KGB Productions

My boy won as a prize a game where you dig out some small miniature dino bones from what looks to be a rock. Amusing at first I decided to video tape the boys progress. It was fun, and kind of neat to see the boys so enthralled in amateur paleontology. Kyle loves digging and chiseling, and he so enjoyed the unearthing of bones, which were actually just plastic replicas, but it was fun. I finally edited it all together and what took about an hour or two is now shortened to four minutes. I added the music, and it sounds so like Jurassic park that it fit the theme, but I have to tell you I got lucky when I found the royalty free music. Hey it was fun, and the boys enjoyed it. As well as the adults too.

I've been working on a film about my dad for some time now, and it's also encompassed my mom too. I felt I could not talk about one without talking about the other one. Of course not having dad here and relying on memory can be a tricky thing. Facts and events sometimes get distorted, so I've been painstakingly trying to piece together past family history. This includes me as well, and no matter how uncomfortable I am in front of the camera I need to record fragments of memory so that hopefully in the end it will all piece together. I got the idea from Scorsese's film "Italian American" where the filmmaker interviews his mom & dad. If you get a chance to see it it's pretty funny and touching. Way back in 1996 I interviewed my mom. My dad had passed away a year earlier, and so with 16mm camera in hand I sat down mom and shot about two rolls of 16mm film. I basically set up a light and shot it. Took the film to DuArt Lab and had it transferred to videota...

So how do I start my story. I've already based it on someone I know and that is my dad. He was a complex guy who said little, but still waters ran deep. The one event that transformed him into the person I know as daddy was the war. My dad was a soldier in World War II, and he was in the German army. He was a radio operator, and he had some stories, but they are few and he rarely talked about his experiences. Once in a while I caught a glimpse into the nightmare when he would talk about people he knew. He would go silent when too much of the memory came back, and the wall went back up. So it's hard to write about someone who didn't share. Even if I would known how important those memories were back then I still wouldn't have gotten much out of my dad. Here where I work we've been video taping World war 2 veterans and their experiences. We've also been chronicling other soldiers experience from the various wars American has fought in. I directed a series of these...