It would be conceited of me to assume anyone reading this actually cares about what piques my interest. Despite that, I think there's something fundamentally interesting about the stories people tell when discussing how they found themselves engulfed in their passions, and I think there's a lot to learn from hearing them. Keep this in mind the next time you see a proctologist.
From the start, it was obvious that I had a passion for the arts. A big portion of my childhood was spent with a stubby pencil in hand scrawling out various characters I made up. I suppose it would have been one thing to simply have a repertoire of silly characters my 7-year-old-self liked to imagine, but I liked to imagine using them for different mediums in which to tell their stories, although it usually came in the form of crudely scribbled comic books. Somehow, I thought my ability to draw cartoons was going to be where I made my living.
At some point, I was given a computer program. Microsoft 3D Movie Maker is what it was called, and in it, you had a gallery of pre-made pixelated models and environments with which you could make animated movies. Even when I had first got my hands on it, the program was old. My copy was licensed by early '90s Nickelodeon, so everything had the aesthetic of cartoons like "Rocko's Modern Life" or "Aah! Real Monsters!" To me, the possibilities were endless. This was the turning point. Suddenly, I was no longer simply watching movies, I was making them.
I spent countless hours slaving away in front of the family computer, toiling over my latest creation. I made elaborate stories where complicated characters represented by old Nicktoons went on adventures and fought villains. It taught me a lot about animation and blocking as well as visual storytelling. I forced my family to watch the fruits of my labor, expecting them to be entertained by the nonsensical animated works I presented to them, waiting to be basked in praise. There was nothing more rewarding than spending hours piecing together a scene and watching its outcome.
But I still didn't really see film as an art form that could be taken seriously. Despite my obvious passion, film was a hobby and not something I could devote myself to. There were other mediums I wanted to try. I wrote, I drew, and I even tried my hand at game design in my early teens. Writing was my forte, and it was there that I was without limitation. With other mediums, I was limited to what I was able to draw or mold together, but in literature there wasn't any limit to the stories I could tell. For a huge portion of my middle school life, I saw myself as a writer.
The catalyst to this was the release of the first Harry Potter film. I wasn't familiar to the books before seeing it, but the world shown to me had drawn me in, and I became enamored with the idea of world building. Looking back, the first Harry Potter film isn't what I would call “great” by any stretch of the word but at 12, I was floored. I wanted to write stories that people would adapt into movies like Harry Potter and inspire other kids the way I was.
At 15, I had written a 114-page book after spending late nights typing away. Eventually, after looking through the mess of escapist teenaged fantasy I had written, I realized that this wasn't what I wanted at all. I thought in visual terms. Words alone could not do what I needed to get my ideas out there. I think the last time I even looked at those 114 pages, they were on a computer that one day started smoking and nobody has touched it since. Good riddance.
At 16, I had decided that it was film I needed to get enrolled in. I owe a lot of what I know about film to my father, who then proceeded to show me the classics. "Citizen Kane," "The Godfather," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Maltese Falcon," and various others. As soon as I could, I left my hometown high school and transferred to a vocational school where I was taught how to use a camera and how to edit. Most of that time was wasted decorating swear words in Photoshop, because you can't trust high school kids with technology. But at last, I was working with filmmaking and developing skills I hope to be using for the rest of my life—skills that included photoshopping a bloody chainsaw into a lion's mouth.
Art, and film by extension, has always been about exploring ideas through expressive mediums. I've experimented in music, drawings, and acting but none have given me the satisfaction that film has given me. I like to think that every short film I've made and all the scripts I've written as an extension of my own personality made visual. Obviously I'm still learning about film as a medium, but if nothing else it's given me a lot of fun stories to tell about working behind the camera. From the beginning, I've worked late into the night trying to make my vision into a series of moving images, and I like to think that's worth at least some sort of credit. If nothing else, it's granted me the gift of good movie recommendations.
