I got started kind of late. I'm not one of those filmmakers who was shooting super-8 movies with his buddies when he was eleven-years-old. Sometime in the mid-80's, and I was around that wholly impressionable age of ten, my life was changed forever when we got HBO. This was before the explosion of home video. I hadn't been exposed to a lot of movies. Suddenly there was a never-ending stream of movies brought into my house. Being a kid, I didn't care if they showed BMX Bandits or Beastmaster ten times a week. In fact, I relished in it.

HBO: Hey Beastmaster's On!

Leaving high school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Movies were my favorite thing in the world, but for some reason it never clicked that I could go learn how to make them. Instead, I had fell in love with the still camera, and I decided to go to the Seattle Art Institute. While I was there, I met more people with the same love of cinema. I was exposed to movies like; Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, Easy Rider and other cult classics. I began to realize that movies could be an art form, and not just entertainment.

I had found my true calling. But for eight years all I could do is dream and talk about filmmaking. I was 26, when I finally found the balls to make my first eight-minute, B&W, silent, dark-comedy eRATicate. It was good enough to play in 15 film festivals, winning a couple of minor awards along the way. A pretty good start, but I still felt like a failure. It seemed like most of my favorite directors had made their feature debuts before that age.

Now, here I am at 30, working on my first feature length film. It just happens to be a documentary, something that I never thought I'd do. aI sort of fell into it. My wife and I decided to have a kid a couple years back. I started filming everything. I did so thinking that I could put together a short film about our life pre-baby. Something to show our offspring many years down the line when they were interested. A totally and completely personal project.

The fruit of my loins.

"Wait a minute," you're thinking. "Not one of these guys. He's not a real documentary filmmaker."

And to a certain degree, I agree with you. With good cameras and editing equipment available to everyone, along with how hot documentaries have become in the last few years, there might be a glut of these types of films. "Glorified home movies," as one documentary producer put it towards me.

But my final thought on this is; it all comes down to how well the film is put together. Whether it's a documentary about the Holocaust or the filmmaker's three-legged dog Pete; if the film can tell a good story, capture an impartial audience and show some talent along the way; that is all that really matters. I hope I have accomplished that with The Turning Point

Ross Williams

Writer/Director/Editor