THE LOVE FOR FILM & IMAGES By: Vert Wright
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he good thing about giving up your day job is that you can now do what you love, full time. I didn’t retire from my day job to sit and watch TV all day. I retired to explore my fascination with filmmaking and photography, which I’ve had since I was 5 years old. I never tire of shooting or filming. Onset is where I am most at home, and I feel I was born to do it.
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sometimes think it is because I have watched so many movies and so much TV in my lifetime that I’ve been driven to learn the language from the side of a producer since I knew it so well as a consumer. Also, as a part introvert, I have come to feel really comfortable behind a camera.
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f I look back on my journey, I remember knowing what I wanted at an early age. I wanted to be on TV, and I did everything I could to make that happen, including dragging my Mom to what I thought were casting opportunities. They were really just ways for people to promise kids fortune and fame to get their parents to shell out big bucks for training and pictures. We couldn’t afford that anyway, so nothing came of that.
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o I spent the next few years involving myself in school plays whenever possible. The roles were few and far between, but I always jumped at the chance. It was in junior high school that the photography bug bit me.
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even began to develop my own black and white film. I used to break the old film cartridges open in the complete darkness of my Mom’s washroom and thread the film onto the reel of the closed, light-proof container and then pour the chemical in that would develop the film. I would then put the film in my enlarger and quickly shine the light by exposing the photographic paper. Then I would put the exposed paper in the three baths, the developer,
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