Be Inspired: A Day of Thanks Film Festival Be informed.

Be entertained.

Be inspired.

It's our tagline and the essence of our mission.

As we enter the holiday season, I'm excited to share MPT█s Be Inspired initiative.

Our way of giving back and highlighting individuals, groups, and organizations who are going above and beyond to make a positive difference in their communities.

The Be Inspired series began in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on Marylanders who were quick-thinking in rising to meet new challenges during an uncertain time.

We showcased community food pantries, local manufacturing businesses pivoting to create face shields, and arts organizations providing at-home and virtual learning activities for kids.

Now the series has expanded to include the stories of those who are working to preserve the environment, build community, create spaces to help children grow and thrive, and uplift others.

MPT is proud to showcase two new short documentaries in this first annual A Day of Thanks Film Festival program to celebrate these inspiring stories.

Enjoy and subscribe to Maryland Public TV on YouTube and follow us on social media to see the latest Be Inspired stories throughout the year.

And now the premiere of Be Inspired: Through the Lens of Baltimore Scenes.

When you're walking, you're going to see different things than when you're driving, riding the bus, riding a bike or anything like that.

When you have time to walk around and look at a storefront, look at someone's front door, Look at a monument on the street up close and personal that is seeing a city.

Baltimore Scenes really came together originally as a way to showcase how beautiful Baltimore was, but I just started running into people in the streets that were photographers.

The response that I kept getting from people was I feel like I█m the only person walking around Baltimore with a camera and capturing day-to-day life.

That really struck a chord with me.

What if we start getting together and start sharing other people█s work, meeting up in person and building community?

Baltimore Scenes is true to the idea that this is very Baltimore-focused.

And so here's all these little screenshots capturing the scene as if it was like a still from a movie from every walk of life or every angle that you can imagine.

We want to showcase and elevate the city and the artists.

I was always drawn to photography, especially as a way of looking at photos to connect to family members and periods of time that existed before me.

Through the years, I've taken on an approach that's just carrying a camera with me everywhere I go, so I can document different parts of my life.

Moments that spark curiosity, moments that are pretty, and some portraiture work as well.

I started the Baltimore PhotoWalks in February 2024.

I'm outside shooting anyway, why not see if other people want to do it together?

And people came out.

-That is awesome.

We had I think, like, 20 or 25 folks come out to the first one and I was blown away because I didn't expect that level of interest.

Being with other people for an hour or two, it can add to your cup in a way that you don't get with otherwise solo experience.

When I go to these Walks and these meetups people are explaining things to me.

There are still so much that I can learn with photography and technique and skill and learning about certain gear.

And it's honestly a breath of fresh air because now I have my photo friends.

For the PhotoWalks, we select a neighborhood, there's usually a meetup point and we'll give recommendations on a map of attractions of things that folks might wanna shoot.

But otherwise we're not really guiding people within a certain direction.

In fact, some of our Walks are too big so we naturally split up.

We always come together and meet up for a group picture it's kind of been tradition at this point.

And so, I kept hosting them for the next few months and then linked up with Jake.

He had started this Baltimore Scenes page on Instagram and we were like, why not host something as a group?

Because there's clearly demand for community events and community spaces.

That was the start of a really fun friendship and partnership.

There█s tons of great stuff in the neighborhood.

There█s all kinds of parks everywhere.

There█s hidden parks in the middle of streets.

All kinds of beautiful houses and little hidden gems.

So enjoy, have fun, see something new.

When I moved here I didn█t really know anybody, and it was the middle of the pandemic.

So there was nothing really to do, not a lot of community to be found and so walking the streets alone with a camera was kind of the best way to just get out there and see the city.

I predominantly shoot film all 35 millimeter, usually a mix of color and black and white.

Mostly color in the summer, mostly black and white in the winter.

A lot of the photos that I like to take are scenes of life as a living landscape.

You're seeing something happening in a scene, but you█re also capturing the essence of what█s going on around you.

So we have our PhotoWalks every month.

Those are usually like an hour and a half you just walk around the neighborhood, capture what you see, what you like.

Cameras and Coffee is more of just a casual hang at a coffee shop.

Aperture Hour, it's a happy hour.

It's much of the same, we meet up at a bar or brewery.

People bring cameras to show off if they want to, but it's not required.

It's been really special seeing people meet for the first time.

Like, “oh, hey, I█m a huge fan of your work!” Then realizing that they actually have a lot in common and becoming friends.

- So I under- I overexposed by two stops and um- - Wow.

I'm definitely like a shyer person and going up and talking to strangers and having conversations with them really got me outside of my box.

And looking at all the people in this community and the stuff that they post makes me want to go out even more and take pictures.

I would say my style is mostly geared towards street.

What excites me and brings the photo alive is seeing somebody█s expression.

My hopes for Baltimore Scenes is that it continues a legacy, but maybe more than that it becomes like an actual staple of Baltimore.

That people know Baltimore because it has this flourishing photography community.

As a Curator, my role is to be on the lookout for work that makes me feel something.

For Baltimore Scenes, we accept film, digital, color, black and white.

It just needs to be shot in Baltimore City.

That's our only limitation.

We have Weekly Roundups where we pick one photo each week to highlight folks that are here shooting and seeing the beauty that they're capturing each week Baltimore Scenes has always been very welcoming and inclusive.

All types of photography is gonna be featured.

Every curator, I think, is quite different so having us all have really diverse backgrounds allows us to get better coverage Most of the photography here tha that I really connect with is around people that are making very personal connections to the city and are spending time with a scene that they belong to.

Even if we don't put it in the Roundup, you█re gonna see all the people that follow us.

You're gonna see all the people that are posting and tagging us.

There's so many different beautiful pockets and boroughs that each have its own flavor, each has its own style and these PhotoWalks have helped me experience it so much where I truly have developed a new love for the city.

I live here but now I live here.

Up next, Be Inspired: Chris Ullman - A Simple Gift.

Hi, I'm Chris Ullman, four-time International Whistling Champion and member of the Whistlers Hall of Fame.

I had this very key moment.

I had graduated from college, and I was a pretty good whistler at this point, and I was on a hike in the Shenandoah National Park and a friend of a friend heard me whistling and said, “Wow!

You're a really good whistler.

You should do something with that.” And I said, “well, I█ve heard there is an international competition, but I don█t know anything about it.” So the mutual friend said, “if it exists, I will find it.” And sure enough, there is at the time, The National Whistlers Convention.

So I signed up.

I practice.

I compete and I won a small prize.

So now I figured out how it worked.

So I go back the next year after a year-long practice regiment and I win the Grand Championship.

And like, all hell breaks loose.

I'm on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

I'm on the Today Show with Katie Couric.

I do dozens of TV and radio interviews.

So I've developed what I call a whistling ministry.

And it's whistling Happy Birthday for people.

So over the years, starting almost 40 years ago, I started whistling Happy Birthday for family and friends.

And that has accumulated now to a list of 700 people.

And it is just a great joy to be able to take these like, little packets of love and then send it to someone on their birthday to acknowledge their life.

Well, I have had the opportunity to whistle in a whole bunch of wild places.

Literally at the top of the Washington Monument here in D.C.

on the outside.

And I've whistled the National Anthem at a whole bunch of games.

The Orioles, the Nats, Cincinnati Reds, Texas Rangers, Duke men's basketball, and lots of other places as well It's a great honor to whistle a national anthem.

And then it had dawned on me that it is just a simple gift.

I'm not curing cancer.

I am not climbing Mount Everest blind.

I█m not rowing across the Atlantic single-handedly.

All I'm doing is sharing this simple gift of whistling with people.

But it makes them happy.

It brings some joy.

I whistled in the Oval Office for the President of the United States, and I gave this busy man a little respite for 20 minutes.

So that's what the theme became, is that everyone has a simple gift.

Mine happens to be whistling, but what is your gift?

The whole notion of Find Your Whistle is really a metaphor.

That the whistle is what is your gift in life and what are you doing with it?

Every day, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed you will intersect with scores of other human beings.

Those are scores of opportunities to touch hearts and change lives in small ways.

If you're wondering, do you have a gift and what do you do with it?

Well, the first thing to do is to kind of survey yourself.

How have you intersected with people throughout your life?

And then it█s development.

You know, can I, you know, fine tune it?

Can I make it better?

Then it's application and going out there and and being courageous and and sharing your gift with people.

In my book I feature ten people and what their gifts are and how those gifts touched my heart.

So, for example, a former colleague of mine makes the best carrot cake in the world.

And on my birthday every year he will make me a carrot cake.

And it warms my heart just as I warm his heart when I whistle for him.

Another man runs a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C.

and his gift is love.

And I have a priest friend whose gift is communication skills.

He's able to take the gospel and and kind of package it in this little way that I can appreciate it and understand it better than I ever could.

And that's his gift.

So everyone has that simple gift So the key is, can you find what that simple gift is for you then develop it?

Whether it's the cake or the communication skills.

And then be courageous and get out there.

Get out there and share it with people.

Don't keep your gifts bottled up inside you.

Get out there, develop it, share it and be courageous and change the lives of the people around you in these little ways.

And now enjoy, Be Inspired: Magnet Fishing.

I started magnet fishing back in December of 2022.

I came out here with some friends, tossed it in and we started pulling out trash And I thought it was, like, really neat and a more accessible way for me to start hunting for other things, especially other treasures that are potentially lost out there.

Magnet fishing gained a following pretty quickly.

So I host a meetup every Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

here in Fells Point.

Magnet fishing works by taking these powerful magnets that are rated from anywhere from about 800 pounds to 3500 pounds.

And with that, I can throw it in the water and then pull it back through.

Now it has a magnetic field, but the field is not that wide.

So you have to kind of move, lik like, in sections as you're pulling it through the water to find cool and interesting items.

I first found out about magnet fishing through a post on social media.

I think I saw a post of one of the first groups back in the winter time and it looked so exciting, I just had to go check it out.

I was hooked immediately, got a magnet, came back the next week and over time, week by week, we had more and more people coming out and showing up.

More and more people seeing our posts and stories of things we were catching.

So every week our group picture would get bigger and bigger and bigger until we had dozens of people showing up at a time.

The Eastern Shore Magnet Fishing Meetup is one that is very near dear to my heart.

I started it shortly after Evan started his on the Baltimore side.

And I find the environmentalists are more of what the Eastern Shore is about.

It█s not as much of what it is, or how it got there, or anything like that.

It█s just, we like crabs so we want to give them a better environment to thrive in.

Magnet fishing for me is one part historical excavation, one part environmental restoration.

I think I initially got into it because I█m a wildlife biologist by trade and the ultimate mission we pursue every week here is cleaning out the harbor.

There's also been a couple of times where we've had encounters with important wildlife to this area.

We did find a baby diamondback terrapin that was entangled in some garbage that we pulled out of the water.

We were able to free it, release it back into the Chesapeake Bay.

And I think that was really special because that is a threatened species that a lot of people don't get a lot of up close contact with.

It's really interesting seeing all the different types of items that have been pulled up.

Everything from chairs, tables, shopping carts and benches, bikes, CO2 tanks, scooters, scooters, scooters, scooters, bottle caps, the leaf springs of a truck, a large gas tank, even one of those luggage carriers for a hotel.

So at the end of every meet, I have folks pile all the trash that they pulled in.

Anything that they do not want to keep, they put at the end for a local junk hauler to come through.

Some folks ask what inspires me to do this and to do Salvage Arc too.

It█s just my quest for knowledge I like learning more.

Through all the research I've done for the locations, I've learned what was there beforehand.

And that kind of helps pinpoint spots that I think would probably have older items or something historically significant potentially below the waves.

One night while fishing back in February, I reeled in this large, rusty shipping hook.

It was forged, and you could see that by the graining structure of the steel.

And so I cleaned it up and I've dated it to about the mid 1800s.

So we're finding actual old things and something that could tell a story about not just the artifact, but what the place and what Fells Point was doing back in the 1800s.

Like, this area behind me was originally filled in with buildings, but then there was a fire in the 1800s, late 1800s.

All that was demoed, pushed into the water.

And now you have this beautiful, you know, waterscape and pier area.

Magnet fishing really took off after everyone came out and saw all, A. the trash I was pulling out, but B. that they could get involved actively cleaning out the water while having fun.

We've grown a nice little, small community of folks that have almost become like best friends it seems like.

What keeps me going is the camaraderie of the sport.

There's some awesome people that do this, so it's really fun to hang out with everybody.

I also come out to hang out with this cool group of people that come out every week to magnet fish.

It's been a great way to meet a lot of people, make new friends.

I think originally I came for the fascinating finds, and I still do, but what really brings me back is that everyone here is like family now Everyone is so passionate, so educated.

The different perspectives that we get on everything we pull out of the water is just beyond fascinating.

It's a way to not just have fun every week, but just keep learning about the world that we live in.

And now, Be Inspired: Collaboration Laboratory.

█ Music █ Music is deeply rooted into people's emotions.

Like when you get goose bumps or when your hair raises on your arm when someone sings a certain note and that for me is a big part of the human experience.

█ Music █ The music scene in Baltimore is one of the most beautiful things I know.

The people here, they love art and they love doing it.

There's something about sharing your passion with like-minded people that pumps that love into this world.

█ Music █ This is like magic.

This is like alchemy.

That spontaneity is what sparks a lot of creativity.

Co Lab is speed dating for songwriters.

We get musicians and artists and writers together and put them in random groups of four and give them a minimal prompt where they're given up to 15 minutes to write a song.

█ Music █ I'll give you whatever theme or whatever concept we're going to be working at.

Sometimes it's magnet tiles, sometimes it's wordplay and sometimes it's based on whatever event█s going on or whatever holiday is coming up.

Seven minutes.

Seven minutes left.

After the round is over, everyone convenes in the common room where there's a stage and then they play that song for the other groups and then rotate and do it all over again.

And you'll do this four times in a night.

█ Music █ We've been able to get rappers and hip hop artists, but also people from like a folk background and people from a more soul, funk, jazz background and rock, punk.

I'd say it's pretty diverse.

- Just give us like a little nod - A little nod.

Alright.

- So we know to where to head back in.

█ Music █ I remember coming home and thinking like that was the funnest experience I█ve ever had in the past at least five years making music.

- We█ll see how seemlessly I can hop on the bass.

Just keep the groove going when I come over.

- That works.

That works.

█ Music █ I took a break from music for a few years.

I had severe writer's block.

So I was really excited to get back into, like, music.

Doing Co Lab kind of just switched that creativity back on in my brain.

- Oh, I like that.

One of the songs that I wrote with some people in Co Lab, we actually went outside of Co Lab to record it.

What we're doing is just not limited to Co Lab.

It's like we're able to share this potentially with the world.

█ Music █ The cycle is the bigger framework, and each cycle is about three roughly four months.

It builds into the Finale event where we take musicians, that we already know everybody loves working with that were voted by their peers and gave them 90 minutes to write three songs.

And then they immediately perform it to a live audience.

█ Music █ We use that to pull participants for our Showcase, which is a public event that we have.

Now outside of Co Lab you have three months to write a 40 minute set.

█ Music █ I was blessed with an opportunity to be in one of those groups.

We performed at Monument City Brewing Company in July of 2024.

I was able to perform an individual set and then each of the other members in my group also got to perform an individual set █ Music █ Anxiety with performing has been something I've been working on.

Co Lab has helped me to build further progress towards overcoming it just because of the amount of practice you get and then also the people in the group are really supportive as well.

That really helped me to come out of my comfort zone and to expand my creative abilities.

█ Music █ I was really struggling to find a music community in Baltimore.

It felt like I was kind of doing this alone.

That was until I met all these great musicians.

So we can have this community as opposed to what felt like each musician existing in their own bubble.

Now that we have this hub, I█m starting to see the Baltimore music scene come alive █ Music █ In the last year, I came from not knowing everyone to knowing a lot of beautiful people.

Thanks for that, Lee.

And your intentional community you█ve created here.

As with many of my artist friends, I struggle with mental illness and also physical illnesses and so I really need a place to escape.

When you hop into a group for Collab Lab, you have a short amount of time to build safe space.

And it█s so cool to see how people celebrate each other.

Although this has much of a workshop formula, it's nicely emphasized that we come with what we are.

We're learning to do with what we have together.

█ Music █