Filmmaking

Foreword

I remember the moment as if it happened yesterday. It was a scorching summer afternoon in July 1984, and my fourth-grade friends and I stood anxiously in our spacemen costumes in the loft of my parents’ Ohio barn. Surrounded by Christmas lights stuck through hastily painted cardboard boxes, we stared at the crayon-drawn view screen and yelled as the make-believe enemy ships fired their weapons at us. Throwing ourselves around the set, my Dad shook the camera as my friends threw pieces of cardboard debris on top of us. It worked perfectly. I stood up, called “cut,” and we officially finished the first shot of my first movie. Looking around at the world I had created in the barn, I knew, in that moment, that I had found my calling … to ...