(no subject)
Life, lately, is good. Busy, occasionally hampered by the knowledge of deadlines fast approaching or unanticipated setbacks, but overall, it's been a productive and positive month.
I came out of this winter completely drained and burnt-out: I dropped the ball on what was a seriously terrible semester, my living situation was becoming intolerable, and after spending the previous year in China, I was not dealing well with either the temperature or the lack of a social life like the one I was used to in Wenzhou. As April arrived and it started to warm up - not to mention the end of said semester - the world righted itself and things fell back into place for me. Which is where I'm at now.
The first two weeks of May I spent taking a class in Directing for TV with a guest professor named Bobby Roth. Bobby has directed a handful of Lost episodes (Whatever Happened, Happened and The Man Behind The Curtain) and about a third of Prison Break, amongst other things. The course was crammed into an intensive two-week period of five hours of class a day, but was made tolerable by the fact that most of that time was spent listening to anecdotes about what it's like to work with Wentworth Miller (good, apparently) or Matthew Fox (bad, apparently). It may well have been the best class I've taken at UBC, simply because it was taught by someone who has a great deal of practical experience in the particular field I'd like to get into.
As a Film Theory student, I've spent the last four years watching countless 'important' films and cultivating a singularly unrealistic perception of what a director actually DOES. I mean, with that much praise, analysis and significance directed towards, say, Alfred Hitchcock or Michael Haneke, the unspoken implication is: directors are artistes, maestros of the cinematic medium, set apart from the common man in some vague but undeniable sense. So I could fantasise about doing it all I wanted, about becoming the next Godard or even the next Michael Mann, but the elevation of 'director' in my mind made it about as attainable as a career in being a unicorn.
What I got from Bobby's class was the basic, unswerving and completely raw reality of what a director, or at least a television director, does on a day-to-day basis. And frankly: it sucks. It's a difficult and thankless job, it doesn't pay nearly what you'd expect, and you're required to deal with delusional, incompetent people at every turn. And, since you're getting a script which you had no input into, are working on a show which has an overall 'look', and are regularly asked to do things that are not only unreasonable but actually in fact make no sense whatsoever, your level of creative input is pretty slim. That's not even getting into the 16-hour shoots, the fact that you will be held accountable for EVERYTHING (like, say, the incredibly poor cut turned in by a network-assigned editor which you have virtually no control over whatsoever), the on-set divas, &c., ad nauseum.
My pal Alex came out of the class having concluded that he never, ever wanted to direct anything, EVER. I had a different reaction: for the first time, someone had spent something like 40 hours laying out the exact requirements, responsibilities and expectations of directing for my benefit, and suddenly I had something to work with. I saw where creative control COULD be asserted, learned about which basic pitfalls to avoid, and realised that I have the sort of personality and perspective that would mesh with that kind of career pretty damn well. After four years of theory, all of my idealised beliefs were thrown out the window and replaced by cold, hard INFORMATION in the span of two weeks.
The first thing I did once the class was finished was spend four days writing a screenplay. It wasn't something I'd been wanting to write and was now inspired to follow through on: instead, I sat down with a blank Celt-X template in front of me and decided I was going to just write something. And then I did so. It was insane - four days of 10-hour writing jags culminating in a 104-page script - but it came together, it will work as a film, and I'm happy with it. I've spent the last week in revisions, and I'm up to my third draft right now. I'm going to start workshopping it, then submitting it to screenplay competitions, then see if I can't raise the money to move into the production phase, or - if that turns out to be unrealistic - sell it and move on to a new project.
And that is what I've been doing with my life.
I came out of this winter completely drained and burnt-out: I dropped the ball on what was a seriously terrible semester, my living situation was becoming intolerable, and after spending the previous year in China, I was not dealing well with either the temperature or the lack of a social life like the one I was used to in Wenzhou. As April arrived and it started to warm up - not to mention the end of said semester - the world righted itself and things fell back into place for me. Which is where I'm at now.
The first two weeks of May I spent taking a class in Directing for TV with a guest professor named Bobby Roth. Bobby has directed a handful of Lost episodes (Whatever Happened, Happened and The Man Behind The Curtain) and about a third of Prison Break, amongst other things. The course was crammed into an intensive two-week period of five hours of class a day, but was made tolerable by the fact that most of that time was spent listening to anecdotes about what it's like to work with Wentworth Miller (good, apparently) or Matthew Fox (bad, apparently). It may well have been the best class I've taken at UBC, simply because it was taught by someone who has a great deal of practical experience in the particular field I'd like to get into.
As a Film Theory student, I've spent the last four years watching countless 'important' films and cultivating a singularly unrealistic perception of what a director actually DOES. I mean, with that much praise, analysis and significance directed towards, say, Alfred Hitchcock or Michael Haneke, the unspoken implication is: directors are artistes, maestros of the cinematic medium, set apart from the common man in some vague but undeniable sense. So I could fantasise about doing it all I wanted, about becoming the next Godard or even the next Michael Mann, but the elevation of 'director' in my mind made it about as attainable as a career in being a unicorn.
What I got from Bobby's class was the basic, unswerving and completely raw reality of what a director, or at least a television director, does on a day-to-day basis. And frankly: it sucks. It's a difficult and thankless job, it doesn't pay nearly what you'd expect, and you're required to deal with delusional, incompetent people at every turn. And, since you're getting a script which you had no input into, are working on a show which has an overall 'look', and are regularly asked to do things that are not only unreasonable but actually in fact make no sense whatsoever, your level of creative input is pretty slim. That's not even getting into the 16-hour shoots, the fact that you will be held accountable for EVERYTHING (like, say, the incredibly poor cut turned in by a network-assigned editor which you have virtually no control over whatsoever), the on-set divas, &c., ad nauseum.
My pal Alex came out of the class having concluded that he never, ever wanted to direct anything, EVER. I had a different reaction: for the first time, someone had spent something like 40 hours laying out the exact requirements, responsibilities and expectations of directing for my benefit, and suddenly I had something to work with. I saw where creative control COULD be asserted, learned about which basic pitfalls to avoid, and realised that I have the sort of personality and perspective that would mesh with that kind of career pretty damn well. After four years of theory, all of my idealised beliefs were thrown out the window and replaced by cold, hard INFORMATION in the span of two weeks.
The first thing I did once the class was finished was spend four days writing a screenplay. It wasn't something I'd been wanting to write and was now inspired to follow through on: instead, I sat down with a blank Celt-X template in front of me and decided I was going to just write something. And then I did so. It was insane - four days of 10-hour writing jags culminating in a 104-page script - but it came together, it will work as a film, and I'm happy with it. I've spent the last week in revisions, and I'm up to my third draft right now. I'm going to start workshopping it, then submitting it to screenplay competitions, then see if I can't raise the money to move into the production phase, or - if that turns out to be unrealistic - sell it and move on to a new project.
And that is what I've been doing with my life.