This acrylic painting decorated a set for Disney Channel's "What a Life!" television program yesterday and I got to watch filming: a first for me! The episode is about a friend and his 9 year old son who are pet detectives: the boy proudly told me they've located over half of the lost pets they've been asked to find.

I was fascinated by the parallels between the visual language of filmmaking and what I do as a painter. For example, in pre-production, the director of this episode took photos of frames or shots he wanted and then worked with an artist to draw story boards for the written script. At his direction, the story board artist moved trees around and removed things just like I do when working with reference photos of a subject.

But thank goodness I don't have to coordinate with sound in my work; that looked difficult. But the crew seemed to really enjoy collaborating, the way I do with people who commission me to do paintings for them. All in all, a great day, and I learned a lot, even though I didn't paint.