I was about eight year old when I experienced filmmaking for the very first time. This might sound silly, but believe me this is how it happened. It was summer vacation, the time all the kids of the neighborhood get together and start playing which one is the baddest either at soccer, car riding (toy), tree climbing etc. This day, I don't remember how it happened, I found myself having a stockpile of slides depicting some biblical era war. I was fascinated by the images. I took them one by one and looked intensively as if I was trying to understand something. At first, they were just distinct images... But as I was putting them together stories started to form in my mind (notice this was pure imagination as the slides were not numbered which made it difficult to know which one comes after the other). I started to see princes, generals, lands and territories. I saw soldiers leaving their families, battle fields, conquests etc. All that in my eight years old head. I enjoyed it! And suddenly, I wanted to share my discovery with my friends. I wanted to tell them the story I just saw; however, I wanted this to be in a continuous, fluid way instead of pulling slides one by one with interruptions. How could I accomplish that?
I decided to tape the slide one to the other by the egdes and make a long band of many of them. Now, I resolved the continuity problem, but I felt it lacked in magic. As the day was getting to its end, it started to get darker which to me was an inconvenience as I wanted to finish my project. So, I got a flashlight and turned it on. Accidentally, the light went straight through the slides and to my surprise big images were forming on the house wall. This is it, I thought. It was bigger than television and very captivating. But quickly, I saw a disadvantage. My images were silent. Now, my new battle was to add sound to it. It was late; so I had to wait for the next day. All night, I could not sleep. I was thinking about the story, about what each character was supposed to say, who was going to make it and who was going to die etc. It was the longest night ever. The next morning, I gathered all my friends, took a tape recorder, some kitchen utensils and I started recording.
On my parents' patio, I remade an ancient war. I spent the whole day taping and retaping the story with dialogues, warfar noises and other vivid sounds. Contrarily to the previous day, now I wanted the time to go fast so it could get dark for me to start the magic. That night, around 7, my friends and even some adults came to see "my movie". I used two of my friends to each hold an end of the slides band, another one right in the middle to hold the flash light, and me I was operating the tape recorder as the slides were passing one after the other. At the end of the show, everyone was excited. I became a filmmaker (lol)! And for the rest of the summer, I was just making films. The funny part is: I was making a different film almost each day with the same slides by just changing the sequences. Also, until this day, I never can understand how in the world I had the gut to put "Dirty Diana" of Michael Jackson as the score of all my summer war series movies. Someone tell me...
