Here's a clip reel of a documentary I've been producing and shooting for the last few months. It's called RISE UP AND SHOUT and it follows some young gay and lesbian performers featured in a live talent showcase held in early September. You can read more about the event here. In addition to filming the event, the director, Brian Gleason, and I have been interviewing the performers as well as the organizers. What has emerged is a unique profile of what it's like to be a young gay person in LA and the challenges they face while navigating identity, ambition and community.

It's been challenging and exciting shooting documentary. I found myself pulling from my background in photojournalism. It's a pretty awesome experience when I am able to capture a moment, a look, an emotion as they surface in the moment. It's a lot like hunting, I suspect. You have to always be looking out of the corner of your eye for an opportunity to capture something special.

I would like to give big props to some of the people who helped out on the doc: Matt Johnstone, Mark Thompson, Don Kilhefner, Jason Dollar, Josh Smith, Peter Tang, Brad Sample, Kim DeRose, Abigail Severance, Julia Gandelsonas and Scott Hatcher just to name a few.

We're currently finishing up principal photography and moving into editing. Eventually we hope to screen it at festivals and, perhaps, sell it to a TV network.

In other news...

Read a great article about David Lynch in this week's New York Times. Here's something Dave had to say about finding the inspiration behind his new feature, Inland Empire...

Mr. Lynch has repeatedly advanced a poetic, democratic notion of ideas as independent of the artist, waiting to be plucked from the ether, or, in his preferred analogy, reeled in: he’s working on a book about the creative process titled “Catching the Big Fish.” With “Mulholland Drive,” he said the eureka moment came while he was meditating. With Eraserhead his indelible debut in 1977, inspiration came while reading the Bible. (He declined to specify the passage.) There was no equivalent lightning bolt on “Inland Empire,” but in due course “something started to talk to me,” he said. “It was as if it was talking to me all along but I didn’t know it.”

Pretty awesome, Dave.