OK, here goes. I'm a wannabe filmmaker -- always have been. And have never really pursued that dream.
I love shooting video, love editing it, love the medium for bringing stories alive. I used to write all night long, but for many years video has been what I do in the quiet hours when I can't sleep and everyone else is snoring ... if I'm not drawn onto AD. Sometimes I'm actually on AD during the gaps in time when I'm waiting for video to render on another computer. I've learned how to work with lighting equipment and sound equipment, different cameras that I'll probably never be able to afford to get my hands on, I've practiced all kinds of editing techniques. I've even gone back to school at night to study filmmaking a few years ago, even though it had nothing to do with my "day job," thanks to a nonrestricted tuition reimbursement program. I've finally gotten up the nerve to enter work in a film festival last year, taking part with a team in a 48 hour competition where you don't know your subject and provided characters/key lines until Friday night and have to deliver a finished film on Sunday evening -- but I'll never share a link, it was so much fun, but truly such crap that I was almost too embarrassed to show my husband. Someday, though, I'll get it right ....
I shoot everything. Feeding the chickens, driving to work in the morning. Li getting on her van to school. I've got endless footage, going back 20+ years. Some of my stuff has gone places even though I haven't
. My husband was roommates with Dave Matthews before he started his band and I've got great footage of them goofing around at home, of Dave noodling away on his guitar while serving drinks at a bar and talking about how someday he'll be a rockstar! Some of the footage Dave included in a documentary, some we watched a couple of years ago and unanimously decided to to bury it
Incriminating all around!
I have to admit that Li is my favorite subject, so I'm breaking SallyLou's rules by talking about her a bit. She and I have been playing with a green screen studio we set up together in her playroom, making videos of her flying like superman over Tokyo and wandering through dark forests -- all from the safety of our back room. Not exactly the stuff of the HBO or PBS documentaries I aspire to, but still, great fun. I'd love to recreate a series of children's fairy tales with her, and we both took off work/school in August and wrote a bunch of stories together that we want to film.
That's one of my big unrealized dreams, to make films and tell stories visually, something that will likely never happen as anything more than a hobby, but it's something I slip away to do in the middle of the night. whew. There. Got personal. Scary.