Over the years I've attempted to make some of the weird little films in my head but something would always get in the way. I had a movie I was working on during my last relationship and it was sabotaged and during the divorce process I had lost all my footage. Interestingly enough, I saw a trailer for a small movie coming out (or IS out) with the same story and setup to some degree. I had tried to work with a good friend of mine on some stuff but nothing came to fruition. He, my sister and myself did shoot stuff for a short that was supposed to go to an indie anthology but nothing came of the footage shot - actually my sister and I never saw the footage afterwards. I've been asked by family and friends "Whatever happened to *insert project here*?" It's hard to explain to people a lot of times what gets in the way of things. It's always different.
This past year and a half I've had a lot of a "Fuck it, why not?" attitude with things. Last year I submitted a poetry book expecting to hear nothing but "No" and it got published. From that book I saw some submission requests on the publisher's website and said "Why not?" Did two stories for them and saw the novel submission. I didn't think I'd ever do that or even be able to do that but said sure and wrote a novel. Since I've been doing that, my art's gotten better. I've animated something by hand and worked on an art series you'll see soon called Coma's End. So with a comic book, a play, a novel, a poetry book, and an art series, I figured it was time to just jump into something else I wanted.
Digging around at my dad's while helping him throw stuff away I came across an old digital camera (a Vivitar to be exact) and I remembered using it at a time. I noticed it had an SD card in it and took it home (he said anything I found and wanted, I could have). I plugged the card up into the laptop to see what was on it - sure enough it was the things I had recorded. It was just my tooling around trying to learn the camera. I had set it in black and white because I just love B&W photography and cinematography. The actual video setting on the camera is terrible; something I actually enjoyed. If you're wanting to do something tattered or rough looking, there's no need for the added aged film FX. So B&W AND rough looking? It looked JUST like the films that I love and inspire me. Looking through the footage there was me and my ex. On a side/personal note: it was strange to see us on film after we're well over. It was like I could see on the film that there was really nothing there between the two people; something I didn't see at that time as one of those people. But I digress...
I saw little angles of ceilings and walls that I liked and so I went through and cut everything else and kept those odd angles. I then took the same camera and went to shoot random stuff in my house to fill it out. All just experimenting. The more I shot and the more I was experimenting, the less of the original footage stayed. There were no plans, I was doing simply that - experimenting. The finished result is very obviously a film about suicide, however, again, there were no plans - it just kind of happened. Now that I shot this short and I'm happy with it, I'm definitely going to do more.
Let this all be a lesson - if there's something you want to do but feel you don't have the means and not even sure how to go about it, just jump in and do it. Even if you don't like the results the first time - just do it. I'm going to keep going with all my projects and you should too.
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