Real People Empty Nesting

Gail Mooney:
Photographer, Filmmaker, World Changer

by Robin Bonner

New York–area filmmaker Gail Mooney found her calling at a young age. As a cultural photographer, she tells other people’s stories, one frame at a time. Many years and countless assignments later, Gail, now in her sixth decade, felt it was time to go down that road again. Seeking leads on people who had “made a difference in the world,” Gail popped out an email, almost on a whim, to everyone in her address book. She had a project in mind, she said, a film about people who have made a difference, but she needed help finding subjects. Within 20 minutes, Gail had her first response.

"Erin and Gail, with children of a small village along the Amazon River in the jungles of Peru. The children hold seedlings for hard wood trees given to them by the conservation nonprofit APECA. A 10-year-old child can plant those seeds and then—because the resultant tree will grow to maturity by the time he or she is 20—can build a house from the wood. (Photo courtesy of Gail Mooney)"
The email was from her daughter, Erin Kelly. Erin told her mom that she was on board. She wanted to do the film with her. It was then that, for Gail, everything changed . . .

From planning to execution—a 99-day trip across 6 continents to tell the stories of 11 people who are making the world a better place—the mother–daughter filmmakers had no idea what effect their project would have. Using accumulated airline miles and embedding with the subjects they interviewed, the project cost very little to execute. The result, after some time on the editing table, was sneak previewed in July 2011 at the State Theatre in Traverse City, MI, as Opening Our Eyes: Global Stories About the Power of One. Created “to inspire and motivate people as to what they can do,” the film opened to accolades.

Since its release, the documentary was invited to The Artivist Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA (Nov. 1–4, 2012) and shown at WHYY Studios, cosponsored by the Geographical Society of Philadelphia (Nov. 9, 2012). It appeared at the Carmel Art and Film Festival, Red Rock Film Festival, Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, Costa Rica Film Festival, Chicago Social Change Film Festival, Global Peace Film Festival, San Luis Obispo Film Festival, and other locations. Opening Our Eyes has been awarded Best Documentary at the Orlando Film Festival, Best of Fest at the Los Angeles Women’s International Film Festival, and Best Humanitarian Documentary at the Bare Bones Film Festival. It received the Utopian Visionary Award at the Utopia Film Festival and the Festival Theme Award, Enriching the Human Spirit, at the Ojai Film Festival. The trailer has been viewed in 127 countries—more than half the world. Gail and Erin have compiled blog entries written during the trip into a print book.

Gail has logged 30 years as a still photographer. In addition, she and her husband and business partner, Tom Kelly, offer their still and motion/video services, now digitally and online, through their company, Kelly/Mooney Photography. Clients include National Geographic, Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure, American Express, Hong Kong Tourist Association, Mexican Ministry of Tourism, New Jersey Tourism, Holiday Inn, Oticon, U.S. Trust, DuPont, AT&T, and KPMG. In addition, Gail serves on the editorial board of the Young Photographers Alliance, and currently she is First Vice President and National Board Chair of the American Society of Magazine Publishers. She writes several blogs, one about herself professionally in Journeys of a Hybrid and another about the Opening Our Eyes project. She also contributes to (and maintains an author archive on) the blog Strictly Business, operated by the American Society of Media Photographers. Gail began writing to combat sleeplessness (she found “getting it all down on paper” stopped her from tossing and turning at night), but today she advises others on how to “tell the story,” with either keyboard or lens.

Erin Kelly is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she earned a bachelor of arts in anthropology, international studies, and Spanish. She currently resides in Chicago and works as program manager with CCI Greenheart, a nonprofit international educational exchange organization dedicated to the promotion of cultural understanding, academic development, environmental consciousness, and world peace. Erin works to facilitate cultural exchange programs for international high-school students coming to the United States. Prior to her position at CCI Greenheart, she worked at a marketing and communications consulting company for nonprofits. Erin has always had a passion for travel and learning about different cultures, probably because of her childhood adventures in traveling the globe with her parents. She has continued to follow this passion throughout her academic, professional, and personal lives.

Empty Nest invited Gail and Erin to share their story about making Opening Our Eyes, and they graciously agreed . . .

EN: Gail, what was growing up like for you? Describe your family and environs. How did they influence your choice of career?

GM: I grew up in a typical suburban family with four children. I was second in line, with an older sister by only a year and a half and two younger brothers. Even though I grew up in the suburbs, the location was always changing, as we moved from Chicago to Rochester, NY, and then eventually to the Greater NYC area when I was in my early teens. All that moving around gave me a curiosity for new places. We didn’t travel a lot as a family, but we did take a few memorable trips to Florida, California, and Canada. Not until I turned 19 and took some time off from college, however, did I really begin to travel the world.

EN: At what moment did you decide to become a filmmaker? Describe your career path, its ups and downs. What have you enjoyed? What would you like to forget?

GM: During what was intended to be a short trip to Europe, which turned into my first journey around the world, I decided I wanted to find a career that would enable me to live a life that incorporated travel and my curiosity about different cultures. It was then that I decided to become a photographer. It wasn’t really my love of photography that moved me toward that career path—photography was a means to an end—the end being the finding and telling of stories. I started pursuing magazine work and ended up working for top travel magazines like Travel & Leisure, National Geographic Traveler, Islands, and Holiday. In addition, I was working with my partner, Tom Kelly, who is also my husband, shooting a lot of corporate assignments around the world.

Living the life of a freelance photographer, as well as being married to one, has always had a lot of ups and downs. But it was the life I set out to live, and it has been the most fulfilling and rewarding life I could ever imagine. I pursued my passion, worked hard, and have made my business into my pleasure. I can’t really think of anything that I would like to forget, but I do wish that I could remember more.

EN: What kind of relationship did you share with your daughter Erin as she was growing up? Has that changed now that she’s a young woman?

GM: I would like to think I was the kind of mother who was a good role model for a daughter. I wanted to show her that she could pursue her own dreams and that anything was possible. We traveled a lot as a family, and we have always exposed her to all sorts of places and people. I was strict in some ways and more liberal in others.

Certainly, traveling with one another for 99 days, not to mention creating a film together, made us closer in many ways. We became more than a mother and daughter. We needed to watch each other’s back when we were traveling and to depend on one another. That sort of experience will either make your relationship stronger or break it apart. It greatly strengthened our relationship and created a special bond for life.

EN: What thoughts, ideas, and events led up to the Opening Our Eyes project? What inspired you to do it?

GM: I was at a point in my life where I had just officially become an empty nester (my daughter had recently graduated from Northwestern University and told us she was going to be staying in Chicago), so I was feeling antsy, and had a lot of airline miles and hotel points. I wanted to get back to my roots, the time when I first decided to become a photographer. But I needed a purpose, and I wanted to create more than just still images. I had expanded my skills into motion/video as part of my business, and I was becoming increasingly interested in motion story telling.

Erin had graduated from high school with a young woman named Maggie Doyne. Maggie had taken a gap year after high school and opted to travel before heading off to college. She eventually wound up in Nepal and saw a million orphaned children after Nepal’s 10 years of civil war. She called home and asked that her saved babysitting earnings be sent over so she could build a home for herself and 30 children. I was so inspired by Maggie’s story that I thought I would find other people like Maggie, all over the world, and create a film about these change makers, to inspire others to make a positive difference in our world. When Erin and I visited Maggie in 2010, she had just finished building a school for more than 200 children and was living with her extended family of 40 children. She is now 26 and is raising money to build a high school in Nepal.

EN: What thoughts went through your mind when Erin asked to collaborate with you on the Opening Our Eyes film project? Did things go the way you expected? How were they different or the same with Erin involved?

GM: I could never have done this film without Erin. She was such an asset. She kept track of all of our subjects and coordinated those logistics. She did the interviews and was our translator in every Spanish-speaking country. She took care of all the audio and shot more than 2000 wonderful still images. She was a great navigator and we never got lost.

When she first said she wanted to come with me on this adventure, I had a million thoughts go through my head. I was thinking that it’s one thing to put yourself in an unpredictable situation and environment, but was I being responsible in subjecting Erin to that? At the same time, I was so happy that I raised her to want to do something like this, something with risk attached. She needed to quit her job, sublet her apartment, and say goodbye to her boyfriend for a few months. That had to be scary.

I never doubted for a second that she could handle the rigors of travel, though, and she amazed me in that respect. It wasn’t an easy trip, and a lot of people couldn’t have hacked it. Amazingly enough, though, things went pretty much according to plan. None of our subjects was a no show, and the stories always exceeded our expectations. We had incredible adventures that will stay with us for a lifetime and will surely mold our lives in continuing ways.

EN: Erin, what made you decide to respond to your mom’s feeler email that day? Did the project go the way you expected? If not, what twists and turns did you experience? What did you bring to the project and what did you come away with?

EK: In the fall of 2009, I was working at my first job, adjusting to life after college and learning how to become a “real person.” I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to be doing, and that made me anxious. I didn’t know what career path I wanted to take, yet I still felt as though I needed to be doing something, something that actually had meaning, something that I was passionate about. I had a desire, a longing to go out and experience the world, and to discover things about myself along the way.

When I got the email from my mother, asking me to send out her query about subjects, a strange feeling came over me. My stomach filled with butterflies, and I felt unusually determined and ambitious. I thought to myself, “I have to do this. This is what I’ve been waiting for—a way to travel and figure out my life.” I immediately wrote back to her, saying that I wanted to go with her, that this was something I needed to do, and that I would help with the project in any way I could. When she said yes, I was ecstatic. I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting myself into. I had grown up traveling with my mother, shadowing her on assignments in many different places. I knew what the process was like—the early mornings and late nights, the long periods of waiting, waiting, and yet more waiting for the perfect moment. I remembered how I used to love writing the numbers on the film canisters, arranging them in order in the plastic bags. I did my fair share of modeling, too, so I knew what it was like to be both in front of and behind the camera. Regardless of all those experiences, though, I could not have foreseen how very different this trip would be. Instead of being my mother’s shadow, I was a full-blown team player. It was just the two of us, so we both had to take an active role to get things done. And although I hadn’t had the technical hands-on experience of being involved in such a project, I learned a great deal about filming a documentary and discovered the strengths that I could bring to the table. Having a “good ear,” a skill I developed from my involvement with music as I was growing up, proved useful, as I was in charge of sound throughout the trip. I learned the crucial importance of getting good audio, both in interviews and in “B-roll” footage. My studies in anthropology came in handy as I prepared for and conducted all of the interviews with our subjects. And I was able to put my “good eye,” something I undoubtedly inherited from my parents, to use in learning the technique of taking good still images with a 7D.

But most importantly, the best lessons came from the incredible people we met, both our subjects and others we encountered along the way. We learned about their passions, the challenges they overcame, the successes they celebrated, and the stories of their everyday lives. We compared our cultures, and although coming from different backgrounds, we found we could relate to one another as people. To me, this was one of the major goals of the project—to open our eyes to the rest of the world and discover our similarities as human beings. Hopping from one culture to the next is perhaps the best way to realize that we are all the same people, with the same desires, curiosities, and needs.

I also came away from the project with an even stronger bond with my mother. During the trip I grew to view her not just as my mother but also as my confidant and best friend.

EN: Gail, what projects do you have on the horizon, since you released Opening Your Eyes?

GM: I am beginning to write a screenplay based on a true story. I’m also working with NGOs, nonprofits, and institutions to help craft their stories through the video medium.

EN: Erin, do you anticipate doing another film project with your mom? If so, any ideas about what that would be?

EK: I do not have any immediate plans to do another film project with her, but she also has not presented me with another idea yet. It would be nice to have that experience again. I look forward to what the future holds, but I’ve also learned to take things one day at a time and enjoy the present moment.

EN: Gail, what advice do you have for empty nesters? How can they best “stay young”and “stay in touch,” especially with their grown children?

GM: Be authentic to yourself and tune into that. Live your life in the most fulfilling way you possibly can, regardless of how people your age are living theirs. Say yes more often instead of talking yourself out of things.


Robin Bonner is editor of Empty Nest. For more about Robin, see About Us.


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