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SPIRING filmmaker Ross
Ching relocated to Los
Angeles to seek his
fame and fortune.
“I thought that was really cool
and I decided to take it a step fur-
ther,” he recalls. “I basically took
his still-photo concept and turned
that into a motion-picture concept.
I posted that online and it did very
well, got about 400,000 views.”
Using time-lapse photography,
Ching’s Empty America series
Realizing he was but one of many
with the same goal, Ching decided
to carve a niche for himself.
“I had this idea for a music
video and I put it to a Death Cab
for Cutie soundtrack,” says the
26-year-old Costco member. It
had 100,000 online views in its
first week.”
Ching subsequently started
working as a director for commercials and music videos. Then, a
couple of years ago, he discovered
a photo collection by Matt Logue
called Empty LA, showing photos
of Los Angeles streets with the
people and cars removed.
( rossching.com) includes videos of
San Francisco, Seattle, New York
and Washington, D.C. Each one
took about two and a half days to
shoot and six to seven 12-hour
days to edit.
“I can do it when there are a
few cars on the road. If you’re taking a time lapse, you’re taking a
series of photos,” says Ching. He
then painstakingly removes every
car and person from each shot, putting them together to create the
illusion of empty cities.
—Steve Fisher
ROSS CHING
ROSS CHING
(Left and above)
Scenes from
Empty America
show Los Angeles
without cars
or people.
REVOR PACELLI, now 20, was 5
years old when he was diagnosed
with an autism spectrum disorder.
The telltale sign was that he was
slow to learn to speak. Despite his early difficulty in using words, however, Trevor is
now the author of a new book, Six-Word
Lessons on Growing Up Autistic: 100
Lessons to Understand How Autistic People
See Life ( www.growingupautistic.com).
The organization of the book is charmingly, wittily autistic. Each of its 100 brief lessons has as its title some fact about an
autistic person, and each title is precisely six
words long. Among these simple but illuminating facts are “Some can have sudden
autıstıc Growing up
T
mood swings” and “There’s always the feel-
ing of loneliness.” Lesson 20, “They get
either A’s or F’s,” explains that an autistic
child may “be a master in science and just
breeze through all the labs” but be unable to
solve a math problem “to save his life.”
Lesson 29 is about mood swings: “One
minute they love talking to others. Then sud-
denly, a painful memory comes up in their
heads and they no longer want to speak.”
Lesson 51, on loneliness, urges parents to
“Keep encouraging your child to not give up,
and they will find some true friends.”
Always, the guiding philosophy is that
understanding can help parents muster the
loving patience that an autistic child needs.
From left to right, the Pacelli family:
Patty (mom), Trevor, Lonnie (dad,
with Kasie the cat) and sister, Briana.
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Reaching out has helped Trevor as well.
Costco member Patty Pacelli, his mother,
recalls that a woman at a fair on autism told
him, “You’ve given our son hope.” Trevor
was clearly moved. “He was and is happy
and proud about that,” Patty says from their
home in Bellevue, Washington. “It’s harder
for [autistic people] to care about others,
but he’s come a long way in that area.”
Trevor adds, “I deeply want other fami-
lies with autistic children to learn from my
experiences.”—Fran R. Schumer
