Juggling Act

While the last four years of freelancing have certainly honed my ability to juggle and balance multiple projects, this summer and fall have really put those skills to the test. On top of planning and hosting a wedding (my own!), I have been kept super-busy with a number of projects -- five separate clients, in fact, since I last posted here. The thing that I find most interesting is that the projects couldn't possibly be more different from one another; they include a comedy web series, corporate content for a medical records-managing company, a documentary pitch, a museum video, and a nonprofit PSA. So yeah... they've really run the gamut.

At the 2012 Camden International Film Festival

Two weeks ago, I bumped elbows with fellow documentary filmmakers in Camden, Maine, at the Camden International Film Festival. It was really nice to soak in the all-doc festival atmosphere, as well as tangle with other filmmakers, both Boston-based ones and ones who had traveled far and wide to be there. I was accompanying my friends and coworkers, Jackie Mow and Laura Pacheco, to the Points North Documentary Film Forum -- a forum designed to give filmmakers a chance to pitch their projects to an "international delegation of funders" and receive valuable feedback (and potential funding connections) from industry pros. I edited a trailer to Jackie and Laura's project, East of Salinas (working title), a film they've been shooting for over a year now about a third-grade teacher in Salinas, California who teaches mostly migrant farmworker children in hopes of showing them a better path than the gang-ridden streets they know. 

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An image from my yet-to-be-titled short film, currently in production

I'll be honest in saying that my recent "busy-ness" reflects a push on my part to bring home a little more bacon in the wake of accumulated wedding bills :) But now that the wedding is over and I have a little more time on my hands, I am realizing that work is not fully satisfying my creative self, and I am itching to return to some of my own projects. Of course, there's the behemoth of a project in the film I want to make about my dad, which I have been working on here-and-there over the past three years,... but for the time-being, I have my sights on a smaller, though in some ways more daunting, ambition: a short documentary about a great personal loss I suffered when I was 22 years old. I actually began shooting for this project about a year and a half ago, and took a bit of a hiatus from it because of the wedding. I am looking forward to returning to it, which will likely happen when I travel to D.C. later this fall to shoot what I anticipate to be my final interview for the project. More on that later...

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Garland Waller's film, "No Way Out But One"

In other news, some of the films I've worked on previously are getting some exposure. Lyda Kuth's Love and Other Anxieties (on which I was the Assistant Editor) is making its way through the festival circuit (click here for a list of screenings), and will be playing locally at the Coolidge Corner Theatre the week of Nov. 2-8. In addition, Garland Waller's No Way Out But One (for which I shot second camera) is making its national primetime television debut on the Documentary Channel on October 29th at 8:00 p.m. (airing again at 11:00 p.m.). 

Last but not least, if any fellow Bostonians are around November 7-19, check out the Boston Jewish Film Festival. I was one of the judges in the festival's short film competition :)

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