The light in the dark...

That's what I saw on my way back to the hotel at 1:00am (which was four am for me) Saturday night in Vancouver.

We'd just wrapped the last ten of twenty episodes we had to shoot June 20th/21st and as I was wandering through late-night Vancouver and passed a doorway I realized:

"Man, that's a shot."

A door.  Emblazoned with that powerful symbol of sacrifice in the name of life and restoration, awash in light--standing out in a dark city.

It could be taken to mean something, you know?

The challenge to me is to infuse every moment for which it's appropriate with that sense of a doorway into the light.  And I say 'where appropriate' because sometimes the moment in the story just doesn't 'fit' that kind of light.  And if you work to force it in, you're 'on the nose', editorializing making propaganda, not popular-art.

But I need to keep my eyes open for it.

'Cause it sneaks up on you at the strangest of times and you need to be watching for it to spot it. I could have walked by.  Could have missed it.

(the other thing that just occurred to me--and it's a minor point, well used by many of you I'm sure but nonetheless worth noting--is that it took some work to get the shot.  I just wanted to walk on by and go to sleep.  Instead I had to drop my backpack, the hard drive I was carrying, get out the camera, fiddle with it, frame the shot, etc... the minor point being that finding those moments and 'capturing' them takes plain, old fashioned, effort...)

So while re-writing two scripts this week, one that I expect will go out to the town within the month (and that's going to be a crazy experience...) and one that I hope to set up to shoot sometime next summer or the summer after, I'm watching for those flashes of light in the dark. Working to find the best way that works to bend hope and love and the idea of redemption into the thing.

'Cause for me, that's why we tell stories...

To laud the light in the dark.

T