I recently watched All the Empty Rooms, the Academy-Award winning documentary short film on Netflix and I haven’t been able to shake it. Not because it’s loud or dramatic. It’s not. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s quiet. Patient. It lingers. It is honest and simple. And it is quite powerful. I think that is why it stays with me. Watching it, I realized that this wasn’t something that suddenly became a film. This was something that had been unfolding for years. Seven years, to be exact. It didn’t begin as a documentary project. That’s the part I think matters most, especially if you’ve spent any time in journalism. Because films like this don’t come out of nowhere. They come out of work that, in many cases, has already been done. I think there is a lesson here for all storytellers, but journalists especially. It Started the Way These Stories Often Start It started with reporting. It started with showing up, asking questions, and building trust over time. Sadly, the journalist at the center of All the Empty Rooms had been covering school shootings for years. Not just parachuting in for headlines, but returning, revisiting, staying in relationship with the people living in the aftermath. And over time, something shifted. When you cover enough of these stories, there’s a risk that sets in, not just for the audience, but for the person doing the work. A kind of cultural numbness. Another headline. Another mass shooting tragedy. Another news cycle. I think what began to take hold for the journalist was a discomfort with that rhythm. Because what he was seeing up close didn’t feel like headlines. It felt like lives that had been interrupted. Rooms that had been left behind. Families carrying something that doesn’t resolve. CBS journalist Steve Hartman started to realize that the way these stories were being told, fast, efficient, fact-driven, wasn’t capturing what he was experiencing. For him the question became: What would it look like to tell this differently? The Ethical Weight of Going Deeper That question isn’t just creative. It’s ethical. Because once you decide to go deeper, you’re asking something of people. You’re asking to enter their space. Their homes. And in this case, that wasn’t taken lightly. In fact, there was real hesitation. A kind of dread, even, about what it would mean to show up with a film crew and ask families, who had already been through so much, to open their doors again. There’s a line you don’t want to cross. As a journalist, you’re trained to be mindful of that. To not exploit. To not intrude. And yet, something unexpected happened. Families said yes. Not because they wanted to relive the worst moment of their lives. But because they understood what he was trying to do. He wasn’t there to document the tragedy. He was there to document the life. That distinction matters. He was interested in who their child was. What they loved. What filled those rooms before they were empty. In a way, he was helping them protect something that felt at risk of being lost—not just memory, but identity. Not just how their child died, but how they lived. The Power of Small Details That intention shows up in the way the film is constructed. There’s no rush to get to the point. No urgency to explain everything. Instead, the camera lingers. On photographs. On objects. On rooms that still hold the shape of someone who isn’t there anymore. And that’s where the film does something that reporting alone can’t. Because when you read an article, you move at the pace of information and your deadline. When you watch a film like this, you move at the pace of presence. You sit in it. You notice things you might otherwise pass over. A jersey on the wall. A bed that hasn’t been made. A photograph that suddenly carries more weight than it ever did before. Those details don’t just support the story. They are the story. A Deliberately Narrow Frame One of the most interesting creative decisions in All the Empty Rooms is how narrow it is. This isn’t a sweeping examination of school violence. It doesn’t try to cover every angle or offer a comprehensive analysis like college thesis. It stays focused. Photographing rooms. The elements are rooms. Photographs. Fragments of conversation. Personal video clips. A reporter carrying the weight of the story. And the reporting journey that ties it all together. That constraint is what gives it power. Because instead of expanding outward, the film goes inward. It doesn’t try to explain everything. It lets you feel something. And that’s a different kind of storytelling. Why This Became a Short Film I think this is where a lot of people misunderstand the role of short films. There’s an assumption that a short is just a smaller version of a feature. But in cases like this, the short format isn’t a limitation. Quite the opposite. This film works because it’s compressed. Because it doesn’t overextend. Because it trusts that the weight of what you’re seeing doesn’t need to be stretched into something bigger to be meaningful. In fact, doing so might have diluted it. What you have here is essentially a single premise: What remains after someone is gone. And instead of building that into a broader narrative with multiple arcs and threads, the film stays with that premise. It isn’t overthinking it. It is built with quiet observation. Verité. Silence. Detail. It is powerful because of that. It becomes immersive precisely because it doesn’t try to be expansive. And that’s a lesson in and of itself. Not every story needs to be bigger. Some stories need to be more focused. The Moment the Story Changed If you step back and look at this from a process standpoint, there’s a moment in every project like this where something shifts. Where the person doing the work realizes: This isn’t just an article. That moment doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from accumulation. From years of interviews. From relationships that have been built. From material that has been gathered but not fully used. Because in journalism, you often collect far more than you publish. You distill. You compress. You extract what fits the format and your deadline. But the full story - the conversations, the pauses, the emotional texture— often stays behind. In filmmaking, that’s the raw material. And in this case, that material had been building for years. Seven years of it. At some point, the realization becomes unavoidable: There’s more here. Talk to any journalist and they will tell you they wish they had more time and space to go deeper and tell the more impactful story. I’m grateful that Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp embarked on this journey together and decided to go the next step of bringing in Joshua Seftel to document the journey. What This Says About Journalism This is the part that keeps coming back to me. Because if you’re a journalist, none of this should feel foreign. You already know how to find stories. You know how to build trust. You know how to ask the questions that matter. You’re already doing the hardest part. What’s different is how that work gets developed. In journalism, the goal is to make deadline. In filmmaking, the goal is to build something that can be experienced over time. And that shift from output to development is where I see the biggest gap. Because most stories are treated as something you finish. You write them. You publish them. You move on. You’re on the deadline hamster wheel. That is how I felt working in baseball. After today’s game, we haven another game, and another and so on. But in the context of this story, what if that’s not the end? What if it’s the beginning? The Stories That Stay with You Every journalist I know has a few stories that don’t leave them. The ones that stick. The ones where the relationship didn’t end when the article was published or the story was broadcast. The ones where you know, deep down, that you only told part of it. Those are the stories I think about when I watch a film like All the Empty Rooms. Because those are the stories that have the potential to become something more. Not because they’re bigger. But because they’re deeper. From Reporting to Filmmaking When I talk about STORYSMART®, one of the core ideas I come back to is this: You’re not just creating content. You’re creating assets. And what you have, if you’ve been doing this work for any length of time, is a body of material that likely goes far beyond what you’ve published. Interviews. Audio. Video. Notes. Relationships. Access. Ideas that won’t leave your head. Probably multiple story angles and competing ideas fight for primacy in your brain. I know I get that way. It is almost like a March Madness bracket of ideas that pull at your heart. I’m here to tell you that all of body of work in your files are storytelling source materials. It might be the foundation of a film, but it only becomes that if you recognize it. If you treat it as something worth developing. If you think beyond the first version of the story and you are willing to collaborate with others to take it to the next level. Coming Back to the Rooms When I think about All the Empty Rooms, I don’t just think about what’s on screen. I think about everything that made it possible. The years of reporting. The relationships that were built. The trust that was earned. The hesitation that had to be worked through. The decision to go deeper. The willingness to give back and share a gift with the families you covered. And ultimately, the choice to tell the story in a way that resists the pace of everything else around it. To slow down. To sit with absence. To let the rooms speak. That doesn’t happen by accident. The Question I Keep Coming Back To If you’re reading this and you’ve spent time reporting, I think there’s a simple question worth asking: What story have you already told that isn’t finished? Not unfinished because you didn’t do the work. Unfinished because there’s more there than the format allowed you to share. Those ideas fighting to advance further. I can tell you this for fact: there are stories sitting in notebooks, in transcripts, in hard drives right now that have the potential to become something far more enduring than a single article. In some rare cases, it might be something like All the Empty Rooms. Something that doesn’t just inform. But stays with you. From reporting to something that lasts in the hearts and minds of your audience. And once you start to see your work through that lens, you begin to realize the story may already be there. The question is whether you’re willing to follow it a little further. About the Storytelling for ALL® Newsletter The Storytelling for ALL® LinkedIn Newsletter is a biweekly newsletter examining how stories are developed, protected, and brought to life in today’s evolving storytelling economy. Every other week, I explore the creative, ethical, and economic forces shaping books, films, documentaries, and other story work through the lens of development, rights, collaboration, and long-term value. Written primarily for creators and collaborators, the newsletter also serves story sources who want to understand how their true stories move from lived experience to finished work and how better structure early leads to better outcomes later. For deeper studio thinking, tools, and updates, The STORYSMART® Way is our monthly email newsletter for members of the Storytelling for ALL® community. About Our STORYSMART® Perspective We approach storytelling and filmmaking as a long-term, rights-first business rather than a project-by-project creative exercise. Our focus is on understanding how stories create value over time through ownership, disciplined development, and thoughtful risk management. The ideas shared here are intended to contribute to a broader conversation about sustainable, independent media, not to promote specific projects or investment opportunities.