Community Life Saturday, August 25, 2007 CAREER IN FILM Directors, actors satisfying filmmaking dream in Bend By David Jasper The Bulletin W hen actor Craig Richards considered moving from Los Angeles to Bend several years ago, he asked himself, "Will they find me?" By "they," of course, he means the film industry at large. He had landed small roles in such shows as "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" and parts in films such as "The Majestic." Judging from his profile on Internet Movie Database, the beefy actor has a particular knack for playing security guards and cops. "Down in L.A., I worked a lot." he explains. "Moving up here, I thought, might be kind of risky." Still, in 2002, he, his wife and their young family made the leap north. "The way I looked at it, I was tired of playing tiny little roles that would often get cut from the major films. I though, maybe there's more opportunity to work in smaller films and play a more significant role and expand my range a little," the 51-year-old says. Here here: Not only can filmmakers find actors like Richards, they don't have to travel far to work together; they're all local. Thanks in part to the affordable format of digital video and the rapid growth of national film festivals – including BendFilm Festival – an increasing number of low-budget, homegrown film productions are giving actors like Richards more opportunities, he says. Nationally, there's been a commensurate rise in festivals and filmmaking, according to Barbara Morgan, the founder and executive director of the Austin Film Festival. "I think festivals in general have opened people's eyes to the product they can see and helped indie filmmakers become more accessible to the public," she says. "I think it's made it more accessible for more people to get the equipment and actually go out there and make a film." Today, one can buy a digital camera for a fraction of the cost of traditional film stock, which for a feature-length film could run into tens of thousands of dollars, a burdensome amount for a new director wading into unfamiliar waters. With the rise in sheer volume of films being made and submitted, Morgan's festival gets increasingly more submissions and has to turn down films of a quality they might have accepted when the festival started in 1994. "One could make an argument that truly great filmmaking is not easy to pull off," says Morgan, "but, by the same token, there are some really great people making films that could not have done it had it not become more accessible." Since landing in Bend, Richards has appeared regularly on community theater stages and acted in several independent films, where he's been allowed to wear many hats in the moviemaking process. When he was in Los Angeles, Richardes would hang out behind the directors of large Hollywood productions and observe things from the other side of the lens. "I've been doing that for 30 years. What goes on behind the camera is as exciting for me as performing in front of the lens, but I never had a chance to put my hands on anything. In a big feature film, you go sit in your trailer, then you're called to the set, you mind your own business and don't touch anything because that's someone's union job." On a hot, late July afternoon in the living room of a borrowed rental home across from Drake Park, Richards trained a handheld camera on the set of "Wings of Faith," capturing candid moments for the "making of" segment of the film's DVD. read more of this article at www.BendBulletin.com Originally published in Bend, Oregon USA, by Western Communications, Inc. ©Copyright 2007. Excerpted with permission.

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