Preamble

HOW I CAME TO PUT THIS HOW-TO TOGETHER

I speak from a particular form of experience. In 2005 I set out to walk the whole of Los Angeles - I’d lived there for most of ten years. I pushed a baby-stroller with a video camera attached to the end of it, facing inwards. When people approached me, I invited them to walk with me while I videoed our conversations.

My ultimate goal was to create an authentic portrait of the city – a film based on my experience of it on my walk. I wanted to see Los Angeles ‘anew, with clear eyes, at a human pace, as if for the first time.’ At that point, video blogs were just gaining momentum and I realised that was the missing link in my project. I decided I’d post videos of my walks with people and other experiences from on the road, mix them with writing and photographs and start an open conversation on what it means to live in a metropolis – and especially Los Angeles - in today’s world. A project that would be a part of my film but also independent of it. I had no idea what I was setting in motion.

I built a website describing what I was going to do and sent out about 30-50 emails with the link to the site to family, friends and film industry people I’d crossed paths with over the years. Within a matter of days I received emails from people I’d never met or heard of, all exclaiming passionately about my project.

My City Council member wrote me and asked to walk with me for a while, other video-bloggers sent me huge encouragement, people wrote about and deconstructed the history behind what I was doing, press contacted me (sometimes many journalists within a single organisation competed to be the first to cover the story) and people wrote to me in foreign languages offering congratulations for write-ups I’d had in their national newspapers but which I’d known nothing about.

Whilst I walked (pretty much over a period of a year) I met and had conversations with people that contained a level of intimacy and revelation I would never before have expected. I learnt a lot about myself and LA and by the end of it I’d been on NBC primetime news, had a feature in the LA Times, been covered on local, national and international radio and newspapers, been picked as a favourite on many websites, been quoted in an article about Beck, been presented with an official commemorative certificate from the city of Los Angeles, received 100’s of emails from all over the world (many from people exclaiming what my walk had inspired them to do themselves) and peaked at about 40,000 hits to my two sites (video blog and website) combined. I was also commissioned to create a small series of episodes of my raw footage for local TV.

Oh the wonders of the internet! I’d wanted to engage with an audience, have a wider conversation, a deeper look at my themes - but all this I’d never expected. Considering I only sent out a handful of emails and had no idea what I was starting, not bad.

But the success of the project was ultimately also its ironic weakness. If you go to my video blog, amongst the great moments and footage, you’ll see a history of apologies, broken promises and eventually (and because it’s a blog, the first page you see) a withering out. Dead air. Silence - the web’s cardinal sin. For now at least, and for the last couple of years, my video blog homepage may as well be a tombstone declaring what once lay there, what once was alive and vibrant.

Because I didn’t know what I was starting, I didn’t know how to nurture or sustain it – and when I was already on the road it was too late to think about it. If I nurtured what I’d set in motion, I’d have to put my walk on the back seat, and if I did that, well…

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