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The launch of this website this week seems like a good occasion to offer an overview of where LIFE IS STRANGE, LEIA LU stands and what lies ahead. Some of this info appears elsewhere on this site. I present it here in more detail, and with some digressions, for those interested.

I've been photographing and filming Leia for nearly a decade now. This startling fact makes me feel like I will blink and another ten years will go by, and blink again and the rest of my life will go by. It also reminds me of a joke I made recently about how long it's going to take to finish this film — that my descendents may have to peel the editing mouse out of my cold dead hands and finish it themselves.

Hopefully not! We're launching a fundraising campaign this week that aims to raise enough money to start full-time post-production this fall. and finish the film next year.

Some people have asked me about "post-production" — what it entails and why does it take so long? It entails many things, but here is the main challenge:

All of the thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of footage we've captures live on these drives.

Someone — i.e. me — has to go through all of this and piece together the strongest possible story. Imagine someone hands you 5,000 tiny pictures to make a collage with. Or 5,000 tiny pieces of stones to make a mosaic with. You can use 100 of these pieces, or a thousand, or 3,000. Or 10. You can cut the pieces into smaller pieces. You can glue one or more of them together. You can cut the pieces AND glue them. You can use the empty space of the collage background or floor. You can use colored grout or clear grout. You can make it realistic or not.

Is this analogy unnecessarily abstract? Imagine you have five hours of Leia doing physical therapy when she is four. You watch it and mark spots that seem interesting. This is the material you're going to build a sequence with. It's about 30 minutes of stuff — shots of Leia and interviews with therapists. It might take you a week to turn this into a 3-minute scene. Is it interesting? Eh—it's kind of boring. You set it aside. You work on another scene from when Leia is seven. You haven't thought about it in a few years and you see now that there was a breakthrough of some kind. Aha! this is the moment we can be aiming for. You rework the scene from when Leia was four so that it builds to questions  that are answered when she is seven. Good. This works. Then you slot in some other material between those two moments, because it's three years of Leia's life and we don't just want to jump from four to seven. And you realize that at six she is doing something else physically that is even more impressive than the breakthrough at seven. It wasn't at therapy but it does the work of giving us a high point in our story. And maybe therapy footage is boring anyway? You set the therapy sequences you've done aside for now...You've just spent three weeks on a scene that may or may not make it into the film.

Is this wasted time? No! Trial and error, watching, discussing, agonizing, noodling, shuffling things around — it's all essential to making a documentary. (I'm always surprised when I see documentary directors talk as they though they had detailed plans at the outset of their films — and then made exactly what they planned. It's simply not how it works (though it may be be smart from the perspective of marketing the films.)

All this is to say is that editing is complex, time-consuming work and funds must be raised for it to be done.

What's the fundraising plan? We are reaching out to donors that we think might be willing to make contributions in the thousands of dollars, inspired by the example of the Coen Brothers, who funded one of their early films through $2-5 thousand investments from 50 people. Will this work? Who knows. It would be better if I had one very rich uncle. But I do not.

Of course, we are happy to accept donations of any amount! You'll notice donate buttons all over this site. We may eventually do a kickstarter campaign for smaller contributions.

For this round of fundraising we're reaching out to friends of the film, family, and donors and organizations in the disability, epilepsy and rare disease spaces. For now, the donor section of our site is password protected, because we have some info in it that we don't want to share publicly. If you're interested in reading more about donations, reward tiers, our fundraising plan, and funds raised to date — email donors.LSLL@gmail.com to get the password.

Why don't you just get money from a network or streamer? you ask. Short answer is that it's extremely hard right now for an independent film to get funding from a broadcaster or streamer. The industry pendulum might swing back our way. It must eventually, I think. How many celebrity driven docs can be made before viewers demand other kinds of stories? We will keep trying!

Another source of funding are grants. We've won one already (NYSCA) and are a finalist for a second one that will be announced this Friday. If we win, you'll see a blog post about it. If we don't get it, I'll be sulking. We will be applying to more grants this year.

Sigh. Fundraising is a slog, but I take solace in the fact that so far our film has aged like wine — the more time passes, the more the characters age onscreen, the more we know and understand about Leia, the more interesting it all becomes.

A couple of other announcements — we'll be launching social media accounts soon for the film. They will provide film-related updates, fun Leia pics, and advice and tips for families of children with disabilities and rare diseases.

Leia news: We went to Double H camp last weekend. The camp was co-founded by Paul Newman for children with serious and life-threatening diseases. It's not specifically for children with disabilities, but the lines are blurred because most people with disabilities now have genetic diagnoses of one kind or another (unless of course the disability was caused by an injury). It's a beautiful camp with amazingly helpful, smart, and upbeat staff (it also doesn't hurt that it's free!). Sadly, they cannot take Leia for a week in the summer, because they do not provide one-to-one aids. However, we are welcome to apply for other family weekends, and for skiing in the winter.

Leia enjoyed zip-lining (or rather, tolerated it. Her brother LOVED it) and loved spending time with the horses and goats.

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