May 21, 2024

The Horizon Stares Back

This is Finish Your Monsters, a weekly blog/newsletter/blogletter about the creative process. I'm sharing adventures in art and life as well as setting CLIFFHANGER goals for myself, so--

--DID I MAKE MY GOAL?

Last week, I committed to taking another necessary step for the feature film I’m trying to get made. Specifically, I set the goal to craft the first draft of a boring and stressful legal document for the film!

And…I succeeded! The first draft is done. Even the word “draft” is generous. It’s a hideous, shambling abomination that I would not want to meet in a dark alley or, frankly, on my brightly lit desktop. It’s why so many of us are drawn to the arts, right? To craft legal documents.

The name of this blog is Finish Your Monsters because I think it’s an important part of the creative process to push yourself to let the first draft be messy. You can more easily see what needs to be tweaked and sometimes the awkward parts of a first draft become charming. That dangling extra limb is now the heart of your story.

That same romantic approach is probably not a good idea for a super-important, time-sensitive legal document. But the theory holds true that in order for it to get better, it has to exist first.

So now it’s hopefully in a place to share with actual legal experts. Because I suffered through this first draft beast, I now know the much more precise questions I need to ask to refine it into the gorgeous, sparkling legal document I dream of when I stare wistfully at the horizon and take a deep breath to sing my “I Want” song.

ADVENTURES OF THE WEEK--

Writing a weekly blog about creative adventures is a great way to remind yourself you’re actually getting things done.

I have so much I need to do in a short window for the feature film that no amount of work ever feels like enough. So it’s a balm to flip through my week—the photos on my phone, my chicken-scratch daily to do lists—and realize I did take some major steps forward.

First and foremost, I finally finished editing the sizzle reel for the feature film. Regular readers of the blog may remember that my hubris and I have been declaring “I’ll finish it this week” for the last two and a half weeks.

The positives—I’m very happy with it. It was filmed very quickly with minimal tech in my old childhood bedroom at my Dad’s house in Minneapolis. The place I would put my head down to sleep after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation or watching the 7th Doctor’s debut season on PBS. It’s fun to see that place I dreamed of creative things become a space where I actually made a creative thing.

I’m extremely happy with the actors, my old friends Sam Landman and Natalie Rae Wass. With all the editing, I’ve watched this 6 minute teaser about 8,000 times and their performances delight me every time.

After lying to myself multiple times about how long it would take to complete, I also ended up loving the score/sound design. It’s been a real delight to just go to the keyboard, flip through instruments, and plunk and smack and warble until it sounds like the feeling I’m hearing in my head.

I first did the score/soundscape for our short film, The Nightmare Adorable, largely out of budget and time constraints. I just couldn’t hire a composer. Now it’s become one of my favorite parts of working on film and I can’t wait to plunk and warble my way into more knowledge and experience.

The negatives! Wrestling with the color settings. The color correction and grading took way, way, way longer than I had hoped. It gobbled up my time to finish that SUPER-FUN legal document. Because of shooting the teaser on my computer and my iPhone, color settings were already wonkier than they would be on a proper digital film camera. I was ready for that, building on knowledge from the last short film I shot on my iPhone.

But this time around, there was more disagreement in color between all of these players—the Premiere Pro file, the exported Quicktime file, Vimeo itself, and a different color opinion on the Vimeo file from different browsers. It was like the film got its hands on one of those giant boxes of Crayola crayons and each step in the process picked a slightly different shade of purple to scribble on the walls with.

Anyway, I finally got it to a good place early on Sunday morning. It’s uploaded to Vimeo as a private file with a password. I can now share the teaser with potential investors. Do your work, purple!

I completed the film in time for a special internet show. My podcast partner on ForceCenter, Ken Napzok and I, did a livestream to celebrate the actual release date of The Phantom Menace for its 25th anniversary. I found what I believe is the ACTUAL SHIRT I wore to the midnight screening 25 years ago so I threw it on for the livestream and took a photo. I had already had a drink during the livestream so it’s only water in the martini glass in the photo below, but the shirt DEMANDED a cocktail so I had to give in.

That’s all just a small chunk of the adventures I had this week. I struggled a lot emotionally, but I’m happy to look back and see I did actually get a lot done and had lots of good times with friends, ForceCenter fans, keyboards, my wife, and my balcony.

MY GOAL FOR THE WEEK--

I still have lots of creative work to do on the feature, but I’m firmly in a part of the process where I need to focus on the BUSINESS part of the Show Business. So my goal this week is to send a minimum of 20 emails/texts/dms related to producing the film. I’m feeling the pull toward setting a more specific goal, but realistically this is the part of the process I can control right now. I can control the ask, not the response, so I got a lot of asking/researching/following up to do! So emails it is.

YOUR GOAL FOR THE WEEK--

I would absolutely LOVE to hear what you're working on this week in the comments below. What's your goal? Is it creative? What are the challenges? What are the joys? How many selfies do you plan on taking? How can I help you finish your monsters?

LIGHT PLUGS--

A huge JOY for me! Our short film The Nightmare Adorable will be screening in the UK! Screening in July at the B Beside the Seaside Film Fest!

Here's the poster for the latest short film! Submissions to film festivals add up extremely quickly. They average is about $25 per festival and the more I submit to, the better odds at getting exposure for the film. All proceeds from sales of my comedy albums on Bandcamp go to film submissions!

A LITTLE SKETCH--

This week, my wife and I also briefly stopped by the Beverly Hills Art Show. I was inspired to do some more minimal, gestural sketches. Perhaps because I’m working away on creative stuff and trying not to fall down, I had a vision of a Jerry Lewis-esque pratfall rendered in a very minimal style to remind myself FALLING DOWN CAN BE FUN. Thanks for being here, reading the blog, and giving me an outlet for quick, experimental little sketches! Good luck with your week’s adventures and see you in the future time of NEXT TUESDAY.