About
I first conceived of Retro Reflections when I was watching a documentary. You interview an individual - or several individuals - and then you add pictures, video and music to bring their story to life. I loved the idea of conducting research and piecing media together to bring someone's story to life.
Before that, I had considered shooting documentaries for the city of Houston, but then I thought about all the hassles that would be involved: driving into town, obtaining permits to shoot in certain areas, police stopping me from filming and then wondering if the city would even purchase my documentaries after all my troubles.
The evening I was watching the documentary a seemingly crazy idea reached my consciousness: Could I shoot documentaries about people? Would people want to talk about their lives and offer me photographs and home movies they haven't seen in years so I could bring their stories to life?"
The more I thought about it the more logical it seemed. Indeed, years ago I made a twenty minute documentary on my life for a high school English class senior project. This was before I knew about scanning pictures so I propped up family photos against a lamp and I recorded them to include in the documentary. I took clips of home movies and edited them with the photos and added music and a voiceover.
When I was visiting my parents from college, I copied about twenty home movie tapes onto MiniDV tapes. I took the tapes back to my apartment in Austin and loaded all the footage into my laptop and began editing. I burned over a dozen DVDs by categories: birthdays, vacations, school events, Little League, etc. So now my parents can watch a certain birthday or vacation by clicking one from a DVD menu, instead of having to fast forward through a bunch of footage on a tape. The process of editing the footage and making it available in a more efficient fashion was satisfying.
In my early twenties, I would read the obituaries in the Houston Chronicle due to my fascination with life stories. The obituaries provided a brief glimpse of a life and I looked forward to read what the highlights of a life were.
My fascination with family history continued when I stayed at my grandparents' house while attending another university in Miami. I would find their photo albums and go through thirty years of photographs in thirty minutes; it was fascinating to see the evolution of family members along with the era.
Years later, I had a stint as a middle school history teacher. While classroom management was an issue, the idea of making history interesting to young minds was a worthy challenge.
At the time I didn't realize that these interests were the building blocks of Retro Reflections. At the time, I considered them pursuits of passion that interrupted my daily life. Ultimately, I began to conceive of a way to explore these passions as part of my daily life.
Combining my love of history, storytelling, and video has led me to Retro Reflections.
