The Machinery of Wonder (a short essay)
When we’re little, wonder lives close to the ground. It’s in the rumble of the trash truck, the metallic hiss of air brakes, the rhythmic ballet of a mechanical arm lifting a can, dumping it, and setting it back down with a clatter. That sound was everything. Purpose. Movement.
As kids, we don’t yet have words for “engineering” or “hydraulics.” We just know that something enormous and alive passes by every Thursday morning, and it makes our hearts pound.
But as we grow up, the magic dulls. Trash trucks become background noise. The everyday machinery of life, the buses, the trains, the hum of the refrigerator, all fade into the static of routine. We stop looking.
And yet, some part of us still aches for that feeling. So our gaze shifts upward, to rockets, to stars, to things just out of reach. Wonder moves from the tactile to the intangible. It’s no longer something we can touch: it’s something we remember.
That’s why we make films. Stories, like rockets, lift us out of the ordinary.
Stories, being a documentary or fiction, are our way of exploring the “what ifs”. They remind us how it feels to be curious, to feel good, to question things, to see the world through new eyes. A good story should create wonder. Not by escaping reality, but by reframing it.
Video production, in a way, is machinery too: cameras, lights, lenses, microphones. Gears and glass arranged in delicate precision. But when those parts move in harmony, something greater happens. They capture feeling. They make us see again the extraordinary in the everyday, the divine in the mechanical, the beauty in something as simple as a trash truck lifting its arm against a Colorado mountain.
At Rocket House Pictures, that’s what drives us, this chase for the spark of wonder. The same spark that made us stop and stare as kids. The same spark that sends rockets into the heavens.
In the end, filmmaking is wonder in motion. It’s the art of remembering how to look.
Gio Toninelo - Producer & Cinematographer at Rocket House Pictures
