Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Our new friend Tom Weidlinger, a filmmaker in Berkeley, California, gave Frank, Bob, and me a three-day tutorial in filmmaking the first part of last week. For the SIMPLE LIVING series to date, we have hired all of our videography work out. In so doing, we’ve experienced a number of shooters: the good, the excellent and the indifferent. But Tom, a filmmaker with an impressive track record of environmental films and socially conscious projects (he produced The Long Walk to Freedom, among others), whom Frank and I had met earlier this year at an environmental film festival at the Sleeping Lady Conference Center in Leavenworth, Washington, suggested that we weren’t too old to try to learn to use camera equipment, with the goal of shooting some of our own stuff. So out we all went, with Henry in tow, and he donated three days of his time to bring us up to snuff.

On the first day, he asked us to make a short film, centered around a fire hydrant at a park a block from where he lives. The fire hydrant had been painted to look like a man: a man with a smiling face. The fire hydrant, whom we named Pierre, had on a beret, a tie and an attitude. So we wrote a short script and shot Pierre from many angles. We decided Pierre was an out-of-work waiter who heard about an opening at the upscale restaurant Chez Panisse and was waiting for a bus to take him to a job interview. The bus never came, and Pierre decided he was happy staying put. We spent the morning shooting Pierre from all different angles and ended up putting together a short film. What a thrill. Henry added voiceover for the title and the ending.

For the rest of the class, we shot interviews with each other, sometimes Bob taking a turn at the camera and sometimes Frank doing so and occasionally me holding the large piece of equipment. We had the chance to preview the rough cut of Tom’s remarkable new film for public television, Swim the River, about a man who swam the length of the Hudson River in New York to make a statement in motion about the environment. On Wednesday, we shot a full day interview with a woman I’d always admired: Carol Venolia, an architect based in Northern California, who authored a wonderful 1988 book, Healing Environments. We shot her for season #3 of SIMPLE LIVING at a new home she’d designed in Sonoma, California.

One of the many lessons we learned during this three-day session in Berkeley is how challenging it is to keep learning, how complicated is every single thing you attempt in life but how rewarding. Perhaps most important, though, was what we experienced from Tom about the power of friendship and the innate generosity of people.