My essay films could also be called my "pandemic series." I started making the first one, Notes on Cinematography, before the COVID-19 lockdown, and finished it after moving from New York City to the Catskills. The other films in the series are about country living, and I think of them as visual meditations with transcendent underpinnings. For the last film, A World Before God, I went from isolation in upstate New York to one of the most isolated places in the world, the Galapagos. It was a surreal adventure in the equatorial Pacific.