The Old Days
Before committing to this photography / cinematography life full-time, before my normal 9-5 day job, before college, I made videos with my closest friends. We just did what any other teenager was doing; goofing around, laughing at stupid things, but we channeled that into standing in front of a camera, improvising, and trying to piece our nonsensical puzzles together for our own enjoyment.
Sometimes, other people outside our creative group would watch and laugh along with us. Others would roll their eyes. But we carried on and produced everything that came to us. The videos looked crude and sounded terrible. Our acting wasn’t great. But we loved getting together after a “hard days work” of being goofy and seeing the fruits of our labor.
As an adult, I looked back on those days as just being “normal, goofy hangouts” and even started to roll my eyes at what we did. Over the last few years, however, I recognized that those videos were my “film school.” At the time, I wasn’t learning any “professional” fundamentals. But I was placing a camera down, I did stage people around the frame, I put footage together, and we distributed the videos for all to see.
It eventually led me to actually writing scripts, trying to get crews and equipment together, to produce something that felt bigger and better than what we had created previously. Our initial efforts failed and yet it all culminated into my biggest short film to this day. The irony of that project was that I couldn’t involve the original crew in the way I intended.
A new crew had to fill the gap and it completely flipped the script on what started out as bored teenagers, just trying to make videos for fun, to actually taking this seriously. I love the new crew that came out of making that “big” short film. However, I do miss the free-spirited nature of showing up at my childhood friend’s house, with a crappy old camcorder, and shooting like we didn’t care if anyone saw or liked what we made. It was for us.
I bring this up because said friend texted me recently…
So…should we?