Anything is Possible – Now –
Here is my latest motion picture:
I have just completed and published on YouTube what I think is the best music/video I have created. So far.
That statement surprises me. Not because of the music or the images, but because of the path that led here.
I used ChatGPT 5.5 as a consultant and image generator. Runway provided the few moments of motion. That “motion” cost about $50, which is certainly not the budget of any substantial movie. On the other hand, $50 today is about the price of a 50-foot roll of 8mm film. In the early 1970s, that same roll cost about $10, which I willingly spent. It contained roughly two and a half minutes of grainy moving images.
For my fifty dollars today, I received stunning “Matthew Brady” quality photographs, which I edited on my PC. It was a bit like directing through email. The computer was also where the music was composed, orchestrated, and performed.
And with this little film, I have touched the edge of a lifelong dream.
Since graduating from high school, I wanted to be a great film director. Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini were heroes. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas rather convincingly occupied that territory for my generation. One is a certifiable genius. The other captured the imagination of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, I pursued a degree in Mass Communications and shot many feet of expensive, grainy 8mm film. In 1990, I carried a camcorder to Kenya to record a mission trip and edited the results with two VCRs. In 1998, I began using software editing. Eventually I bought a digital camera. Then my smartphone quietly took over the whole business.
Music followed a similar path. Computers with enormous memories and astonishing processing speeds made orchestral composition and arrangement possible for an amateur musician. After retirement, I devoted considerable time to writing music. The piece that became Love and War was my first successful attempt to weave together several themes and musical gestures into a larger whole.
As I listened to it, images began to appear.
And now, in 2026, artificial intelligence is capable of creating high-quality images. ChatGPT became an invaluable production assistant, helping me write prompts that the image generator more or less understood. The editing process became a fascinating adventure of assembling still images and a few moments of movement into a coherent story.
I have gone from shaky, grainy moving pictures on spaghetti-like film to half a gigabyte of memory and digital editing. The tools changed beyond anything I could have imagined. The desire to tell stories did not.
While I am waxing philosophical (and bragging a bit), I should probably say what the film means to me.
The music developed two principal themes. One belonged to a woman, whom I called Mary. The other belonged to a man, John.
The film opens with their last moments together before John joins a column of soldiers marching off to war. It is not an especially melodramatic or romantic farewell. Mary is remarkably stoic. She watches John offer his life for the cause and then waits through the long uncertainty that history so often asks of ordinary people.
John’s story is mostly the boring part of soldiering. Camp. Waking up. Reveille. Marching. Waiting.
Then battle comes.
The music begins with a dream-state quality that seems to deny the adrenaline-driven action, but the battle eventually consciously arrives and drives the action.
John falls.
His eyes open, and he sees Mary. Is she is an apparition, an angel, a hope? We discover that she is also quite real, nursing him back to health and wholeness.
Only to have to bid him farewell yet again.
My favorite sequence starts with John sitting around a campfire with other soldiers. The camera slowly pulls back, revealing that there are not merely a few men sitting in the darkness, but hundreds of campfires stretching across the landscape.
History is not made solely by the great men whose names fill the history books. The actual fabric of history is created by a thousand campfires keeping ordinary yet extraordinary people warm while they quietly do their duty.
And Mary waits. She waits for John’s return, or for the sacrifice of grief that may be required of her.
Perhaps that is what this little film is really about. Battles matter. Generals matter. Great decisions matter.
But history truly belongs to ordinary men who march down muddy roads, face mortal danger, and gather around campfires. It belongs to ordinary women who wait, hope, endure, and sometimes say goodbye more than once.
If this little film says anything, I hope it says that their stories matter, too.
And perhaps, after all these years, this is the film I always wanted to make.
