BACKSTAGE

Decades ago, my grandfather designed and built this house with my grandmother and my great-Grandfather and for 27 years I’ve been going to family gatherings here several times a year.

Ten years ago, I started filming videos of these gatherings knowing how precious they were and that they weren’t going to last forever. To my surprise, over time the video clips started to tell one silly story that is perhaps the thing that bonds my family together the most — singing and dancing. Even after my grandfather passed away, I kept recording these videos and began a quiet plan to one day edit them together.

And then, I got the call. The house was being sold. It seemed like the perfect time to finish the story. So, cinematographer David Bolen and I went out to Virginia and spent three days filming every corner of the house, inside and out, (8TB in all). It was both an effort to complete this film as well as to archive my grandfather’s architectural work for generations to come.

I started editing the footage together in montage with the archival video clips shot on my iPhone over the years, as I was backing up this precious cache of film to the my iCloud Drive, I knew what the ending of this short story had to be.

The resulting film is a love letter to my family, to creativity, and to the creative technology that has inspired me to tell stories since I was 15.