News You Can Bruise for 2009 January 21 (entry 0)

(3) Wed Jan 21 2009 08:53: I kind of got hooked on Little Miss Gamer and The New Adventures of Captain S ever since realizing they're both filmed in my neighborhood. (The same reason I freebase Sesame Street, actually.) As in, I think I walked past the apartment building on Saturday while attempting to get brunch.

Kris and I were talking recently and sharing our admiration for Internet filmmakers of this sort. It would be cool to make our own shorts about whatever ordinary dramas strike our fancy, and it's a big inspiration to see random apartment-dwellers in Astoria doing it, but we don't have the passion for the medium that's necessary to make good films.

Here's what I mean. Cameras and lights are relatively cheap, and with today's software you can make good enough special effects to get your fantastical point across, but with any creative endeavor there's a certain amount of drudgery and skill involved in just completing a piece that's good. And the certain amount is "a lot". That's why the passion is important. Kris has the passion for drawing comics, I have it for writing prose. We don't have it for making films. It's just something it feels like we ought to be able to do because the equipment's cheap. It's always kind of sad to discover this kind of thing about yourself.

Comments:

Posted by Kris Straub at Wed Jan 21 2009 11:27

Something I noticed about myself early on is that I'm driven to try things because other people are trying the same things. Comics are special to me, but if someone is making a short film, suddenly I want to make a short film.

For a while I wanted to make a psychological horror short, but all I had was a mounted webcam. I was convinced that, even with that constraint, it was just a matter of finding the right story and the right twists to apply using that constraint. I couldn't figure it out though.

Posted by Leonard at Wed Jan 21 2009 12:33

The problem as I see it is that you would have to have a lot of knowledge about filmmaking in general to know what would work under the constraint. Or, you would have to have a lot of time for experimentation, as with a kid who's nursing a passion but doesn't have the money for good equipment.

Posted by Kris Straub at Wed Jan 21 2009 14:14

That leads to my other problem. I would need the expertise or guidance of someone else, but I would be really impatient about it, so I'd rather re-derive decades of camera/story tricks than learn about it.