Wow. I’m so ecstatic about what’s going on – we’ve had just a couple of days of production and already so many amazing and fascinating people have entered our lives and filled our footage with their quirky personalities, honesty, interesting perspectives, and unique stories!
Let me tell you specifically. We met first with Martin, a very distinguished gentleman and multiple-honor-recipient living at Town Village North (I’ll abbreviate that to TVN, because I have the feeling I’ll be typing it quite a bit!). We stayed for just about 45 minutes. We want our first “interviews” (which is a word we’re trying to stop using), or conversations, if you will, to be brief so as not to seem needy or overwhelming. Just to break the ice, get everyone used to the equipment setup – it’s not every day that a camera and audio setup is coming through the halls of TVN. Martin told us a story about having to leave Rochester because if he didn’t, his life would be threatened due to his asthma. He came to Dallas and has been here since. As it turns out, he was the first of more than half of the people we’ve met so far who are from New York!
At any rate, we then went and visited Yael (who had forgotten we were coming to visit–whoops!). She answered the door in total surprise and laughed. After saying we could come back another time, she insisted we stay and she got ready really quickly. What should she wear? Did she look decent? Should she change sweaters? Everyone’s thinking about how they need to dress up for the camera! We keep telling everyone to not worry about it. After some time, we know that people will stop dressing up for the camera and just be natural, but it definitely makes us feel like a pretty classy enterprise! Yael was born in Cologne, Germany, and she’s lived in countries all over the world, throughout Europe, the Middle-East, Africa, and the USA. And she speaks 6 languages, including Swahili! Incredible.
Then we met Sam. You’ve seen his video. He’s a riot and, like Ashley said, was blown away by the fact that we were recording straight to digital and could store 6 hours 40 minutes of footage on one card no larger than 1″x1″ (even though we’re only using 16GB cards that hold 1 hour 40 minutes each, we could be using a 64GB card of the same physical size to achieve that feat). He hinted that he may have some romantic interests that we should press him for more information on–awesome! That sounds juicy to us! When we stopped filming, he said he had something for us. He gave us four chocolate truffles (two milk chocolate, two white chocolate) and the following:
Haha! And that was after he complimented both of our smiles! What a fun guy. We’re so excited to continue working with all of these people at TVN.
Finally, we capped off the day with my own grandmother: Dorothy. She got all dressed up too, of course, and entertained us with her own ruminations on how different youth culture and life for youngsters like us(!) is nowadays compared to when she grew up. Oh yeah, that was after she fed us! Would I be biased if I said she’s my favorite? Her friend Ceil also showed up and so we filmed a little intro for her too, which you can see below. She’s hilarious. Not afraid to say what’s on her mind, which will be key for us to really get a realistic view of life in old age. In fact, everyone we’ve worked with so far has been very forthcoming and honest, I think, which is really encouraging.
The next day, we met with Ed and Selma. We talked about a common go-to: the food. Suffice it to say, everyone’s got their own opinion on that issue! Once again, Selma was from New York. (Did I mention that Ceil and Sam are, too?) Ed is our first born-and-raised Dallasite. Great Texas accent: my kinda guy. Really nice. We can’t wait to film with both of them again. Selma paints and plays bridge quite a bit, and she also attends “winery” (happy hour!) on Mondays–we’ll definitely be checking that out with her. But she said she only drinks orange juice there!
And finally, on our third day, we sat down with Ceil and her husband, Ed, for a few minutes in their apartment. They’re both really funny. Ed fed us chocolate-covered pretzels and propped up his legs on an ottoman for the interview with his pant legs pulled up to reveal pink socks beneath his khaki pants. Ceil called attention to them, and he said, So what? He likes them! He recounted his time spent in the army, in Japan in particular, and also told us about how he first met Ceil. He said, “I told my friend I was lookin’ for a broad!”
We followed them and my grandmother to dinner and shot in the dining hall. Everyone was looking at us, so we went table by table and told everyone who was looking on what was going on. They were all really interested about the project. Needless to say, it’s been an incredible beginning of production, and we can’t wait to keep going–we’re shooting through the holidays!
