Impulse

I’m so excited! I’ve spent the last three years mean­der­ing, dab­bling in sev­eral fields to get a sense of what I want to do next. Now I know. I want to make movies! Short, long, ani­mated, mul­ti­me­dia — I don’t know yet. I’ll find out when I’ve been doing it for a few years. In the mean­time, I’m start­ing with writ­ing. Well, and a doc­u­men­tary I’m film­ing this June. Meanwhile, I’ll be cut­ting back on other activ­i­ties like pho­tog­ra­phy. It’s good to have some focus.

My brother came up to visit sev­eral weeks ago. He and I are in the same sit­u­a­tion — try­ing to fig­ure out what path to take for the next decade or so. I joked that we’d sit around say­ing, “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?” “I dunno. What do you want to do?” “I dunno. What do you want to do?“
After he left, I spent a day pac­ing my liv­ing room, think­ing, writ­ing, talk­ing to myself. I was even wear­ing all white which made me look like a men­tal ward patient. Here are some of the deci­sions I came to:

I’ve been think­ing about movies and mak­ing movies con­stantly since I was lit­tle and we first got cable TV. I’ve been orbit­ing movie-making for the last few years hav­ing worked as a pro­duc­tion pho­tog­ra­pher, var­i­ous assis­tant direct­ing roles, and direct­ing an episode of a inter­net TV show. Yet, I hadn’t owned up to it and cho­sen to make it a career. I let my revul­sion to the busi­ness of Hollywood steer me towards other pur­suits.
I find every­thing I’ve heard or read about the busi­ness side of Hollywood to be loath­some. I cringe when some­one mea­sures the great­ness of a movie by it’s rev­enues. Every cre­ative indus­try has a busi­ness side, though. That’s the “indus­try” part, after all. I think I was being a bit naive. Sometimes you have to accept the good with the slimy.
I don’t have to make fea­ture films in Hollywood. There are lots of peo­ple hav­ing a blast mak­ing short films, short and fea­ture length ani­ma­tion, doc­u­men­taries, and dig­i­tal sto­ry­telling. Plus, the inter­net is pos­i­tively explod­ing with small pro­duc­tion work. Take a look at You Tube, Newgrounds, and video blogs. (Update: tons of online video dis­trib­u­tors here) It’s a great time and a great pool to be jump­ing into.
Where to start? With writing.

Writing is great! I can be imag­i­na­tive at every­thing — from the words I choose, to the way I orga­nize a work, to the sub­ject mat­ter itself. It’s all inter­est­ing sto­ry­telling whether I’m describ­ing child­hood in a war-torn coun­try, or telling soft­ware devel­op­ers how to respond to DIF_NEWDEVICEWIZARD_FINISHINSTALL.
Last month, I took a story struc­ture class from Brian McDonald. The last time I geeked out so much on a sub­ject was back in ’83 when I started learn­ing BASIC on the Apple ][. Ever since, I’ve been watch­ing movies over and over try­ing to dig out their arma­tures, pour­ing over fairy tales, and lis­ten­ing for the nat­ural act breaks in my friends’ con­ver­sa­tions.
Story is essen­tial. You have to nail the story to make any piece of writ­ing or film­mak­ing work. If the act­ing is flat or the direc­tion sim­ple, it won’t mat­ter if the story is solid. Globally, I think sto­ries are impor­tant: they help make sense of the world — and we live in a very con­fus­ing one.
So, I’ll start with story: read­ing, watch­ing, ana­lyz­ing. I’m writ­ing extremely short sto­ries to get lots of prac­tice quickly in exer­cis­ing what I’ve learned. Dabbling in ani­ma­tion will help too — learn­ing to visu­ally com­mu­ni­cate every ele­ment of a story with­out words.
Meanwhile, to keep myself in prac­tice string­ing words together, I’m free­lanc­ing as a tech writer and any­thing else that comes along that inter­ests me. (income doesn’t hurt, either).

I don’t want to be purely a pho­tog­ra­pher. I may employ pho­tog­ra­phy in my sto­ry­telling adven­tures, but it won’t be a full-time pur­suit. It doesn’t inter­est me as much as writ­ing sto­ries. For now, I’ve rel­e­gated it to being a hobby — some­thing just for me. Well, more than a hobby — a way of help­ing me to visu­ally find what I want to say and how to say it visu­ally.
Time for a story: A year or so ago, I wasn’t happy with the pho­tog­ra­phy I had been doing and wanted to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. I talked with my friend and fel­low pho­tog­ra­pher Max. We decided to do a prac­tice fash­ion shoot. He got all dressed up in fancy duds and I started shoot­ing. The more I shot, the more frus­trated I got. Finally, Max asked me in his thick Russian accent, “What is it that you want?” My mind blanked. I was tak­ing “fash­ion” pho­tos — what­ever that was — try­ing to take pic­tures that had a gen­eral feel of adver­tise­ments. I set that aside and asked myself, “What is it that I want to pho­to­graph?” No answer.
I have no idea what I actu­ally enjoy pho­tograph­ing for myself. I’ve been tak­ing pic­tures for other peo­ple: I com­posed my shots to please my pho­tog­ra­pher friends. I chose sub­jects and styles to match those I’d seen in books. I walked around hunt­ing for the photo that Doisneau would have taken, or Erwitt, or the Turnleys, or my friends whose work I admired. I was shoot­ing other people’s pho­tos.
One night at a party, I over­heard another pho­tog­ra­pher friend of mine say, “I love it when you give some­one a cam­era and turn them loose. I love to see what peo­ple come up with when they only take pho­tos for them­selves.“
Inspired by this, I’ve decided to take pic­tures just for me for a while. I’m the only one who’s going to see them. Since I know that nobody else will see them, I’ll only click the shut­ter when I see some­thing that I want to see again in a way that I want to see it. I hope that after doing this for a while, I’ll start hear­ing my own voice, learn to under­stand what it’s say­ing, and learn to rec­og­nize it amongst the din of other voices when I start show­ing my pho­tos again. This’ll be impor­tant for me every­where — not just pho­tog­ra­phy.
That’s the idea any­way. To that end, you’ll notice that I’ve taken down my photo gallery, deleted most every­thing off Flickr, removed most links to my work, and even took “pho­tog­ra­pher” off the About Me side­bar. They’ll come back some­day. I’m curi­ous to find out I come up with.

I’ve made some other deci­sions as well (like giv­ing up dat­ing for a while), but I won’t bore you with those. I made most of these deci­sions a few weeks ago and have been feel­ing light­hearted since. It’s good to have direc­tion again.
Unlike past deci­sions, I’m not choos­ing an end — I don’t know whether I’ll be a big-shot movie direc­tor mak­ing fea­ture films, a happy cre­ative at Pixar, a pro­fes­sional video blog­ger, or just a tech writer who makes flash ani­ma­tions for kicks. For the first time — for me — I’m choos­ing a path; one that looks like it’ll pro­vide an inter­est­ing trip.

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4. Old work made new
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