Monday, December 6, 2010

Doing Justice


Working for so long on my film about the Square it has been frustrating to have nothing yet to show for all of that effort. I started it back in the fall of 07 thinking I could get it out by the Bicentennial in 2008... then it was set back on the shelf to accommodate the Underground Railroad film for October 2008, the Library Centennial film for December 2008, then into limbo for Historical Society stuff, Arcadia deadlines, and more and more.

Realizing that it could pend forever if I didn't extricate myself from all the distractions, I quit the Carousel Board, the Historical Society Board, the Cosby Center Board and went back to my real job.

The film is in 4 parts and I have addressed each separately to get a rough working draft going. Finally last month, as I was photoshopping my way through part 4 and the end of pre-preparation actually loomed into sight, I understood suddenly that I have a serious need to see some results that are not in the box of gettingready. I was assembling images of the Lady Justice sequence for the Courthouse segment and could see that within the framework of Part 4 I could never do justice to her story... so in a thrilling moment of clarity I pulled all of her material out of the film to do a short just about her. And set aside Thanksgiving vacation for completion.

I set myself to tell the story of Lady Justice on the top of the Richland County Courthouse, and use her tale to address a topic that resonates to my soul: the cut-through of the Square.

What a blast. That's what I love to do: have the subject, a theme, the materials, the vast possibilities, the time and a deadline.

Here's the best part of this story: the day after I committed myself to this work all full of en-theo-siasm, I ran into a guy who told me that he had just come from the inaugural meeting of a committee who is working to restore the Square to its former whole. And I had already begun their first piece of propaganda.

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