate illiteracy in this town. Two of the most important turning points that the film covers happen in her hometown of Massillon so it’s appropriate to show her film to a group of friends, supporters and neighbors at the beautiful downtown library.

 

Hope to see you there!

We Won!

 

Thelma’s film was selected by the jury to screen and win the prize for — STORY OF STARK.

I’m so grateful to Thelma for her long investment, but also to my generous collaborators:

John Pope, Bethany Taylor Edenhoffer, David Everett, Amy Everett, Jaelyn Rudd, Alyssa Pearson, Nate Ross, Daniel Rudd, and Connie Clapper.

So many generous community institutions:

The Massillon Public Library, the McKinley Museum, Malone University,  the Massillon Museum, the Stark County District Library, The Massillon High School Alumni Association, the Jones School Alumni Association, Walsh University, the Canton Classic Car Museum

my generous supporters at work:

Don Tucker, Marcia Everett, Kerrie Evans, & Micah Tedeschi

my generous and supportive partner: Lynn Rudd

& my supportive and lifegiving children: Addison & Jaelyn Rudd.

James Waters, festival director deserves a MASSIVE thank you from the Canton Community for the tireless labor he poured into this festival.  Thanks for your work, James!

And It’s Off…

After two major revisions, the festival version of Thelma’s film is in the mail.

My friend Cliff came to visit this summer and during one of our many walks, he and I sort of invented a new way to tell the story that might work a bit better than what I had been doing.

I made the cut during the month of August, but once I watched it?  I didn’t like it at all.  We had decided to invert the order (and *I’m sure* if I would have just followed Cliff’s advice it would have worked like magic, he’s a natural storyteller), and have the movie use a reverse chronology to foreground what I think is one of the big POP! ideas of the film — and that is the idea that Thelma isn’t just a wealthy privileged person who has devoted her life to helping people with less privilege.  Thelma herself grew up in significant poverty.

I still love the idea of an inverted chronology, but the amount of footage and testimonial that I had made this version feel clunky, anti-poetic (a new word!) and disordered.   It was that bad.

I took the best of Cliff’s advice and made the next cut which is the one that I just sent in to the Canton Film Fest.  I made this film for reelate.org out of a faculty grant I was awarded by my employer, Malone University.  It was never my intention to take it to festivals, but since the Canton Film Fest has a contest category called:  Story of Stark, it felt like I should definitely enter it into that category.

Eventually it will live it’s long life on reelate.org.

Happy Birthday, Thelma!

Lynn and I had the great pleasure to be invited to Thelma’s 90th Birthday Party today.  We had a great time, both because the movie played well and it was (not surprisingly) an engaged crowd, but also because we had the privilege to observe Thelma surrounded by her family, friends and co-workers.

And we both came away even more impressed and convinced of the ways that our lives will be richer and wiser for having been a part of Thelma’s life.  She has impacted so many people in so many ways and yet is always very interested in the person right next to her.  Not the person in the room with the most power or potential.  It’s one of her best traits.

Revising the First Cut

I sent the cut out to several trusted friends and asked for some feedback.  The places where my friends coalesced really helped me re-focus my vision.

I was initially starting out with a sequence that was vaguely supposed to be Thelma driving the 15 miles that she drives each morning to volunteer at the public library.

I like the emphasis on driving and the sound of sippo creek in the background (where Thelma grew up) because the contrast between mobility and restriction is embedded in the image *BUT* the sound of water flowing over the visuals of a road provides a continuity (theoretical) to that same contradiction.

But ultimately it didn’t clearly enough tie into the narrative.  It might have worked in a feature film.

So here’s the Opening sequence that is no more…..

Long Nights

I’ve seen two or three middle-of-the-night editors have a kind of plea-for-empathy post like this one.  Funny thing was….when it happened to my screen.  I felt no panic at all.  Very zen.

It may be because I still have four days to recover from whatever it is?  Or maybe because I’ve lost so many mid-edit projects?  Or maybe it was just because I thought it looked like a way cool pastiche / quilt of the whole project?  Don’t you think?

The codec problems related to ingesting EOS footage have tortured me for this past week.  The workaround I finally settled on included ingesting the clips to i movie — doing a rough cut there, and then exporting them into a quicktime file format that could more easily be ingested into Final Cut Pro for final editing.

I know that paragraph seems nonsensical to some of my readers and astonishingly backwards to others.  But it sums up my week of editing.  Can’t wait for Final Cut pro to come and solve all our EOS problems.

Filming In The Rain

camera crew, under our makeshift tarp

I decided early in the process that I wanted to pull a page out of the Errol Morris textbook (since he is one of my favorite filmmakers) and include a re-enactment in this film.

One of my favorite stories about Thelma is how she used to travel all over the district, acting as the first elementary school counselor for 12 – 20 schools.

I love this story both because of what a remarkable accomplishment it is for a woman to invent a program like this, get it funded and then have the mobility and ability to see it through.  In the fifties?  Women did not have this kind of mobility and autonomy in their jobs (in general).  Particularly in Canton, Ohio.  I *also* love this story because of the profound counterpoint that this geographic mobility offers to the experiences of her early life.  But you’ll have to see the movie to understand that point.

So after a great deal of schedule juggling, we finally found a time that Bethany Taylor, my 1950s Thelma and I could both film.  OF COURSE (would you know!?)  that afternoon it started to rain.  I knew that if we didn’t get it filmed in the narrow window we had it might be another month or two, so I enlisted two of our best family friends — Amy and David Everett, along with my 12 year old daughter, Jaelyn, and the five of us went traipsing to our location (an abandoned house, built in the 1930s) to film in the rain.

The whole thing was rather comic in the end.  David and Amy created a massive plastic tent over me (the camera operator) and Jaelyn helped them hold it up.  We would follow our actress, dressed in 50s clothes down the neighborhood streets of downtown Canton.  Quite a sight for passers by.

Here’s an audio clip of us in action:

[audio  http://kiwi6.com/file/21fod8lb5u]

still under the tarp, moving through the neighborhood

Massillon Museum Archive

Mandy Altimus Pond, director of the archival collection at the (always so impressive!) Massillon Museum, prepared a cart full of archival materials to review today.  Not only did she locate a number of the photographs I was hoping to find, but she provided some excellent archival photos that (helpfully!) re-shaped my imagination about the project.

The upcoming Faces of Rural America show that they’ve put together is truly a *great* project that fleshes out the sort of local storytelling I love.

Canton Car Museum

You never know what you’ll find on a documentary project.  As a part of the re-enactment scene, I decided to call the Canton Classic Car Museum to see if they would be willing to donate the use of one of their 1950s cars to the process.

I had the good luck to talk to Char Lautzenheiser, the director of the museum.  Char was not only helpful in setting up a shoot, but, it turns out, has had some experience in the entertainment industry herself.

By the time Bethany and I left the museum, not only did I want to bring my kids back to see more, but both Bethany and I felt like we had gained a new friend in Char, we had learned a lot (and not just about cars!  but about Canton history!), and we got the shots we needed.

You can see a few of the treasures in this Eden for History Buffs here.

The Final Countdown

I’m submitting a rough cut of THREE GENERATIONS to a festival next week; I’m nowhere near ready, and those of you adept in FCP will recognize how far I am from a rough cut(though, admittedly, this particular screen capture doesn’t tell the *whole* story).  I just collected a basket o’ stories from my good friend Jacci on the right….making this project of story collection from amazing women even more powerful and meaningful for me.