truth

UC System: Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

I used to think that filmmaking flowed with an elegant gait, that I lacked the imagination or the willpower to bring serious philosophical discussions into video. Both lies melted in the 2009 summer. Writing, casting, directing, and filming my first series Relinquished pushed limits, and I responded with my treasured qualities – determination, leadership, and quick thinking – rising to levels previously unseen.

Every preproduction step tested my patience. I dreamed such a beautiful image of Relinquished, my five episode film noir series. An accidental death of a college student triggering self-inspection in the student’s friends’ own lives. Characters’ histories and demons so clear. When I wrote my ideas down, more flaws than dream stared back at me. Cheesy situations, cheesy lines, cheesy people, and cheesy thoughtless dialogue across the script drove me giggling, sobbing mad. Giving up tempted me, but I refused, persevering, determined to find satisfaction. As the script evolved, I began to look for a cast. Craigslist yielded a sizeable number of people, yet on auditioning day, everyone had some excuse preventing them from meeting me: car tickets, traffic jams, a family emergency, a lapse in memory. After a quick episode of frustrated despair, I soon cooled and calmly rescheduled. That valuable day, tasting a great failure and soldering on, made future failures easier to rebound. After more obstacles appeared, I finally set up a desirable script and cast.

I had no crew. My chosen cameraman, soundman, director of photography, and co-director – all one person – had left town. Actors had their own time constraints, leaving me a very time-dependent, convoluted schedule. Knowing delays could prevent shooting of scenes, I needed to finish an hour’s worth of dialogue in three weeks. However, I despaired not; I improvised. Actors without lines to perform would pilot camera and microphone. A motley gang of household items – sleeping bags, a flashlight, duct tape, a bicycle – steadied the camera and made my basement a character’s journey into self. Time constraints forced me to salvage characters’ ulterior selves because of the actors’ and my own minor mistakes. Very luckily, some of the actors directed and filmed before. Success winked closer.

While I tended to malfunctioning equipment (mostly a microphone unconditionally playing positive feedback), some of the cast members corrected my angling mistakes and filmmaking faux-pas. Tinkering, improvising, correcting and experimenting, I eventually completed production on time. The experience drained me physically, but I won. I claimed victory over the obstacles. I enjoyed it. Best of all, I saw the true extent of my leadership, my quick thinking, my tenacity to continue beyond failures. I surprised myself – the fear and excitement of meeting a due date or meeting oblivion drove me to streamline my thought processes. Today I also feel like a self-sentient machine – conscious, cooled, thoughtful, and efficient. And through my transformation, Relinquished has philosophical discussion. I have a series of episodes. I have my dream.