Social Responsibility

Concepting and Scriptwriting Tips for Family Video Productions

Flickr photo: Meg Part 2 of a series about capturing the joy of family events on video Last week I introduced this series about creating videos to capture the joy of family events and special occasions like weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and holiday get...

Read more ● Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Filming a Tribute Testimonial

Last week I spent two days filming 13 people giving testimonials for 13 other people for an event in early December. This event is an annual social event that honors local Houstonians for their charitable and philanthropic commitments.I am not going to nam...

Read more ● Tuesday, October 16th, 2012
Let’s Say Thanks

I just found out about a website, http://www.letssaythanks.com, where you can send postcards of thanks to our U.S. troops stationed overseas thanks to the Xerox corporation. You pick the card you want from a large selection of designs submitted by children ac...

Read more ● Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
Matt Langdon – Founder, The Hero Workshop

he•ro |’hi(ə)rõ| noun ( pl. -roes) A person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. What is a hero? Most of us recognize the superheroes that we’ve grow up celebrating. Characters such as Superma...

Read more ● Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Muhammad Yunus and his Legacy on Poverty

Flickr photo:U2005.com This past week I had the privilege of seeing Muhammad Yunus speak at a World Affairs Council of Houston luncheon. Yunus, of Bangladesh, is a 2006 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and a 1999 recipient of the Indira Gandhi prize for pe...

Read more ● Thursday, January 17th, 2008
PBS’s AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Launches “Campaign ’08” Multimedia Website for THE PRESIDENTS Biography Collection

BOSTON, MARCH 3 — PBS’ AMERICAN EXPERIENCE today launched The Presidents, the online component of an unprecedented public television initiative that, for the first time, will make available more than 25 hours of presidential programming onl...

Read more ● Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
Pre-Production and Planning Tips for Making Better Family Videos

Flickr photo:Vanessa van Dyck Part 3 of a series about capturing the joy of family events on video Last week we covered the first of four phases used in creating multimedia productions to capture the joy of family events – concepting / scriptwriting. ...

Read more ● Monday, March 30th, 2009
Rodeo Uncorked! Wine Show

I have been working as a volunteer with the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo over the past year. If you are not familiar with the HLSR, it’s a huge volunteer operation that puts on the Rodeo as well as several other related events each year and raises ...

Read more ● Tuesday, February 10th, 2009
Texas Governor’s Mansion Damaged by Fire

This weekend, the historic Texas Governor’s Mansion caught fire and much of the 152 year old structure was seriously damaged. Arson is suspected and an investigation is under way. Fortunately, at the time, the mansion was undergoing a $10 million...

Read more ● Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
The Houston Oral History Project- Houston Voices Its Past

Yesterday Mayor Bill White and Dr. Rhea Brown Lawson, director of the Houston Public Library, launched the Houston Oral History Project (HOHP), a web-based archive that celebrates the many voices of Houston’s past. Last summer Mayor White commissioned 1...

Read more ● Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
The Three Dynamics of Personal Histories

Flickr photo: Kingsnake Since October is Family History Month, I was already thinking about this subject for a new blog article when a Canadian writer and film producer named Robb Lucy asked that I make a contribution to his new book. Scheduled for publicati...

Read more ● Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

QUOTES

"The stories that we tell ourselves function to order our world, serving both a foundation upon which each of us constructs our sense of reality and filter through which we process each event that confronts us every day. The values that we cherish and wish to preserve, the behavior that we wish to censure, the tears and dread that we can barely confess in ordinary language, the aspirations and goals that we most dearly prize--all of these things are encoded in the stories that each culture invents and preserves for the next generation, stories that, in effect, we live by and through." Henry Louis Gates   
Literary Critic, Scholar, Writer and Teacher  
 Chair: African American Studies at Harvard University

“In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.” The Single-Parent Family: Living Happily in a Changing World by Marge Kennedy and Janet Spencer King. New York: Crown, 1994

“By looking into another person’s life, you need to look into your own. Whether you are the biographer or whether you are the reader. It’s like truth is stranger than fiction. When I am reading a biography, there is something more rewarding about reading about a real person’s life, rather than fiction.” On Writing Biographies: Kevin Fitzpatrick interviews Marion Meade about Buster, Woody, Zelda, and Mrs. Parker for Small Spiral Notebook

“The art of interviewing is as personal as the art of writing. Every reporter brings a different demeanor and skill to the job of interviewing ... But all interviews are designed to accomplish one mission: Get information to advance a story. This is best achieved with organization and preparation, whether it's a five-minute phone interview or a two-hour confrontational affair.” Les Zaitz, Senior Investigative Reporter for The Oregonian from his tip sheet on interviewing

"The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip." Leon Edel, U.S. biographer, critic. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series

"Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it." Rabbi Harold Kushner

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it." Benjamin Disraeli

"All the natural history required to understand consciousness is now readily available in evolutionary biology and psychology. Gene networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that represent the environments they interact with; additional evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without words and is later translated into language when language becomes available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.)" Antonio Damasio A Story We Tell Ourselves Time Magazine 1/18/2007

"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness."   Alex Haley, Roots

"We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium." Ansel Adams

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.” Dickens, David Copperfeild, p. 2 1850 edition

Who made the world?  
Who made the swan, and the black bear?  
Who made the grasshopper?  
This grasshopper, I mean-  
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,  
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- 
 who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.  
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.  
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 
 I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 
 I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
 into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,  
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,  
which is what I have been doing all day.  
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
 Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? 
 Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver - The Summer Day

“Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.” Harlan Ellison

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." John Lennon

"When a parent dies, it's the end. I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that. I wanted some researchers I'd worked with to talk to my mother, but my mother was a little antsy about it. I know she would've gotten into it. It would have been okay with my father, too. But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids. " Robert de Niro, quoted in Esquire

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