Don’t Forget Haiti…

Since the day after the earthquake, I have struggled with whether or not I could/should go to Haiti. As the images began to pour in, my overwhelming desire was to go and to go immediately. But then different stories started to trickle in, stories of people just showing up without purpose and I began to feel uneasy. I read of photographers stuck at the airport having no idea where to go. I heard of photographers taking photographs without any outlet. And it seems to me that without an outlet the photographs of suffering are just fodder for a portfolio…and that is an unjustified transaction. Two things happened in quick succession that really put my plans on hold. First, reports surfaced about severe water shortages and then the following morning, Damon Winter’s photograph of a few Haitians reaching for a stream of water coming from a bucket on the back of a relief truck ran on the front page of the New York Times. To me that was a perfect example of the power of well timed journalism. It was powerful, it was compelling, and it told the story of people desperate for the most basic of things… I know that I donated as a result of that one image. I decided then and there that I would not continue to try and go to Haiti. There were already people working hard with resources, experience, backing, and (mega) outlets ready to publish the images. The best thing to do was to stay out of the way.

Now as a media professional, I believe that this urge to see and to show is only natural. It’s how I make sense of the world and ultimately, I believe that my role is to help play a small part in creating the context through which others (who won’t be able to go) process these things… However, I feel like I know enough about how things work to know that you can’t force something like that. Also, I realized that I am not a breaking news kind of storyteller. I am more intrigued and inspired by the process stories, by the small stories, by the rebuilding… Those kind of stories take time and they take a different skill set than breaking news. So I donated, I waited, I watched.

Nearly 4 months later, I got a phone call from a friend who was travelling to Haiti with the purpose of telling stories of community development and rebuilding. He wanted to focus on the small organizations that weren’t large enough to capture national attention, but were doing really compelling, significant work…who are helping to rebuild a country brick by brick. I had the great privilege of traveling with Troy Livesay and Robbie Seay as well as photographer Steven Bush. Steven and I were tasked with covering a lot of moving pieces. We interviewed families while standing on the rubble of broken houses, we sat with new mothers standing on new (artificial) limbs. We watched wounds being dressed and heard stories of picking up the pieces. I am excited to share the stories that we came across. Stories of loss and pain and fear. Stories of hope and peace and love. Stories of the lost being found, stories of starting small. We will work to put them together as honestly as possible.

You know, I’ve heard it said that the best way to tell a big nuanced story is to tell a very, very tiny piece of it. The mystery seems to be that in the small things we see an emerging picture…not that each small piece is somehow representative of the whole, but rather each small piece hints at a larger framework. It can be counter intuitive, it can feel too simple, but ultimately we are creatures of small circles, of limited interactions and we just aren’t able to comprehend the gravity of large scale disaster.

In a way, large scale tragedy attracts the attention of media outlets across the globe because it makes for “good tv”, but the reason the media crews leave is because the tragedy (even at this scale) is really just made up of normal people trying to live normal lives. But I believe, paradoxically perhaps, that the NORMAL is what you and I end up connecting with…a dad who is trying to find work and food for his family. Not necessarily a flattened cathedral…

Don’t Forget Haiti: Tent City from Ryan Booth on Vimeo.

At one point, while standing on a hillside and surveying to my left and to my right, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t standing on a hillside. I was standing on ten stories of rubble, smashed and piled into an enormous mound. A mound that had claimed the lives of many, a mound that represented the permanently altered lives of a neighborhood, a town. This mound was seismic change, catastrophic change, and yet, as I looked back to my right, a young boy carrying a school bag strolled by weaving his way through the cut paths in the rubble. He was walking on the new “sidewalks” made from thousands of feet following the pair in front of them. He had a sno-cone in his hand and a book back slung over his shoulder. This was his new walk home from school. Catastrophe and normalcy pressed right up against each other. I followed the young man as he walked home, as he made his way through what was left of his neighborhood and I wondered what I was walking over, wondered how possible it would be to “move on.” Then he turned the corner, out of my view, and into his house…

Dont Forget Haiti: Sidewalks from Ryan Booth on Vimeo.

These stories will live on dontforgethaiti.com. Check there soon to meet more of these incredible Haitian people who are just like you and me…more people who are having to rebuild an entire city brick by brick. The hope is to connect you with these people and the organizations who are standing along side them.

Take for instance, the couple below. The man was working on his roof when the earthquake struck. It detached from his house and he somehow managed to ride it like a wildly pitching skateboard down the broadside of the hill his house stood on. It came to rest and he was largely unhurt. Problem was, his grandson had been inside the mound of concrete that moments before had been his house. He spent the next several hours digging his grandson out of the rubble. He had severe injuries, broken bones and deep lacerations. We met the boy at a clinic and sat with him as they changed his cast and cleaned his scars. We stood with the couple on the pile of concrete and rebar that was all that was left of their house as he told us about the other children that he lost that day. These are the stories we will work to tell. Why? Because, quite simply, if we live in a world in which my computer can come from China and my clothes can come from India and my apple can come from New Zealand…if my everyday life is impacted by all corners of the globe, then shouldn’t it follow that “neighbor” is an ever expanding definition? If we are global consumers, then can’t we also be global producers, investors, givers… 

(Photo by Steven Bush)

(Photos by my iPhone)

(Another image by Steven Bush)

Sometimes I wonder if “getting involved” really starts with just “getting to know someone.” Maybe the rest of it just flows from the “knowing.”

I’m not sure.

Either way, don’t forget Haiti.

Beyond the Still

I’ve been itching to enter Canon and Vimeo’s Beyond the Still film contest for months now. After I watched my friends Scott Brignac and Cody Bess collaborate on the second chapter, make the top 5, and have a blast, I knew that I had to do it. Now, I have never written/directed/shot/edited anything narrative before and I thought that this contest provided a great opportunity to try it out. I have been following the contest pretty closely and have voted for each chapter. I had been arm-chair quarterbacking from the sidelines and knew it was time to jump in and make a film. I promise you, my only goal was finishing. I wanted to try something new, make something that I could be proud of, and turn it in by deadline. I knew that anything beyond that was largely out of my control. To make the top 5 is a huge honor. There were some really, really strong pieces this round. I am interested to see what happens to the story from here and who the vimeo community will pick as the winner. If you feel that my piece is the direction you’d like to see the story go, please take a moment and vote! (just click the header above).

The “telephone” nature of the competition, I believe, is both the biggest strength (incredibly inviting for first time filmmakers) and its biggest challenge (good luck trying to tonally/stylistically make anything connect). Trying to logically (and interestingly) follow four other narrative pieces is quite tricky…you don’t want to simply follow the structure, but rather, want to insert your own ideas into the framework and to hopefully nudge it in a different direction. The trick is finding the balance. You want to pay respect to the winning chapters and to the fact that viewers are naturally going to be interested in what happens to the Cabbie at this point. Producing something that was a sharp divergence from the story and completely outside of the cabbie/bear/key/warehouse paradigm seemed to be disingenuous. So I decided to operate within the arc presented by the first four winners, albeit, with a bit of a different tone. I decided to thicken up the Cabbie and daughter characters…asking questions about why we should be rooting for them, why we are following them in the first place… The action that is taking place in the “present” of this story was pretty set at this point. Kidnapped daughter, weird beachcomber guy, “go to this address”, creepy warehouse, etc. I kept coming back to this thought that these kind of mystical/strange/sinister things don’t happen in a vacuum. Mystical begets mystical, sinister begets sinister. Choices tend to cascade exponentially. My idea was to explore what happened long before this particular few days/nights. What was the Cabbie engaged in, regardless of the reasons, that would have put him on a path to intersect with these bizarre characters/circumstances?  

Given that I had never written a screenplay before, my friend Dan Steele was my first phone call when i started thinking seriously about entering. I have known Dan since theater days in college and have always appreciated his writing (of course), but more than that, I knew that he would be a perfect person to bounce ideas around with. We would spend hours on the phone throwing out “what if…” questions, following the rabbit trails where they would lead. We discussed motivations and new characters and how to make this story move forward. Yet, we also began to try and fill in the structure with more emotional subtext. “Raising the stakes” as my theater professors would say. We quickly dismantled the first few ideas, realizing that that is where most people would stop (in a rush to start shooting) and we really spent a lot of time trying to think of ways to thicken the story and provide the filmmakers of the next chapter with plenty of fresh alley ways to explore.

First goal: map out the structure of the entire story (including our ideas), as it existed.

THE CABBIE (CH. 1 - CH. 5)

After we would talk Dan would go and format it all into an actual screenplay and send me drafts at night. Pretty soon we had a script:

Now, to this point any video work I have done has been mostly documentary/promotional pieces and mostly for musicians and labels. I have been overseas quite a bit shooting and telling stories of the work of NGOs, however this is an entirely different animal. I’d like to think that I am not unfamiliar with the theory of assembling a project like this. I have been engineering records for years now and to make music you start with the structure (writing), assemble your team and begin to layer part on part until it begins to take shape. Then you convene, make sure everything is heading into the right direction, then begin to fill in the holes and strengthen the weak spots…a guitar line here, a different fill there…then you take all of your pieces and edit them together to present a cohesive final product. Narrative filmmaking seems to occupy a similar space as making music, albeit with many more moving pieces… 

Friends were called, gear was borrowed, the script was printed out and away we went. My friend Andrew brought a jib down for the cemetery scene. I didn’t want to use a slider and I knew that I didn’t want to light heavily. I shot most of it natural light, mostly on sticks. Anything that moved was shot with a Glidecam2000. All in all, it took a few days of shooting here and there, a few days of pickups after I started editing, and a few days of editing.

A couple of photos from production:

I have a new respect for the difficulty of filmmaking, of continuity in non-linear shooting, and for how many people it takes to even pull off something small. I have learned an immense amount of information in just a few days of self-directed shooting. I am excited to try new pieces, to shoot, to direct, to edit, to create…i have always said that I view myself primarily as a storyteller and I am thrilled with the process of constructing narrative film. I might be hooked… 

Miracle from Ryan Booth on Vimeo.

Airplane Quiet

Now I have been flying pretty regularly on airplanes since I was a little kid.  My parents are divorced so all of the major holidays usually meant a couple of trips on an airplane. I have never been uncomfortable or uneasy on planes. But last fall, on a flight home from a shoot in Chicago, the plane I was flying in was struck by lightning as we were in the steepest part of our ascent.  I mean, a canon-blast, blinding flash that filled the cabin, violent shudder, sinking feeling, screaming, this-is-it-i-am-going-to-die moment.  After the strike, the pilot immediately began to level off…but between the ascent and leveling off just felt like falling. It was sheer panic on the plane. There was screaming, wailing, profanity in bizarre combinations. It was one of those strange, surreal moments. It was a really tense hour as we circled Chicago (in the lightning!) while the pilot ran diagnostics to see if we were going to be able to land.  The flight attendants were working their way up and down the aisles passing out as much free alcohol as was wanted (needed). There were quite a few people drinking. As we began our descent back into the same airport we left from, the pilot came over the intercom just a few too many times to assure us “everything is going to be ok and yes, the landing gear is down, we had visual confirmation from the tower.” As we came down, we were instructed to “assume the crash position” and i just ingnored the instructions. If we were going to crash, I at least wanted to be looking out the window. (I always have to watch the nurse give me the shot). The runway was lined with emergency vehicles. Let’s just say, that really isn’t that comforting… We landed smoothly and had to exit the plane, wait for three hours, and get on a different plane to take off in the same storm. Nothing like getting back on the horse, right? All that to say, I have spent quite a bit of time on airplanes the last several months and I have noticed, quite to my disappointment, that I get extremely uncomfortable during take-off and landing.  I grip the arm rests a little too tight, I get a bit squeemish, I tap my foot. I have never been scared, but now I find myself needing some distraction and interestingly enough, I find that “photo-brain” is active enough to take my mind off of any take-off induced jitters.  I just go ahead and disregard the “if it has a switch, put it away” lines and shoot with whatever I have with me. Sometimes its just an iPhone, sometimes its the G10, sometimes its the mk2… Regardless of what I have, if I can focus on “seeing” what is happening outside of my window, I can start to relax. 

A few images from the window, some iPhone, some G10:

In the Air from Ryan Booth on Vimeo.

There are times now, as I am looking out the window, that I am struck by the significance of what we are doing. We are miles up in the air hurtling at nearly 700 feet per second. Even though air travel is relatively routine for us, the reality is that I am engaging in an activity that only the smallest fraction of humans have ever been able to do. I am seeing clouds in a way that almost no one has seen them. I am traveling faster than most human beings have ever traveled. I am seeing the earth from an incredibly rare vantage point. It is unbelievable how safe it all is, relative to the magnitude of what is accomplished.  It isn’t that I didn’t know this before, it is just that I didn’t consider it that often. Once, my friend commented, as we were standing on the top of a mountain in Colorado, “you know, you don’t get to see something this beautiful without there being a corresponding risk, a danger, a struggle.” In other words, whether we acknowledge it or not, the stakes are pretty high when we get on those planes and flitz around the globe. If anything, my little incident has made me more thankful for the engineers and the pilots and the mechanics who work so hard to minimize the risk, but also, I find that I am also more acutely aware of the sheer beauty that I get to see out my window…

Now, I make sure that I call my short list of “i love you” people before I take off, then sit back and look at the clouds…

A Silent 2010

It has been quiet here on the blog this year. My last post was a wrap up of 2009 and here we are rounding second base in 2010.  An entire half of a year later. I want to apologize for the silence. Not necessarily to you, the readers…I wouldn’t presume to believe that my lack of writing has in any way lessened your 2010. I mostly mean to publicly apologize for not making space for this small discipline. I really believe that small, repetitive, intentional disciplines are so important to weave into the fabric of our everyday lives. Not only for professional “creatives,” but for all of us. Something happens in the repetition. Things begin to come into focus, we have our “standing outside ourselves” moments (epiphany). For me, writing has always been that discipline and then sharing that to a small audience on a regular basis was an excellent grounding…in a way, a cementing of the practice. It is part of the “working harder in 2010” I mentioned in the previous post. You know, it’s interesting, this has been a pretty good year on the work front. I have been shooting a ton, learning a ton, trying new things… I have been out of the country a few times, recorded a couple of records, hosted concerts, shot a few terabytes of video. In fact, in many ways, this has been my most interesting year yet. Yet, for some reason, I just haven’t had much to say. I’ve been keeping my mouth shut, trying to figure out what is next…not just professionally, but personally and honestly, I feel that I’ve been a bit lost in the questions. All that to say, I’m going to be voicing some of those questions out loud, right here.  

So in the spirit of change, I have updated the design of the blog, included a new header (designed by the talented zach mcnair), and even added the ability to comment. I am going to post a couple recap posts from projects from the first half of 2010 and then we’re off to the races. Looking forward to the repetition, to the conversation, to having you, my readers, back and active…