I'm a terrible blogger, as it turns out

So yeah, it's been way too long to respectably have gone without blogging. Apparently, much of my family reads (or rather read [huh that doesn't work so well written]) the blog and to you I apologize. I swear I'll do better next semester.

For anyone who was reading this in a desperate attempt to figure out what to do with your life in regards to film school...I feel especially sad for, for many reasons, but primarily because I suck.

So let's try and sum up the last few months of film school in one post!

I believe I left off shortly after shooting project one. First off, I have to say at the time, I really liked how mine edited together. Hell, I loved the first cut that came in at something like eight or nine minutes. Something nice about being at USC was immediately having access to people you could show your edit to and have solid feedback from. I didn't agree with all of it, but to be able to be in the lab and turn around to find just about anyone in the room to receive considerate, reasoned feedback from is very nice.

Anyway, after painstakingly editing my nine minute wonder down to a five minute thirty second masterpiece, and still being told by others it was way too long I was sure that they were wrong and that on Monday the class would see how clever I was.

I was so very wrong. The feedback on Monday was almost exclusively along the lines of, "wow you have a decent movie in there somewhere, just hack that badboy down." And after some looking at it and general thinking, I realized a few things. One, I have always been in love with my own stuff. Even films before film school, they all could do with serious editing. A subset realization was that I needed to be better at editing my own stuff and probably would need an editor in future projects (probably why such a postion exists on every major film ever released). Two, you watching your movie on your computer montior on your own is very different than watching it projected on a big ass screen with 15 people (or even worse, film students) watching it. This might be a lesson for everone, if you can show your film to people and not feel crushing embarassment you're probably delussional.

I'm making out worse than it was; for the most part people were very forgiving and kind. Too forgiving and kind in retrospect. If I can't count on my peers to be brutal on me who can I count on?

I also came out of the first project with some good advice. A fellow film student gave me the very simple advice of, "Stop shooting for the middle". I imagine this doesn't apply to all young filmmakers, in fact, based on some student films I would imagine advice closer to, "Stop being so goddamn obtuse/crazy!" would be more sage wisdom. But, for me, the middle is where I sometimes end up. To make a long lesson short, it would be better to continually fail big than succeed small.

And looking at my first film, I have to agree. It was almost no different from anything I had done in the past. In the sense that, there would be nothing that would have stopped me from making the exact same film a year ago with my friends. Yes, I got to work with actual actors, which was good, but the film itself didn't require anything like that; though they did certainly add to the film.

So, when planning for my second film, I decided to that above all else, to do something that I couldn't have done on my own.

To be continued in the next post...