My Son, The Filmmaker...MATTY BROWN

A BEAUTIFUL MIND
Following Matty's Past, Present, and Future

This blog is about my son Matty's journey into his filmmaking career. Through his triumphs and challenges, his experiments and adventure, I will give insight into his creative process as well as delve into specific stories from his childhood that helped trigger him to become the amazing artist he is today. This is my attempt to learn about my son, to bond with him more, and to understand as much as I can about what is in his beautiful mind. How amazing it must be to see the world in such a rich, imaginative way.

 In 1989, 
there was an earthquake in San Francisco that shook the surrounding Bay Area. It was the largest earthquake in California since the turn of the 20th Century. It killed dozens of people, set entire districts of San Francisco on fire, collapsed a portion of one of the largest bridges in the world, and disrupted Game 3 of the World Series between the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants. Matty, who was 5-years-old and a naive, creative child was right in the middle of it all. I was on my way to pick him and his brother from daycare when it occurred. 



When we got home, Matty kept asking questions about the earthquake. He was visibly shaken and enthralled. His imagination was flowing great that day trying to figure out how something like that is even possible. Weeks went by, and he still talked about it and asked "why?" and insisting that he experience it again to understand it more. I told him that the only way he would be able to make an earthquake happen is in the movies, for pretend. 

Matty, 6, looking over and judging his creation.

Meticulously denting his hot wheel cars and staging a big freeway accident on the carpet in our living room one day was the first sign of Matty's mind going into the cinematic realm. He would make sounds of helicopters and pretend that his eyes were the news chopper's cameras fixated on a landslide that toppled into the freeway causing a major pileup. 
At the age of 7, I let him use my 35mm camera to start taking photos of his little scenes he made with his toys and bugs, whether it was a hiking expedition with ants, an acrobatic limo/monstertuck wreck, or gravy erupting from his mashed potato volcano, Matty would take dozens of photos of each scene and flip through them quickly to see the story he just told in images. He had no idea that he was in fact making movies already. 
Soon, Matty would have a chance encounter with a video camera for the first time, which would thrust him deeper into visual storytelling to show the world through his eyes...