The crescendo of a new production bump; applicable film to be determined/written/produced.
I find it pretty cathartic to dream up and put together these small ten- to fifteen-second animations. They make good on-spec portfolio work, and serve as a reminder that I probably ought to be more active in the filmmaking community. Ironically enough, what’s making that difficult lately is my career in filmmaking.
Post is different from the other departments, though. Yes, we see all the footage that comes through, but most times we feel like little more than couriers. Our input is never requested before the shoot (unless it’s a tech question), and we rarely get the opportunity to have any fun with the material after we’ve dubbed and captured it. Post is an intermediary between crew and editor.
It’s not helpful that, at heart, I’m a narrative filmmaker at a documentary film company. To them, storytelling is assembling a jigsaw puzzle. They are successful if the audience can see the completed image and gain something from it. To treat it any other way would risk compromising the integrity of the film. My kind of storytelling is in designing the image of the jigsaw puzzle, and cutting it out myself. Then it’s the audience’s responsibility to assemble it in the theatre. I’m successful if the audience can assemble an image that pleases them. Neither is really better than the other; at the end of the day, a worthy passion is the challenge which is most rewarding to face and overcome. There is an art to making one image from countless disparate jigsaw sets, just as there is an art to making one jigsaw set out of an image. But I digress.
I also find myself less interested in television now than I was while at school. I’m sure it’s my exposure to the business model; certainly television itself can’t have gotten any worse (and it wouldn’t matter if it did, since I still don’t actually watch television). But it’s not like the business model in feature filmmaking would be that much more virtuous. Couldn’t it be even worse? Who knows. I suppose it’s just all those little nit-picky bits where film is an industry instead of an art that is so discouraging from time to time.
And yet, there’s nothing else I’ve ever tried that I’d rather do to get my bills paid.
PS I’m going to try and update this more often, even if it’s just a spot of ranting. It’s silly to say I’ve got a blog when I only update as often as I finish new work. Pssh. What was I thinking?
