Jake Taylor \u201920 walked down to the surf, turned around, and stared at the 400 yards of sand in front of him. He put down his camera and took it all in.<\/p>\n
This was Omaha Beach. This was D-Day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that any human being was willing to go and die for everybody else\u2026\u201d his voice fades as the tears well up in his eyes. \u201cThe whole war swung on that day, and I got to see the celebration of that day. What it still means to the people who were liberated.\u201d<\/p>\n
The anniversary of D-Day is the people of Normandy\u2019s Fourth of July. American soldiers are invited to come over, to take part in reenactments, and\u2014most of all\u2014to be celebrated.<\/p>\n
Just a couple years ago, Taylor\u2019s brother, Hunter, was one of those soldiers who was asked to attend, and Jake and his mom went too.<\/p>\n
As he took in the events of that day, he told his mom, Christian, \u201cThis could be a movie.\u201d<\/p>\n
She agreed. And now it is.<\/p>\n
Christian is the director. Jake is one of the assistant directors.<\/p>\n
Most of the filming took place in France this past summer, and with financial help from Wabash\u2019s G. Michael Dill Fund, Taylor was able to be there and help bring his idea to life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s definitely crazy, but I never thought it would be the scope that it is,\u201d Jake says. \u201cI never thought it was going to be a $300,000 production with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment moving back and forth.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014Christina Egbert<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jake Taylor \u201920 walked down to the surf, turned around, and stared at the 400 yards of sand in front of him. He put down his camera and took it all in. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":4577,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-works-in-progress"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2018\/12\/jake-1-1024x683.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4578,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4576\/revisions\/4578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}