Impulse

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.