My time as a student filmmaker

Preface

I took a nonfiction workshop this semester as a part of my Creative Writing curriculum. Going in, I didn't really think I'd like it. The first piece I submitted was a three-page, half-assed rant on my thoughts on cooking. I wasn't proud of it at all, and I didn't give myself enough time to write it.

My second piece was about seven pages, and was much more personal to me, and perhaps to all of you beautiful readers. It was about my time in high school, learning to make videos and films. I went into the workshop feeling confident, and I think I had a noticeably-more positive reaction from the class.

Some of the workshop critiques I got felt like matters of taste, preferences that I considered but brushed off as personal biases. Most of the critiques, though, were more objective, like including more characters, or explaining why the speaker even cares about the subject matter in the first place. I jotted them all down, and planned to tweak some sections to accommodate these more reasonable critiques.

Almost immediately in the revision process, I couldn't help but re-write entire sections in a new tone, or with a different message I wanted to push across. A lot of those "matters of taste" ended up influencing this new version, and I'm glad I wrote them down despite my initial hesitations. Attached here, you can read that initial version, if you'd like.

After finishing and skimming the updated version, I can see that it still needs work. But if you'd like to read it now, I hope that, even if it means nothing to you, you at least enjoy it:

Unfinished Script

Nobody says “Lights, cameras, action!” They say, “Oh crap, did you bring the SD card?”  You don’t shoot a short film, you re-schedule it for three weeks because you managed to forget the thirty assignments you have coming up. You keep re-scheduling and re-scheduling and suddenly you have midterms and one of the crew gets sick on the one day that worked for everyone and eventually you just have to give up and throw another project on the trash heap.

But before you even get to that point of production, you need to have a script. It could take weeks, months, even years to write a half-decent one. Sure, everyone around you seems to have it handled and is able to write something they’re happy with, but your script has to be just right; something that’ll make the time spent on it worth it when it blows everyone’s socks off. But it’ll end up with the others. Somewhere in the deep, murky pits of your hard drive floats a graveyard of untitled manuscripts and skits, each one somewhere between barely-started and almost-finished.

It can feel overwhelming at times, the number of upcoming and abandoned projects that weigh on your mind. But you’re in good company. The girl sitting next to you in class? She’s two days late on delivering her news segment, half-out of her mind and exhausted from editing until 2:00AM last night.

The feeling of companionship is pervasive here. You’re all just one part of a team. Nevermind the team’s collective state of being overwhelmed, or the fact that none of you have enough time between your schedules and deadlines to produce a piece of work that can be approximated anywhere close to the word ‘good’. You’re all in this together. And after a while, you’ll forget the wonder you felt the first time you mounted a camera on your shoulder and tracked a bird flying across the sky. You’ll start to blend into the beige of the walls, staring into them until you fall straight through, part of the very fabric of this room you can’t stand to be in.

For three years of high school, I spent most of my time there between those beige walls. I learned how to write a script, how to use a DSLR camera, how to wrap cables, how to edit a video, how to light a subject, and, alongside whatever the hell ‘chromakey’ means, countless other tidbits of esoteric wisdom that meant nothing to any of the friends or family I would moreso talk at than talk to in response to the obligatory “So, what have you been up to?”

I joined my school’s Television Production program not for these niche nuggets of wisdom, nor for three years of needless stress and sleepless nights; I did it because I was enraptured completely by the subject. I had never been interested in learning about anything at all until the day I picked up a professional camera.

A picture can tell a thousand-and-one words without making a single noise. The beauty of a sequence of frames telling an immersive story was something that never struck me until I tried to create one. The excitement you feel behind the camera as the slightest tilt of the camera changes a scene from dysfunctional to dynamic is electric; the little click of the puzzle pieces in your mind as you start layering shots and sounds in the editing room, each piece finally revealing that grander image, is so gratifying and addicting.

And it wasn’t just the learning aspect. Our Television Production program was an active participant in tons of competitions. I was already a competitive person, and almost as soon as I joined the program in my sophomore year, I signed up to compete at SkillsUSA, a three-leveled competition. I was itching to see how far I could make it if I pushed myself, if I learned everything I possibly could about cinematography and lighting and everything under the sun. Until I was assigned to a non-video competition. To Extemporaneous Speaking. That first year, I couldn’t even make it past the Regional level.

But I wouldn’t let myself give up from one failure. Over the first two years of my three-year stint, I’d spend countless hours of my free time learning, showing up to the Television Production classroom during my study hall so that my teacher would maybe think This guy knows what he’s doing. Television Production was a co-curricular, meaning you had to take the class to be a part of the club. Having just moved to a new city and school, constantly depressed and missing my old friends, I was anti-social and couldn’t figure out how to connect with my classmates. I gave up entirely on the club aspect and figured I’d be able to prove something to myself by honing my technical skills, hoping that being good at something would help me be recognized by the people around me.

One of my first attempts at this was at the beginning of my second year. I tried out for our more difficult competitions, STN. I had a good team during the tryout, and I was proud of what we made, but it was clear that there were better members of that team, and space was already limited. I think that failure is something that I internalize and use against myself, spawning feelings of inadequacy throughout my life. This instance, however, was the first time I can recall channeling those feelings into something else; an obsession.

I spent every study hall from that point going to the TV classroom and asking upperclassmen millions of questions, or following an unending stream of editing tutorials. Towards the end of that second year, when my time as a high school junior was coming to a close, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring one more time. I applied to be one of the two people in charge of the next year’s competition teams. One of the few friends I’d made in the program, Tai, said we’d make a good team if we both got the position. I didn’t think she meant it. Honestly, I didn’t know why she’d even said that to me; we’d hardly known each other, and she was miles ahead of me in experience and accolades. My career in our program’s competitions was a story of what not to do, if anything. I couldn't really figure out how I’d fit in that position, but I also didn’t see the harm applying. Shoot for the moon, I thought.

And then I hit the moon. I got the position.

I was in shock when I found out. I’d spent two years of my life mentally working myself to the bone to reach this place. To feel recognized. And I lived in that feeling for the rest of that school year. I was happy to see that Tai and I ended up getting the roles we wanted, and soon enough we were taking on some of the new responsibilities. The work was hard, but I felt accomplished and proud of myself.

I remember vividly something my teacher said during our last meeting of the year, something he’d noticed from years of teaching students in the exact same boat as us. “Summer changes people.”

I spent my summer doing a lot of introspection. I’d just been crushed during my second time competing at SkillsUSA; this time I couldn’t make it past the State level. I was struggling internally, both with a failing relationship and with the lingering omnipresence of my parents’ divorce, no longer recent but still constantly weighing on my mind. I was at a genuinely low point in my life, and I had nowhere to go but inside my head.

School came back. So did I, but different. “Changed”.

I tried to like my senior year, but I couldn’t. Those first two months, I had a panic attack every time I walked through the gates, and I’d skip first period or the entire day just to try and breathe.

And I tried to like my position in the club, but still I just couldn’t. My teacher wouldn’t let me do any work on STN with Tai, since I’d never been selected for the competition team. My sole focus was SkillsUSA. I hated every second of it.

After a while, those feelings started bleeding into my work in class. I worked on a livestream early in the year and completely snapped at the rest of the crew for technical issues that were nobody’s fault. I would bury myself in a pile of competition paperwork and logistics and leave the majority of our video assignments to my friend Mateo, whom I often worked with since we’d competed together the previous year. I always felt guilty throwing him the SD card and asking him to edit, but I never stopped doing it. Sometimes I’d take on more extracurricular work just so I’d have an excuse to distance myself even more from having to make videos. But I had already locked myself in by taking two TV Production classes.

Early into the year, it was time again for STN tryouts. I was now a senior. This would be my last chance to go to California and compete against the best schools in the country. I’d learned a lot since the previous tryout, and I felt confident that I had the skills to be picked. Just like my previous tryout, I had a good team, and so I knew I had to put more effort in to stand out. I walked away feeling proud of what my team produced and the amount of labor I put into it. That feeling trickled away over the coming days, as time drew on and my nerves seeped in. I didn’t want to bother Tai by asking if I made it in or not; by this point we were barely working together on anything.

About a week later, my teacher pulled me aside in class to talk.

“I’m very sensitive to the fact that you’re a senior and that this is your last chance to compete,” he said. “But the way you treat me and your classmates here is unacceptable. You need to do better.”

I didn’t really know how to respond. At the time, I sort of just moped and felt bad for myself. He told me that I wasn’t outright rejected from the team, and a week later I found out I finally made it. But whether or not I’d actually be going to California depended on if I could work on myself and how I treated others.

I don’t think I would’ve been able to change my behavior in that environment alone. I acted out because I was in mental anguish, stuck doing the things that made me miserable for yet another year. And the only reason why I didn’t continue being miserable, why I escaped the cycle of self-torment, was because of a random elective I chose.

If I could use only one word to describe the Media Studies teacher, it would be “eccentric”. She had a funny habit of, as soon as she went to the next slide of her PowerPoint, shouting “Don’t copy that down!” It was such a frequent occurrence that I started keeping a counter in my notebook of how many times she’d do it each class. She was very particular about us processing the information before writing any notes, and I think it spoke to her teaching style.

My TV Production teacher was someone who didn’t like his job. He was very clearly experienced in the field of media production, but didn’t really have the innate passion for teaching. Most of our club was student-run, and he took a very hands-off approach when it came to lessons in class. I thought he was fun to talk to, and I actually liked not having to sit through tedious lessons, but when he was stressed from his job, it was very clear in how he interacted with us. My Media Studies teacher was, as I said, very eccentric. You could tell that media studies was something she loved, and though she could be strict at times, she seemed to enjoy teaching it to her students. She was also much more particular with her lesson plans, and had us produce and study a variety of media forms beyond video content.

The change in energy and teaching style was something that I needed. I became disenamored with making videos because everyone around me, from the other students I worked with on assignments to the teacher, just seemed tired of it. Seeing someone who had not only been teaching and working in the media field, but still loved it after decades, was infectious.

I shared her class with Mateo, along with two of our friends from the TV club, Zach and Cody. Working with them throughout the year on different kinds of assignments, from doing case studies on magazine and video game publishers, to making a music video for a fictional band as part of a fake marketing campaign, started to revive the passion I first felt behind a camera. I was re-discovering the fun of creating something with my friends.

I made my way into the next semester with this mentality; I began to love video production again, and my work in both classes had been heavily improved. But spring semester brought new challenges my way.

I had already found out that I got accepted into my top choice of college. With that stress gone, my desire to do any kind of schoolwork went out the window. Unfortunately, every class I had was picking up as we headed into testing season. Even my Media Studies class began to stress me out; I had two months to work on writing, shooting, and editing a film opening, all the while blogging about my progress on said film opening, and at the end create another video discussing the creative and technical choices I took with it. In the midst of that, SkillsUSA Regionals were about to start, STN practices were ramping up, and a couple weeks before my film opening was due, I’d have to spend a week competing in California.

It was enough for me to just keep my head afloat in my non-media classes; I didn’t care about any of them, and my college acceptance wouldn’t be rescinded over a couple Bs. But I couldn’t let myself give up on something I spent years of my life pursuing. I threw myself into competitions and screenwriting, and in the ides of March I found myself at the bottom of the pile, drowning underneath the work. But I couldn’t stop; I’d already finalized my script for the film opening and my parents had given so much money for me to be able to compete.

By the time the plane landed in California, I was a stack of fried nerves. I didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t want to compete, I wanted to roll up in my suitcase and fly back to Florida and get my first full night of sleep since the previous summer.

I spent so long dreaming of being there. Of hearing my school’s name called, the top of the podium revealed with the title of our short film, our director walking onstage to accept the first-place award as my teammates and I lost our voices screaming and crying.

The funny thing about dreaming is that you only observe the events. You don’t have the chance to look into your mind there and think, to know what you’re thinking in the moment. So when my dream came true and that scene unfolded, I never could have imagined that my first thought would be Okay, now I have to work on the shot list for Media Studies.

I never got the chance to sit and breathe after we won. When we flew back, it was spring break, and I was able to throw myself into my film opening. I wanted to feel accomplished, but the only thing on my mind was dread. I had a tight window before I had to leave town, and that window gave me just a single day to shoot my entire opening. I would have the help of Mateo and another friend of mine, Santi, for that one day, but otherwise every detail, from getting high-quality equipment to designing the set, was entirely on me.

When the day came, I was frenetic; my on-set anger issues had returned. I spent most of the shoot lost in my head, taking control of the camera and the shots as much as possible, even though I had two friends who were far more skilled than me there to help. I relapsed.

The next day, I flew out of state to New Orleans. It was just me and my dad on the trip, and I tried to undo the knot sitting in my gut, but every time we settled in early for the night or took a few hours between tourist spots, I could just feel the unedited footage staring in the back of my mind, the unfinished CGI I needed to work on boring a hole through my eyes with its searing gaze.

I came back from the trip, anything but rested. I spent long nights at my desk, line editing and compositing and coloring, and throughout the process I had to extinguish a hundred fires that flared up. I was so far out of my depth. It was April 2nd, 11:58PM when I finally submitted my film opening. I was finally done. April 3rd, 12:00AM. Happy birthday to me.

The rest of my school year was hectic, but I made it through the hurricane. In late April, I had to make a music video for my TV Production final, and I had finally made it past SkillsUSA States and was going to the National level. Sadly, Nationals was in the summer, so even though I was glad to have made it, I had already graduated and wanted time and space away from TV. That affected the quality of my work, and my team didn’t end up winning.

I was sad to have lost, but for the first time in a long time, I was able to take a break from filmmaking and video production.

Currently, that break is a year-and-a-half old.

I’ve barely touched a camera since then. I think it scares me. I’m not the most self-aware or spiritually whole person nowadays, but I feel confident in saying I’ve grown away from being content with snapping at people over a stupid video project. I don’t want to let myself go anywhere near being that person again, and in my head I can’t help but lump the camera and that feeling together.

But I have nagging thoughts sometimes. That it’d be different this time around. That I’m more mature now, and that I don’t value my self-worth based on the quality of what I can produce anymore. I want to do it again. It certainly could be different this time around. But I’m not a kid in high school shooting oddball videos with his friends anymore. There’s higher expectations for how a production is run now, and I’m scared that the person I am now would have been perfect at keeping up then, that it’s too late for me to start over.

Yet that’s unreasonable. I can’t possibly improve my relationship with filmmaking without, in some way, approaching filmmaking again. I believe that the basis of my fears is a lack of understanding. I spent years misunderstanding myself and how I sought to compensate for my own issues through seeking achievements and recognition, how I mistreated my friends and colleagues. Realizing this has felt like the first step back into a world I left behind. A world that’s changed and moved on without me, that could maybe feel different if I look through new eyes.

My only goal now is to keep moving forward, one little step at a time, through that world. And I hope that on this journey, somewhere in the future, I can re-discover the spark I once had.

New goal in life: Become a househusband

Trigger Warning: Opening a b*ok and reading it

At the time of writing this, it's the tail-end of Thanksgiving break, I haven't done any assignments in three weeks, and I'd rather be put in the Clockwork Orange eye machine than open a single Word document.

First off, I want to open a public request to incarcerate whoever the hell made Microsoft Word and Google Docs. You give people this program they have to stare at all day to work or write or whatever, and you make it insane asylum-white? And there's not even a goddamn Better Canvas equivalent for Word or Google, the best you can get is dark mode or something. I hate it.

While my motivation to return to the asylum-white writing software of Doom and Despair is currently sub-zero, I've been working on bringing my constant media consumption habits back to books. Working at a bookstore is, to no one's surprise, a great way to get back into reading; highly recommend. I get discounts on physical books and there's a website we have access to that lets us get advanced copies for certain books, and while most are just random slop for the slop gods, there's (so far) two that I've read and enjoyed. 

The first one, which lowkey I haven't finished yet but still recommend, is The Girl With a Thousand Faces by Sunyi Dean (Releases May 5th). I'm like halfway through and so far I'm meandering between a 3.5/4 out of 5 stars. It's good for the most part, but the dialogue between the protagonist and the antagonist is so corny and exposition dump-y. I also think they revealed the antagonist way too early, but I guess I haven't read enough to say whether or not it still paces well or if there's another shoe to drop.

The second book, The Language of Liars by S. L. Huang (April 21), was a good read imo. I thought it was just generally solid for the most part; I'd recommend it mainly for fans of linguistics (like myself) and fans of freaky-deaky goobers (not like myself), and since I was only one of those two things, I just couldn't get myself fully into it. It's a sci-fi where the creatures are non-humanoid and just weird, hence the freaky-deaky goobers part, but the plot twist at the climax was genuinely not something I expected and, in my opinion, was pretty fire, so I bumped it up in my review.

I felt bad for the author when I logged it on Storygraph; I was the only review for like a month, and I left a stupid review because I generally don't write seriously on review apps. There's one other review now, though, and I'll just let you play spot-the-difference between the two.

People who take media analysis too seriously piss me off crazy style (ignore the fact that this started as a media studies blog); at least the people who beat subtext to death. Idk though, you tell me if I'm wrong for thinking that.

Gonna speedrun some other, already-published works I've been reading recently, starting with Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, which I liked but wished Janie was more present as a character in the Jody section. Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon gets so much hype for its worldbuilding and politics but the entire East section is half the length of West and generally irrelevant until you're like halfway through; it's just an alright fantasy trilogy compressed into one book. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler was good, but Lauren's stream of consciousness was pissing me offffff; just get to the point bro. And lastly I just finished reading The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, which is good and takes some interesting routes with how it tells the story, but idk I just haven't felt the book connect me to anywhere in its setting aside from the Junma. Fun fact, one of the people in that book's acknowledgements is teaching my fiction workshop next semester. I didn't even know my university had game like that fr.

I just don't get a lot of chances to
use this reaction image I'm sorry

The last book, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, has become one of my new favorites and is one of a few books that make me pause and think about how I write and tell stories. 

It's written as an oral tradition; though where, for example, Their Eyes Were Watching God goes down an oral tradition route of just talking to your friends about your life, A Wizard of Earthsea emulates a legend or an epic's oral tradition. It's a hundred percent a turn-off for a lot of people; there's barely any dialogue, and not everyone wants to read mainly prose for 200+ pages, but for me I enjoyed her writing style. The story takes place in Earthsea, an archipelago, and while there's so many different islands mentioned, we actually don't get a lot of fixation or interest on any one island in particular. Part of me kind of hates that and wants to Le Guin to expound on the worldbuilding, but simultaneously another part of me gets this sense of wanderlust from this massive, diverse archipelago.

The last thing I love about the book isn't actually from the book, but rather the afterword. Le Guin talks about what she did and why, and while I skimmed through most of it, towards the end she talks about why she designed Earthsea to be a land of relative peace. She talks about war as almost a disingenuous cop-out (my interpretation of her words) for fantasy writers to create conflict within their stories. She doesn't outright diss anyone, and in fact praises Tolkien and some other dude I forgot for their stories which deal with these wars of good and evil; what she does instead is mention that conflict appears in many different ways, and that fantasy almost uses war as a crutch.

I wouldn't write a war novel, as someone who's never experienced, researched, or spoken to survivors of war. If I wrote a fiction piece, the conflict would most likely be about something other than war. If I wrote a non-fiction, the conflict would be something more personal to my life. But if I wrote a fantasy or science fiction piece? Maybe it's just me, but while I've written a warless fantasy story before, I don't have that same taboo for the subject on account of my lack of experience.

For me personally, it would feel wrong to write about a real war without knowing almost everything about said war. It would feel wrong to write a fiction novel about a non-existent war that happens on our Earth, because I wouldn't be able to infuse it with enough nuance to make it seem A) realistic and B) not some tear-baiting slop some kid threw together for funsies. But when I think about writing a war in Fantasyland, I don't really have those same hesitations, and after really thinking about Le Guin's afterword I realized it's probably because I just don't care.

Like I've been watching the Lord of the Rings movies recently, about to start the third one, and I just can't help but think Who gives a shit?

Andy Serkis has had such a career

Lord of the Rings and a lot of other fantasy just feels so removed from reality for so many reasons. The difference in time period, the clear distinctions between good and evil; even just the elements of fantasy like dragons and magic and whatever. It's fun to detatch yourself from the real world and imagine Fantasyland for a bit, but none of these elements of war in my childhood favorites like Eragon or the last couple books in the Percy Jackson, or even a recent favorite like Dune, really stick with me because they sort of just use war as part of the spectacle that Fantasyland creates; it doesn't connect to my human emotions. I can see it as an interesting plot device or something, but when Main Character loses Third-Favorite Friend who was also Somewhat-Beloved Side Character's love interest as a result of some holy crusade, it doesn't feel like a genuine attempt to connect to the deep despair and pain you feel when you read about the actual atrocities of actual war.

Does the kid's series Percy Jackson need to emulate war crimes that happened in real life? Probably not. But did it also need to lead to a final Mega-battle against the evil forces of Kronos? Also probably not.

I feel like the only time I've read a war plot in fantasy that's stuck with me, not for how it just affected the characters or the world, but for how it affected me and my emotions, was in The Poppy War, where one of the cities is described exactly as the Nanjing Massacre happened in real life. To write a war plot in fantasy that feels genuine, I feel like you need to use it not to motivate your characters, but to make your audience feel sonder for each and every life that's affected, each life that could have been yours if you lived in this world. Lord of the Rings is cool and I get why people rock with the movies and the Good vs. Evil themes, but to me I just think of it as a spectacle. I care about the Fellowship (sort of), and I want them to win, but the war just seems like a thing that's gotta happen, and not an event that will affect Middle Earth for years to come.

War, to Le Guin, just isn't a place she wanted to go to in her writing. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'll never write a fantasy or science fiction war plot myself, but her words do make me think about how I might want to use conflict more to connect with something deeply human than as a spectacle.

TLDR; good book.

I will gain a thousand Letterboxd followers.

I am so sorry to anyone who's ever asked me what movies I like only to watch me immediately pull up my Letterboxd. No I do not have a top 5. No I do not remember any movies I like until I go through my reviews. No I am not original. Yes I deserve happiness too.

I don't really know what happened, I've pretty much never been a movie guy ever in my life, but downloading Letterboxd is like ingesting a brain slug that tells you to be unfunny on the Internet. I just can't help it.

I've had multiple conversations with people about what books and movies I like, and a lot of them start with people saying I love to hate or I'm a snob. I think it's fair enough; I'm the type who barely gives anything a five star rating and I'm one of those chumps who are like well it was objectively good but I don't like it because and yada yada. But also now that I think about it...who gives a gaf?

I also just don't really watch a lot of movies or read a ton of books. A lot of the times when I've logged a movie in the past year, it's been something I watched because it's the only thing me and my friends agreed on or I just wanted to spend time with people and we just happened to watch that movie. Half the books on my Storygraph are novels I had to read for literature class that I wouldn't have picked up otherwise.

I'm starting to realize that I'm less inclined to like a piece of media if someone tells me I have to consume it.

I didn't really enjoy any of the books I read for my literature class this semester. Some were good, but I wouldn't pick any of them up in a bookstore. I also had a decent streak where I felt like I never watched a movie willingly. Chump mentality I guess.

I've been trying to watch more things I'm actually interested in recently, and while there's always some exceptions (Sweeney Todd you will burn in hell) I think I've had a good run of watching movies I enjoy. 

I ended up watching the whole Now You See Me trilogy recently and I truly cannot decide if I love them or hate them. That's not really related to anything else I just wanted to mention it.

I've also been reading more books for personal enjoyment, and I just want to say that whoever came up with Don't judge a book by its cover is a moron. I think you should judge a book a solid 40% by its cover; cool, creative people don't slap lame-o covers on their books! And 99% of the time when you see a fiction, romance, or fantasy book where the cover is a photo of an actual real-life person instead of a drawing/art; it's probably garbage. Real photos of non-people are an edge case.

Last thing I'm just very proud of my Frankenstein review

I am going to become Head Coach of the Miami Heat

One of the greatest decisions of my life was getting into basketball, I love NBA brainrot so much. Just a couple of pearls of insight and wisdom as I leave you to ruminate on this blog post: The Heat becoming a power-of-friendship team and somehow winning games when Herro and Bam were out was such an unexpected development. Like omg we might beat the play-in allegations this year. Free James Harden from the Unction, blow up the Pelicans' training facility, and put Wemby on steroids and Celsius. Happy Holidays.