Picture Perfect

The Boys of Summer - Second Base, sequel to the award-winning first documentary, began principal photography on March 13, 2014. We need your help. Please visit our kickstarter page and share it with your friends and family.

Translating the artistic idea, whether it is a story, a song or an image, from my mind to whatever media necessary for others to experience it the way I see it in my head is tricky to say the least. I’ve done it a few times and I’m very proud of those moments. One of them is with the image of my father and I playing catch at Lime Ridge in Walnut Creek, California. It’s just a few miles from where I grew up and my parents still live. It’s a place where my high school friends and I would climb up on top of a hill and look down upon the city we lived and grew up in. We were, for that brief moment, dominant; above our problems and worries below.

The image of my father and I works for several reasons. The ball is in flight – meaning the game of catch is active. The game of catch itself indicates the simplicity and the strength of our relationship. Our caps are worn differently, his forward, mine backward, though the jerseys we wear are the same. We are silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky. The grass in the foreground reminds me of “The Natural”, a story with a brief but haunting father/son relationship that is eventually healed at the end of the movie with a new birth.

And so it goes with the image for "Boys of Summer – Second Base". Akin to The Natural, the (relatively) new birth is Giuseppe, my son. He is the next generation and he joined us in this photo shoot. To be clear: this isn’t a sexist thing – I would have happily had my two year-old daughter up on the hill with us, too…but she’s two. The artistic question became about how to capture what was in my mind. Adding a third person to the image complicated the message. The father and son in the first were very clear. Now, in a single image with only limited text (title and tag), how can I convey the message of relationship, the passage of time and the game of baseball? My son’s obvious height disadvantage (he’s four) served to show who he was in relationship to us pretty clearly. But what would he do in the image? I had several ideas - from him playing catch with Grandpa and me watching, to him being between us as we played, to us not even playing at all. 

I'm happy with what came out of the shoot, but I'm still deciding which will be the final image for the poster. So I’m putting up a few different images and would appreciate your opinion of which should be the poster for the new documentary. The pitch for the sequel is "A father, with Parkinson's Disease, and his son explore what's changed in ten years since their 30 Major League Baseball park odyssey in 2004." Tags: Parkinson's Disease, Baseball, Father and Son, America. Tagline: Baseball is a vehicle.

Thank you for your thoughts.