The story is told

I think of all the times people told me I should write a book and finally I found the time to find a way to do just that.  Maybe I'm just a control freak, but I also wanted to learn the process and chose to self-publish every step of the way.  Fortunately I surrounded myself with good advisors, mentors, and editors. 

When I first began to tell the story I thought with all the photography and video I had of Lucy, it made sense to put together a video of her story.  I looked at the photos and footage and created narration to follow the images. 

My sister Joie is a talented designer and she cleaned up the images.  All of my images were 35 mm film and had to be scanned at a high resolution to be ready to be shown on the big screen. 

Joie provided the design for the credits and title and designed the DVD packaging.

My old friend Pete Jensen works for a local t.v. station and he provided the software know-how and put it all together for me. Pete narrated the first edition of the film for me because I never thought I had a good enough voice for other people to listen to.  Pete has a deep voice and is the voice of Spokane.  You hear him on commercials everywhere and I felt very fortunate to have him narrate the video for me. 

The music during Lucy's flight scene is a song called In My Dream is an awesome flight song by Michael Tomlinson.  It is so perfect and I felt honored that he allowed me to use it in the DVD.  M.T. is a good friend of my sister's - they say a lot of how you progress is because of who you know, and it's definitely true.  Michael is a very talented singer songwriter. 

Just as I was finishing the DVD, I met filmmaker Chad Christensen.  He had seen my photography in a gallery and because a particular photo showed our dog Lily and goose Lucy running down the road together, he was interested in the story and approached me.  I was in the process of creating a video already so I thought he and I should collaborate.  Chad had worked for a company called NowDisc and recommended them so I used them to order the completed disks.  The story of Chad I will write more about later - we've had an interesting relationship.  We created a half hour documentary which still to this date I can not sell. 

The short film I did is short and sweet.  It's 11 minutes long and I share it in schools and presentations. People quickly connect with Lucy and our family taking the  journey to Lucy's successful return to the wild. 

With Chad's background, he recommended that I enter my film into film festivals.  I have entered it into three and was nominated for a Best Director in N. Idaho at the LakeDance Film Festival in Sandpoint Idaho and won an Audience Choice Award at the Spiritual Film Festival in Morristown New Jersey. 

I recorded the narration in my voice and now sell the DVD with the Coloring Storybook I created.  More about it in the next post.

More about Raising Lucy and the video and books at http://www.raisinglucy.com/