» Archive for the ‘career’ Category
My creative juices have been diverted to my new internet film project for so long that I don’t have much left in the tank to write the oh-so-clever blog post that this ought to be. Functionally, this post should suggest I’m a self-deprecating, talented writer in addition to a resourceful no-budget filmmaker… but I’ve been burning the 5AM oil for too long to have the energy to write that post. Suffice it to say that I hope this is an important moment in the “tries to start a film career in New York” storyline of this site.
So, without further ado, please go and watch The West Side. Zack and I have been working on the show for a full year, during which time we triumphed over approximately one billion setbacks. It’s a great feeling to finally have the idea we talked about a year ago–an urban Western–fully realized and up and out there for the world to see. We’ll see what happens as a result.
I’ve been working on an internet video serial for the better part of the past year (yes, despite avoiding writing about “starting a film career,” I am actually, actively trying). My once-a-month-at-best posting schedule on this site is likely due to the amount of time I’ve been putting into this project (at least, I’d like to think it is–in reality it’s due to any number of reasons, possibly 46).
A few weeks ago a contest came to my attention which seemed to be the perfect opportunity for our work-in-progress. The New York Television Festival and Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace (the best hi-def movie download service, from what I’m told) are running a contest wherein would-be filmmakers submit a 5 to 15-minute TV pilot, and the winner receives $100,000. In addition to the sizable paycheck, said winner goes on to produce a six-episode TV series, he or she undoubtedly receives a good amount of exposure, potentially launches a film career in the process, and enters into unilateral negotiations with Iran.
My co-creator and I were understandably excited about this prospect. So it was with an elevated blood pressure that I combed over the submission guidelines, liking our chances more and more as I read on: the contest is open to all genres (good) and it’s judged by a panel on merit and originality rather than a populist (and potentially sophomoric) voting system (great). However, the final page of the agreement put forth the most draconian legalese I’ve seen in any submission guidelines:
NYTVF and the Designated Entities shall have the perpetual and exclusive right to exhibit, disseminate, or broadcast each entry (and any portion(s) or element(s) thereof) in any manner, media or format now known or hereafter devised, throughout the universe. Each entrant agrees not to exhibit, disseminate, or broadcast, or authorize any third party to exhibit, disseminate, or broadcast, in any manner, media, or format, his or her entry (or portions thereof) and, by entering the Competition, each entrant irrevocably and perpetually waives any copyright and intellectual property rights in and to the entry, including, without limitation, rights of droit moral or similar rights which entrant may now have or may hereinafter become entitled to.
Basically: you can never show your entry anywhere else, even if you don’t win. As someone who’s participated in (and won, I should–or perhaps should not–note) some of these contests in the past, I’d never seen anything like it. You’re asking someone to enter their original work into a contest where it’s overwhelmingly likely that they’ll walk away with nothing, and even then you refuse them the right to try their hand at building an audience elsewhere? It’s like submitting a film to a festival under the agreement that even if your film doesn’t get in, you can’t show it at any other festivals. It’s patently absurd.
I called the festival to confirm this deal-breaking rule, and afterwards considered submitting a pilot anyway, guessing that they’d be unlikely to sue us if we later premiered a modified episode elsewhere (assuming we didn’t win, of course–for that kind of money it’s understandable that the winner would enter into an exclusive agreement). On the money side, $100,000 would be approximately $100,000 more than our current budget. On the legal side, I briefly considered consulting an IP lawyer. But on the content side, I realized that our first episode was already shot and was not meant to be an end-all-be-all pilot, but rather the first ten minutes of a serialized feature–not exactly ideal for this contest. So after some long discussion with my co-creator/writer/director Zack, we realized that our dream all along was to build an audience purely through word-of-mouth with a do-it-yourself approach to everything–the content, the website, the production blog, and whatever else there may be.
One thing’s for sure: because of digital video and the internet, there’s never been a better time to try your hand at truly independent filmmaking. It’s why I started this site two (long? short?) years ago. Stay tuned, because within a few weeks, Episode 1 of The West Side will finally be up (you can bet I’ll let you know the minute it premieres).
The digital video blog I used to write for, DVguru, has been axed by its corporate overlords, which, in my (obviously less than objective) opinion, was a shortsighted mistake. I will now write about why this is the case, I will take some time to further inflate my own ego, and I will come up with an angle that could’ve undoubtedly saved the site.
Given the ongoing explosion of video content online (YouTube = $1.65 billion), given the ongoing DV revolution (take you pick of any number of digitally-shot films, the first that pops into my mind is 28 Days Later), and given DVguru’s relation to the digital video news market–that is, being the foremost oft-updated video site that caters to content-creators–it would seem that DVguru had a bright future. Say what you will about its less-than-stellar name, say what you will about its limited appeal, the site was a valuable resource for many filmmakers, especially of the aspiring sort.
Not to criticize Weblogs, Inc. or its sugar daddy AOL, but let’s briefly look at the other blogs they closed at the same time as DVG, according to Valleywag:
PVR Wire was a blog specifically focused on TiVo/PVR/DVR technology. It’s since been folded into TV Squad, which makes sense (as ex-WIN honcho Jason Calacanis points out), but if the topic of time-shifting television technology isn’t considered too small a niche, I don’t know what is (also, the opportunities for growth shrink as the technology becomes more and more commonplace, and/or integrated into other systems like Media Center). While PVR Wire was, in fact, garnering more traffic than DVG, I’m not surprised they shut it down. Another victim, Divester, was a blog on SCUBA diving: not a terrible idea but I’m not sure that anyone but the most passionate of divers would want to visit such a site on a daily basis. Though I’m a PADI Advanced diver (“advanced” not “Advanced“), I had visited Divester maybe twice in my life. So that one’s understandable too. The last one, BBHub… I have no idea what that even means.
Digital Video, on the other hand, is a rapidly-expanding field. NewTeeVee, part of the GigaOM network, launched a mere month before DVguru shut down, so clearly Om Malik and co. recognize a opportunity in the burgeoning video field (though they are more focused on the consumption and distribution of video than they are on its creation). Still, DVG could and should have covered all three areas, and to a certain extent it was starting to, by the time it was shuttered.
DVG also compared favorably to some other video sites I visit frequently: HD For Indies, Cinematech, DV.com, and Studio Daily. According to the traffic stats on all these sites, DVG was the leader.
Anyway, enough on the axing of a niche blog, and onto my own ego-building!
Here are the exact traffic numbers for DVG at the time of its closing (I don’t think I’m doing anything unauthorized here, as the site has always had a public Sitemeter available):
Looks like growth to me: 20k page views/month at the beginning of the year, 120k by the end. What is that, 600% growth? The curve would be much steeper, in fact, if it weren’t for those spikes–and what might those be, you ask?
They’re feature articles pulling in outside readers, above and beyond the usual daily audience. So pray tell, who was responsible for those? Moi.
First off, a disclaimer: if you think this is about the size of my ego, you’re terribly wrong. Someone with an ego the size of mine, in fact, scoffs at even writing about mere video technology. Instead, Ryan refers to himself in the third person, writes the next great American screenplay left-handed, pours champagne on strippers (working pro-bono, no doubt), and snorts lines off the deck of a yacht.
Kidding aside, let’s talk about me some more.
Above is a graph of the month in which I wrote my first feature, Ten video sharing services compared. Not a piece of literary genius, but perfectly timed. The piece garnered 830 Diggs (Digg is a social news service where readers vote (or “digg”) stories to the front page), which resulted in a boost of 30k page views for the one article alone.
Okay, you say, you’re a genius, but that was the small spike, what was responsible for the much larger one in October? I can’t claim sole credit for that one, as Russell Heimlich’s post on a spoof device, the DVD Rewinder, became DVguru’s most-trafficked post of all time, thanks also to Digg. Full credit to Russell, but there is of course a difference between writing a post pointing out the mere existence of a product (his) and a post made up of original content (mine!!! me!). I don’t know how much traffic the DVD Rewinder pulled in but it was certainly 6 figures of page views; I can’t speculate as to how much that was worth to Weblogs Inc. in advertising dollars but they probably made their payout to Russell times 500.
Two features I wrote that same month contributed to half of that spike, however. First I hit the readers with Ten reasons to not go to film school (wonder where I got the idea for that from?), and then, just as they were tossing their NYU Film prospectuses in the trash, I blew their minds with Ten reasons to go. Both also made Digg’s front page, totaling 1300 Diggs, and inspiring a lot of discussion, both on DVG and on Digg. Here is a link to the comments on reasons to go, here is a link to the comments on reasons not to, and here is a link to a commenter calling me a douchebag.
Lest you think Digg was solely responsible for all this traffic–and no business model reliant on someone else’s unaffiliated business is ever a very good one–the same features also made the front page of Slashdot, Techmeme (neither of which I read myself), and probably others. These articles were probably worth around 100k additional page views, and were also translated into Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, and Croatian. I had to do some digging (no pun intended… really) to find out which language the Croatian site was in.
If you’re looking at these traffic numbers–and if you weren’t already convinced, for whatever reason–you’re thinking I’m the man.
Unfortunately, manliness is not judged by blogging ability. In fact, it was recently proven that manliness is inversely proportionate to blogging ability. Damn.
On top of this detraction is the fact that the current Netiverse (or whatever you call it) is quite unrepresentative of the real world. Similarly to how The Real World (every season since the San Francisco original) is filled with far more air-headed but attractive young men and women than the real world, so too is the Internet filled with far more technologically-minded young males than the real world. Most of the articles on Digg, even the most trafficked, would never make the mainstream news, so just because a bunch of young gadgety guys find your writing topically interesting, does not mean that anyone else does. Personally, I find Reddit‘s news more interesting, as it is more focused on news related to politics, religion, science, or the intersection of all three.
Regardless, when you’re writing features for 5 cents a word and the shit is blowing up, I suppose you’d expect some sort of remuneration beyond what is given to the rank and file. But I wasn’t invested in the idea of being a prominent technology writer, and as such, I left most of my feature ideas sitting in a folder, untouched.
Still, I did learn while looking over internet traffic stats that if you want to become profitable through the monetization of internet traffic, you should immediately start posting upskirt photos of female celebrities. In response to the proliferation of such photos, I have to ask: where do you go from here? It used to be that tabloids and gossip rags would sell copies by capturing a bit of thigh when the wind blew aside a starlet’s dress, then it was taking photos of celebrities vacationing on faraway islands in bathing suits, which was one-upped by snapshotting their nipples (which, shockingly, look very much like regular people’s nipples) slipping out of strapless dresses, and now we’ve finally arrived at sticking a flash camera between the legs of coked-up socialites as they step out of luxury automobiles. Simultaneously, body grooming has advanced to the point where it’s marginally normal in society for men to do it, so many of these crotch-shots are unencumbered by any hair, clothing, or any other such concealment device, and thus become gynecological by nature.
So, let me ask again: now that we’ve reached a new low for paparazzi photography, where do we go from here?
I have the answer:
Sex tapes.
Not only do millions of people now have the privilege of knowing, topographically, what the nether region of dozens of celebrities are like, we can also (finally!) experience what it’s like for them to have sex–what they look like, sound like, talk about, and how well-endowed their boyfriends are. I have a couple questions in response to this:
1) What did they think was going to happen when they taped it in the first place?
2) How did a post about the closing of a blog I used to write for arrive at expounding upon the sexual habits of celebrities?
Again, I have the answer: they’re both about the proliferation of Digital Video.
And thus I know what would have stratospherically boosted DVguru’s traffic numbers, and thus saved it from extinction: making it the authority (nay, guru) on celebrity sex tapes. Bring it back, AOL–if traffic is what you’re looking for, we’ll do you right.
Some scenes from my Junior-year student film at Middlebury College, which also played at film festivals in New York, Boston, and North Carolina in 2002:
Fanfare was meant to refer to the container–the bookends and the constant audience presence–while Higher Education was the film-within-a-film (thus Fanfare for Higher Education).
I shot the 17-minute short during the first half of 2002. Context: a month after I finished the project I became legally able to drink, which is why I haven’t made a film since. Just kidding–drinking is why I haven’t made a good film since. Just kidding–everyone starts drinking before 21 anyway. Looking back on it, it was a fairly implausible undertaking: I was solely responsible for writing, casting, directing, shooting, editing, compositing, mixing, scoring half of it, and–ah yes–attending the rest of my classes at the same time. As one of my professors asked me after the screening, “was it worth missing all of those classes for?”
Put it this way: the struggle to produce this project was one of the most educational experiences of my life. On the other hand, the professor’s class that I skipped several times… well, I can’t even remember the title of that course.
One of the particular challenges inherent to Fanfare was the director-by-proxy concept. Since the director of the Higher Education is an actual character in Fanfare, it was necessary to direct the film-within-a-film as he would direct it, rather than the way I would (not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t likely write a voiceover-laden film about selling drugs in the first place). Because of this device, I couldn’t show off my own writing and directing chops–not a good situation to put yourself in if you’re a young student filmmaker trying to… show off your writing and directing chops. It was a challenge: on one hand I wanted to create an entertaining short film for a Middlebury audience made up of my peers, some of whom I wanted to date, while on the other hand I wanted to belittle the kind of drugs-are-cool action flicks that were popular among many of my peers, some of whom I wanted to fight. Viewing the film today, it’s fairly evident that I couldn’t make up my mind about whether to attack or defend the director character (“Tyler Simon”). By hedging my bets, I may have effectively negated both viewpoints: I didn’t sabotage the film-within-a-film as much as I should have, while I also didn’t get to show off what I was capable of as a writer/director working with “my own” material.
It may be that the whole director-by-proxy idea stemmed from my own insecurities as a filmmaker–that, or just the general knowledge that I wasn’t ready to live up to my own expectations were I to undertake writing something “from the heart,” a scary prospect indeed for a jaded college Junior.
If your first reaction to the on-screen audience was, “this looks like Mystery Science Theater 3000,” you wouldn’t be the first. While I never had cable TV as a kid, I had surely seen episodes of the show; nevertheless, I didn’t realize the similarity until after I’d written the script. Once I realized it was going to look a lot like MST3K, I experimented with other methods of having the audience present, but given that I didn’t want to cut between the two–I wanted the actual viewer of the film to see Higher Education with the persistent presence of a second audience between them and the film itself–I decided that this was really the most logical way to do it, MST3K be damned.
“Cryptomnesia” is an applicable term coined by Carl Jung, which is defined as our ability to create something we think is original, when we’re unconsciously being derivative of another work we’d seen earlier and had just lost immediate recall of. Backing this up is an instance where my freshman roommate Ben Campbell (who did some of the music in this very film) wrote a song (which I produced–our creative crew was, and, as you will see in a couple months, is–very incestuous) that we discovered months later shared an almost identical melody to Bob Marley’s “Guava Jelly,” which Ben had certainly heard once or twice before but no more than that.
All of that said, if I ripped off the idea of writing the audience into the original work itself, it’s more likely that I lifted it from Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound. Credit where credit’s due.
As written, the ending was supposed to include a second audience, appearing in the same silhouetted manner, looking through the reverse side of the movie screen at the first audience. I simply didn’t have the time to shoot it, however, especially in light of the limited resources I had used to shoot the first audience: I mail-ordered a giant roll of green paper, taped it across a chalkboard in a classroom, turned on the overhead fluorescent lights, and filmed the visual component of the audience in one take (I promised the actors they’d be done by 11pm and the DV tape for them to watch wasn’t done exporting until 10:45). I shouted out directions as we filmed and then later taped each actor’s audio individually in a soundbooth. Here is a picture of this ultra high-budget greenscreen setup (and by “ultra high-budget,” I mean, $20):
It took a hell of a lot of tweaking to get a clean pull off that greenscreen–and while there are still a lot of flaws, it’s pretty damn good, considering. Which is probably how I’d evaluate the film as a whole, at least technically.
Another example of limited-resource-fulness: we only had one prop gun. So the shot of the two guns in the case together was actually two separate shots merged, and we staged the later scene with Damian Washington’s character getting shot in the back such that our sole gun never needed to be in the same shot. Also, due to my PC being below Adobe Premiere’s minimum system requirements, I almost didn’t make it to my own screening with a tape in hand–only after making last-minute hardware adjustments did I finally get the “Export to Tape” function to work–at 6:55, for a 7 o’clock screening. After shooting and editing the entire project digitally, it was incongruous to have to sit there and wait for the 17-minute film record out to tape in real-time.
Considering the whole thing was shot on my personal camera (which I’d won for an earlier video) with a budget of less than $150 and completed start-to-finish in a matter of months, I was… realistically proud of it. Today, probably none of it is usable on my reel, but the experience of finding out just how well Murphy’s Law applies to film production was an invaluable one. Also, I learned another valuable lesson: spend more time writing.
Still, my experience shooting Fanfare was perhaps the final bullet point on my “reasons not to go to film school” list–despite being the only student during my years at Middlebury to have any success getting work into outside festivals, I was given a “B” on the project because I missed some of the rough cut deadlines. A year later, I was told that I was ineligible to do a senior film because of my “disqualifying” grade, and while they later “made an exception” for me, it was a pretty pitiful tangle of red tape to have to wade through. And there I was thinking that it was a teacher’s job to encourage creativity.
And thus No Film School. To quote a movie no one will ever show in film school: “If you no help me now…I say, fuck you Jobu. I do it myself.”
I’m at a barbecue with one of the other designers from MTV. While introducing ourselves and jumping through the usual smalltalk hoops, we mention we’re designers. In turn, we’re asked by a nearby female party, “so what do you do, like, draw pictures?”
The two of us look at each other. He’s about to put in the effort to explain what a designer does, when I preemptively cut him off and blurt, flatly, “yes.” Nuff said: she was a lost cause anyway.
So here is a smattering of, like, pictures I’ve drawn over the past few months for the Music Television mothership. Specifically, these are all for URGE, MTV’s nascent digital music service.
Click on a thumbnail for the larger version; mouseover it for navigation (you can also hit the ‘N’ key for “Next,” or “X” for “close.” I mean “eXit.”).
Yesterday I wrote an article at DVguru titled 10 reasons you shouldn’t go to film school (update: a week later, I followed it up with my disingenuous 10 reasons you should go). Thanks to making the frontpage of Digg, the article garnered a lot of comments. Here’s my pick of the litter:
“Is it just me or is Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo not exactly the guy I want to
trust when it comes to making these decisions.The relative merits of going/not going to film school aside, some
douchebag who has a website and has never made a movie really isn’t
the authority on getting a career in the motion picture industry.Considering he runs a website called “Nofilmschool” that he
shamelessly plugs in his post, I’m guessing I could give a shit.”
I’m framing this one and putting it on my wall.
I’m starting my own internet company.
Blah blah blah, Web 2.0, blah blah blah.
More news soon.
Ironically, now that I finally have a job in the city, you might not hear much about it. This NYTimes story (about bloggers getting hired and fired due to their online disclosures) might as well be about me (the hiring part, not the firing part). In light of these issues, I’ve already erred on the side of using a promo-only voice when writing about URGE (which is an MTV property–whose parent company is Viacom–whose employee-confidentially agreement–the very same one I signed my first day–is quoted in the above story). After all, it’d be ironic to get fired because of blogging–after I got hired because of blogging.
Yes, this site was instrumental in not only getting job leads that didn’t go anywhere, but also in getting job leads that actually did. And one led to the other. What?
After quitting my corporate video gig in North Carolina a year ago, I started this website, which, let’s face it, is a blog–even though I never refer to it as such. After four months of writing about film (and music), I got a surprise email from Joshua Newman, the almost-my-age head of Cyan Pictures. I’d linked to his personal blog, Self-aggrandizement, and apparently he’d track-backed my site and liked what I had to say. Long story short, we met over coffee in New York about a producer position at the company, and after it went well, I thought I was in like flynn.
I’d like to note that, according to Urban Dictionary, the above phrase is “A fukkin gay way to say “Im in”. If u use it u will get popped in tha face.” So much for the wisdom of crowds.
Murphy’s law applies to few things better than job searches, so while I was excited about the position (and about moving to New York), I knew that nothing was set in stone. Few things are certain in life, except death, taxes, and my posts being too long (in my defense, I recently saw a quote proclaiming that “art is excess,” which I will now use to justify every overlong post here. It’s art). Knowing the job wasn’t a lock, in my follow-up email to Josh, I wrote:
I almost didn’t tell anyone about this company and position, for fear of jinxing it. You know how the story goes–I tell someone I’ve found this great job, which I’m absolutely perfect for, and then Deep Impact happens, centered on your offices.
New York managed to stay asteroid-free, but I managed to stay job-free as well. After a few months of hearing nothing from Cyan, I had nothing to lose, so I decided to write about my situation on this site (given that it was fairly central to the storyline of avoiding film school). My very long (it’s art!) telling of the story ended like this:
And then–nothing.
Josh did eventually email me back, to say that the Cyan’s funding had fallen through for the time being and that all hiring would have to wait until replacement cash had been raised, but by then I’d already begun pursuing other, much less-appealing, positions–and I never expected to hear anything related to Cyan ever again.
And then–something.
Out of the blue, an email that would eventually put an end to my job search and finally move me to New York showed up in my inbox.
Erik, the sender, had stumbled upon my post while googling “Long Tail Releasing.” He’d had a similar experience with Josh a year or so ago, in that he’d also tried to hook up with Cyan/Long Tail, only to have it ultimately fall through. Since then, he’d been periodically checking up on the company. Besides being amazed at Google’s search prowess, as well as the internet’s ability to connect perfect strangers, I was also, of course, thankful that Erik decided to relay me his tale. But then I got to his email signature: “Senior Producer / Production Manager, MTV Networks.”
Innnnteresting. I stroked my chin.
Nine months earlier (before I started this site), I’d actually applied for a position at MTV, through their Jobhunt website. When I initially applied, I didn’t expect to hear back from the company, for a number of reasons: one, their site only allows you to fill out small dialogue boxes rather than submit a complete, formatted resume, which isn’t particularly conducive to younger applicants who have a lot of experience outside the confines of a day job. Two, it’s an online application, which means everyone and their mother can apply without hesitating, so there’s bound to be a deluge of unqualified riff-raff. Three, it’s MTV, so that deluge grows by a factor of ten because it’s “cool” to work here, or at any entertainment company, for that matter. Four, at the time the position had been up for almost a year–so it was doubtful that they were actively seeking to fill it, if it was still up at all. Not surprisingly, I never heard back from anyone, despite the fact that the job seemed tailor-made for me. I even called and pestered HR a few times, to no avail.
But now I had an “in.”
The whole idea behind starting No Film School was to tell the story of what happens when you try to pursue a film career, not only without going to film school, but also without having any connections. This site wouldn’t be interesting (or, it’d be even less interesting) if I already had connections in the industry, which I could just use to network my way into a position at Paramount. But being from North Carolina and having gone to college in Vermont, I didn’t know anyone, anywhere. Thus, by starting this site, I could narrate the quintessentially American story of pulling myself up by my own booststraps, and… who am I kidding? I got a lucky email. Two, in fact–first from Josh, and then from Erik. Regardless, this makes for a much more interesting story than the typical story of “my uncle’s brother was a producer at Dreamworks and got me in as an assistant to Mr. So-and-so.” And I never would have heard from anyone if I hadn’t put myself out there in the first place.
As it turned out, Erik was working on launching MTV’s digital music service, URGE. When I relayed my tale of having previously applied for a job at MTV, and asked him if he had any openings in his department, he replied that they were looking for designers. That was enough for me. I was finishing up physical therapy on my shoulder in NC at the time, so I showed up to the last appointment with my car packed and ready to go, and hit the road to New York, straight from the PT office. I arrived at my friend’s place in Connecticut on a Sunday evening, went into the city for an interview with Erik on Monday, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Ultimately, writing a lot about film on your personal site without advertising any of it, having the head of a company read it and invite you in for an interview, going public about your (lack of) experiences with that company, hearing from someone else who happened upon what you’d written, getting an interview with that person, and eventually getting hired to work at the same company you’d applied to work for almost a year earlier, is not the most direct way of getting a job and moving to New York. That’s a bit of an understatement–this was one of the most circuitous routes imaginable. But looking back on it, would I rather have just gotten a job at MTV with my initial online application? Absolutely not.
Here’s where I’m supposed to say “I wouldn’t have done it any other way,” except I think people really only say that about things they have no control over. Essentially, if you substituted “couldn’t” for “wouldn’t” in that phrase, you’d have a much more accurate statement. “I couldn’t have done it any other way.”
Which is true. So I’ll just say this: one aspect of our lives that we do have control over is how interesting of a life we live. And I’ll take the more interesting route every time, even if it’s a more circuitous–and difficult–one. This is the reasoning behind this whole site: sure, I could go to film school, but won’t it be so much more interesting if I don’t?
Along those lines, I’m headed to Germany for the World Cup tomorrow. Our Munich-Vienna-Berlin-Hamburg-Brussels-Hannover-Amsterdam itinerary may be circuitous, but you can be damn sure that it’ll also be… interesting.
I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t help myself. And neither could the mainstream media.
I still haven’t written up the story of how I finally got a job and moved to New York, which is kind of the point of this site. Regardless, the project that I’m doing graphic design for, MTV’s digital music service URGE, launches today. URGE is a combination a la carte music store, ala iTunes, and subscription service, ala Napster–but it’s much more editorially-driven. There are a lot of passionate music fans at MTV programming the various channels, feeds, blogs, and playlists in URGE–all of which are ways of helping users explore its very, very deep catalog. iTunes operates under the assumption that you pretty much know what you want when you head to its store; URGE is designed to be a place you can go to discover new music. And I’m not just talking about the teenyboppers screaming outside my office window; whatever your niche may be, it’s likely well-represented in the service (one of the first things I did at MTV was to make a Klezmer playlist image, if that gives you any idea). And while my taste in music was pretty indie by North Carolina standards, I’ve got nothing on the folks I sit next to.
Don’t just take my word for it; initial reviews of the service have been very favorable. Head on over to URGE.com, or download Windows Media Player 11 (also released today) and click on the URGE button. You’ll see my dirty work scattered about.
UPDATE: For everyone who’s complained to me about URGE costing money, I’d like to point out the big “14-Day Free Trial” button on the site (no credit card required). If your trial period runs out and you decide not to subscribe, head on over to Pandora or Last.fm. I actually wrote a review of both services once upon a time (I liked Pandora more), but I forgot to post it–essentially they’re both music recommendation engines similar to URGE’s Auto-Mix feature, without the portability. It’s the new millennium–there are no excuses for not having your musical tastes extend deep into the Long Tail.
Now that I’m gainfully employed at MTV, I’ve been enjoying receiving boilerplate rejection emails from other companies. When one unexpectedly pops up in my inbox, I think: oh, okay, yeah, I remember you guys–I would have never worked for you anyway. Which may or may not be true–but the sting of rejection inspires such a response, regardless. One example:
Dear applicant,
Thank you very much for your interest in Lime Wire’s film project and for taking the time to complete the first-round interview process with us. We very much enjoyed reviewing your application. Blah, blah, blah. However, although your skills and experience are impressive, we feel that your qualifications are not a match for our needs at this time. Thanks again for your interest in Lime Wire; we wish you the best of luck in your job search.
Sincerely,
[Name withheld]
Human Resources Associate
The Lime Group, LLC
First of all, if I were a HR person, I’d occasionally put the “blah, blah” in there just to be a dick. Within a split-second of opening the email (or envelope), the applicant knows that he or she didn’t get the job, so the contents of the notification are just a formality anyway. On the other hand, actually hearing back from a job, one way or another, is better than not hearing back at all.
Second, if I were a HR person, I’d have to ask myself, what the hell am I doing?
Dealing with HR is widely accepted to be a consistently shitty experience. I know more than one person who had their hiring nixed by HR, even though their interviewer and potential boss wanted to hire them. So what, exactly, is the point of HR, other than to entangle employees (and potential employees) in a mess of red tape? HR seems to exist primarily to make things more difficult in life. Institutions that serve such a purpose make life so much more enjoyable. That was sarcasm.
It’s no coincidence that the job that ended up working out for me was the rare position that did not involve going through HR–but that’s another story, which I’ll get to soon. The point is, HR department infrastructures are so bloated, it seems to me that anyone who could come up with a new way of leveraging online applications to streamline the admin processes–thus cutting out 75% of the personnel required to accomplish an inane task, and opening up more direct channels of communication for employees–could change the very definition of human resources, and make a fortune in the process. Of course, HR is another in a long list of institutions that are overdue for revolutionizing. Another obvious one? The film industry.
DVguru is part of the Weblogs Inc. network, which is owned by AOL/Time Warner. MTV is part of Viacom. I now work for two of the largest media corporations in the world. I’m a corporate whore.
On the eve of leaving North Carolina, I wrote a very long, very unfocused treatise on my southern-fried home state. I didn”t post it to this site, because… it was very long and very unfocused. Not that excessive length or a lack of focus has ever prevented me from posting an entry before. But instead of re-writing the piece entirely and leaving most of it on the cutting-room floor, I chose to break it up into smaller chunks’my thinking was, if someone’s going to read a post of mine and think, “‘that was a waste of my time,” then I’d prefer to have them think that in response to a 300-word post, rather than one approaching 3,000.
So much for that. After I cut two chunks out of the longer Carolina piece and posted them individually (as Things to Do in Durham When You’re Dead and Pushing the Limit), I was left with a bunch of orphaned paragraphs that didn’t really fit together, but weren’t really posts in and of themselves, either. I will now dump these leftovers here. You’re psyched for this, I can tell.
After re-reading what I originally wrote, I decided to insert intermediary post titles to cover up just how meandering and unfocused the narrative was, and added little self-criticisms in italics. This extra layer of self-absorbed-reflection-upon-self-reflection is the reason behind the “gazing at my own navel-gazing” post title.
You think you’re clever, don’t you. Well, no one cares.
THINGS TO DO IN DURHAM WHEN YOU’RE A DUKE LACROSSE PLAYER
Since I initially wrote about my home town of Durham a couple weeks ago, the city has jumped into the nationwide media spotlight, thanks to Duke’s (white) lacrosse team allegedly raping a (black) stripper from nearby NCCU. Having spent time on both campuses myself, I’m not incredibly surprised that an incident of this magnitude occurred, because the racial segregation in the town is frankly severe. Anyone who believes otherwise hasn’t really been to downtown Durham. What did surprise me about the incident is that the stereotypical racial roles were reversed in this case–rather than a lower-income black male being the accused aggressor and an upper-class white female being the accusing victim, this case calls to light an opposite situation. Given the income divide in the city and the general proximity of Duke’s student housing to Durham’s housing projects, if I had to pick the most likely nationwide scandal involving rape and multiple Duke student-athletes, I wouldn’t have picked this one.
That’s because you’re a racist.
Whatever the case, vast inequity is at the heart of both crimes; rather than an opportunity-less southern minority lashing out at an upper-crust hapless victim, you have a bunch of privileged white northern lacrosse players who feel entitled to everything in life, spending time in a boring southern town and taking their pent-up aggressions out on someone they feel they should have domain over.
As I write this, the case is all over the national news; indictments were just handed down for the arrest of two of the Duke lacrosse players, with a third apparently on the way. The case is going to go to trial, and like a racially-reversed Kobe Bryant rape case, the truth about what really happened will never be clear. Ultimately I’m glad that this incident, if nothing else, has cast a light on the racial and economic tensions present in my home town–Duke enjoys a lofty reputation that it doesn’t deserve (and I’m not just saying that as a rabid UNC fan).
In part, you probably are. And that’s sad, that a sports allegiance would affect your judgement so much, you irrational jingoist.
THINGS TO DO IN DURHAM WHEN YOU’RE DEAD (PART 2)
IMDb notes that the film whose title I modified for my own uses a few weeks ago, Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead, in turn takes its title from a Warren Zevon song of the same name. Zevon (“Werewolves of London”) himself was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road–one of the many books on my “to read” list that I still haven’t gotten to, despite being on the road myself quite a bit in recent times. In his book, Keruoac writes, “Down in Denver, Down in Denver / All I did was die.”
For me to say the same thing about Durham would be overly harsh, so I’ll amend his sentiment to “Down in Durham, Down in Durham / All I did was waste my time.”
You’ve always blown at poetry.
On one hand, I really do feel that way. On the other, it’d be wrong to say that I didn’t accomplish anything since I left my job as a video producer in Durham last year. I started this site (which has arguably been one of the best decisions of my life), I applied for and won a filmmaking grant, I put together a proposal for an as-yet unannounced project that’s not at all film-related (but which has an inordinate amount of potential), and I’ve managed to land a job in NYC (more on that at the end of this). But people tend to judge your life by your career and your career only–”what do you do?” is the first question everyone asks you–and by that measuring stick, I haven’t accomplished much with my time off.
But that’s bullshit. All of my friends say I’m lucky to have known for years what I want to do in life, but the truth of the matter is, film is only one of my many interests. When recent final-fourer Glen “Big Baby” Davis was asked at his high school All-American basketball game what he liked to eat, his response was: “everything.” That’s a pretty good answer, for someone who likes food. And it’s the same response I’d give to the ubiquitous “what do you want to do in life?” question.
Really? Even theoretical calculus?
HOW TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE: DON’T GO TO FILM SCHOOL
Indeed, many people who think they know what they want to do early in life–and who jumpstart their careers accordingly–end up being wrong. Figuring out what you love, and finding a way to do it for a living–which is not the same thing as merely doing what you’re good at for a living–is a feat that only a small percentage of the workforce ever accomplishes. Paul Graham makes this point much better than I in his extremely-relevant-to-twentysomethings essay, How to Do What You Love.
While we’re on the topic of relevant essays by established industry players, Mark Cuban recently wrote a post titled Getting Paid to Learn, which, for the purposes of this site, might as well be titled “Don’t go to Film School”. Cuban’s not saying that formal education is a bad idea, and despite the title of my site, neither am I; but we’re both in agreement that paying for specialized education is often unjustified in many fields. To me, business and film are two primary examples of areas that you’re already equipped to start working in once you’ve got your B.A. in hand (and often before that); in the long run, your graduate education in film or business won’t make a whole lot of difference, because underneath it all, you either have it or you don’t. In the short term, removing the constraints of school and pursuing your own interests will allow you to develop faster than if you’d chosen a specialized field of study and stuck with it for three to six years, regardless of any doubts in your mind about your decision. That said, every area of expertise is different with regards to higher education, and certain degrees–e.g, law or medical–you pretty much have to get.
You either have it or you don’t? And I suppose you’re saying you have it?
A friend’s father was quoted as saying, “work is so bad, they pay you to do it.” On one hand, it’s a back-to-basics truism; on the other hand, people let this mentality eventually drag their standards down to the point where they find themselves saying they “like” their job, even though it’s the same job that they never saw themselves doing for more than a couple of years–ten years ago. Rather than truly liking their job, they’ve merely convinced themselves that it’s a decent occupation because it sucks less than some of their other options, like being a fishmonger, or being poor.
Ultimately, I’m not sure that I’d be as secure in my own aspirations if I hadn’t had the time and space down in Durham to really figure things out–and I have the solid support structure of my family to thank for my ability to do that. I was able to quit my corporate video job and move back in with my parents, which allowed me to stretch out the chunk of change I’d saved from my previous gig. Nevertheless, being stuck in a one-horse town with a dead-end job can more than counterbalance any support structure you have, or any potential you exhibit.
Why’d you cut out the paragraph where you told your family you loved them for their support?
Because no one reads this site (I could probably put a period here) for that kind of stuff, and I can tell them in person that I love them, which means a bit more.
Aha! A third-level of navel-gazing emerges–a responding-to-the-self-questioning-voice, voice–as demonstrated by the bolded AND italicized font.
Despite the lack of options in Durham, I tried to pull off a couple of promising projects with some friends, and those attempts came crashing down–along with a friendship, in one case. But lack of career options and weak partnerships are external factors; as Hollywood mogul Barry Diller recently stated, “talent outs,” which is to say, you’ll ultimately overcome the external obstacles if you’re internally gifted.
[EXCISED A SELF-PITYING PARAGRAPH ABOUT MY CHRONIC SHOULDER PROBLEMS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF OVERCOMING INTERNAL OBSTACLES]
Nice. By doing that, you just pitied yourself anyway, in a pomo/meta/other-bullshit-term, self-conscious way.
Yeah, but if you were a “real” artist, this is the point at which you’d devolve the entire post into a navel-gazing, inner civil war of sorts, in order to make a timely point about the metaverse created by the post-millenial rise of blogging, social network profile-writing, and other forms of… navel-gazing.
True. But you’re not a “real” artist. Yet.
DEFEATED IN THE SOUTH, LIKE THE CONFEDERATE ARMY, BUT I SHALL RISE AGAIN, UNLIKE THE CONFEDERATE ARMY
There was something about the prevailing attitude around Durham that I just couldn’t identify with. Something that I wanted to run from as fast as I possibly could. Out and about, something in the air just screamed, “defeated.”
A small part of me worried that the longer I was down there, the sooner I’d end up giving up too. Indeed, many of the most alternative people I knew growing up–most of whom I didn’t get along with particularly well, because I wasn’t ROCK! enough (and because you just correctly used “whom” in a sentence)–ended up on standard, boring career paths, and they seemed to be happy about it. Their unexpected act of conformity made me realize that I’d much rather be dealing with someone who doesn’t buy into anything than someone who’s been assimilated by the system. Suffice it to say that I liked my classmates more when they were wearing studded collars and torn t-shirts to school, than I did once they started wearing ties and slacks to work.
Maybe it’s because it’s what I know (and the grass is always greener on the other side), but something about the suburban lifestyle just doesn’t appeal to me. A McMansion with a trimmed lawn and a 4-car garage seems like a nightmare, rather than the fully realized American Dream. Thus, in seeking out the pulse of ambition in the big city, I suppose I’m demonstrating that I’d rather be surrounded by hustlers than complacency. That’s fine; down in the suburban south, if you were trying to accomplish something, many people got a look of distrust in their eyes, because they couldn’t easily pigeonhole you (especially when you’re of mixed race and have no discernable southern accent). They’d rather have you give up and buy into the system, so everyone can be comfortable together, in their conformity and defeatedness. Fuck that.
Defeatedness isn’t a word.
Shut up.
Tommorrow is my first day at MTV (the story of which I’ll share later). I’ll be working at 1515 Broadway in Times Square, in the heart of the most famous city in the world, at the center of the (pop-) cultural universe. You can’t get much more “city” than this. I wrote about my intentions of getting out of Durham and moving to the big apple back in June of 2005, so the idea’s been gestating for a full 9 months. Now that I’ve left the womb of home, it’s time for me to pop my head out into the world. We’ll see if I get slapped.
After a feature I wrote for DVguru made it onto the front page of digg, Slashdot, and tech.memeorandum over the weekend (and got linked to by over 250 web sites), the last thing I should do is write a post on my own site about computers. I’m a filmmaker, not a nerd/geek/other-derogatory-techie-term, right?
Whatever. I’m too comfortable with my offline machinations to be self-conscious about my recent foray into online tech journalism. Although I will say that I learned a valuable lesson about the current state of the internet and the way traffic spikes–frankly, for the feature, my review methodology was not at all sound, and I was merely trying to get the review up before the weekend officially started, yet the timing ended up being more important than anything else. Regardless, I found it amusing when, in response to my recent propensity for blogging, someone called me a “nerrrrrrd” (via IM), especially when that someone hosts a weekly videogame show on GameSpot (just kidding, Rich).
Anyway, after much finagling, my MacBook Pro is on its way. Yes, I’m switching to a Mac. Why? Well, in this case, Final Cut Pro was a strong enough gateway drug to convince me to pay a visit to the dealer. Also, while I’m all-too familiar with the innards of PCs, I was tired of the paradox of choice–in Windows, there are too many applications and controls, and I just want the damn thing to work so I can be productive. I’ll keep my HP workstation around as a big, messy box of applications, storage space, and virus-protectors, and I’ll use the Mac laptop as a nice, pared-down, mobile model of productivity. That’s the theory, at least.
There are a number of drawbacks to my decision to switch to Mac, chief of which is my inability to use Microsoft OneNote, which is a terrific idea/journal/organizer program. Furthermore, one thing is undeniable: PCs are cheaper. And seeing as I haven’t been gainfully employed in almost a year, I was asked by a friend, “how in the hell are you affording this?” Good question.
After spending most the day in a Connecticut coffee shop, writing by hand on blank, unlined paper (I accidentally left my legal pad at a friend’s house in DC), I realized it was time to bite the bullet. So how does a starving artist with no full-time employment afford not only a MacBook Pro, but also another nonessential Apple purchase made back in December? If you head over to Apple.com and order a 2GHz MacBook Pro and 60GB video iPod, with tax, you’re looking at a hefty fee of $3,100. In my case, though, the two devices are going to end up costing me almost nothing. Here’s how:
-$2000: My Emerging Artist Grant from the NEA/DAC. I’m going to end up splitting the $2k between the MacBook and a copy of Final Cut Studio, but for now, it’s all going towards the laptop.
-$310: I actually got a free iPod from freeipods.com (I would not, NOT recommend this to anyone else), and promptly sold it on eBay (this was back when I was still anti-Apple).
-$267: My old MP3 player, a Rio Karma, bit the dust while it was still covered under Best Buy’s extended replacement plan, and they sent me a full refund. I used this towards the new iPod.
-$200: Amazon.com does not have physical retail stores like Apple does, so there is no sales tax.
-$150: Amazon also has a substantial mail-in rebate on the laptop.
-$75: I actually signed up for the Amazon VISA card, because of the rewards you get on a purchase of this size, and because…
-$30: Amazon also offers an instant discount for signing up for their card (this is the first time I’ve ever bit on one of these offers).
So, when it’s all said and done, for over $3,000 of Apple hardware, what did I pay out-of-pocket?
$68.
Here in New York, that’ll get you a steak, a vegetarian dish for your date, and a couple of cocktails. Depending on the restaurant, maybe just the steak.
If you’re an affluent first-worlder (not a word, I know), being cheap is one of the ugliest qualities you can possess–it’s just paper, it’s just numbers, it’s just money. I’m not trying to encourage penny-penching. But if being smart with your money can enable you–and I consider both of these purchases to enable me to get a lot of work done in the short-term, and to be a better filmmaker in the long run–then it’s obviously worth it. Thanks to the Durham Arts Council for the grant (this is a sad excuse for a thank you post, but my original post was lost to the wolves and the time for re-writing it has passed), and thanks to…
Wait, I almost forgot–as a filmmaker, both of these items are tax-deductible! By the time I’m done cooking the books, they’re going to be paying me.
These days I’m staying with a college buddy in Connecticut. It’s not quite New York, but it’s a hell of a lot closer than North Carolina, and I’ve been periodically hopping the train into the city. Additionally I’ve started writing for DVguru, a film technology blog (on my way up to NYC last month to pursue a gig that seems never to have materialized, I saw this post and figured I’d apply). Summer has been rearing its head occasionally in these parts, with a warm day followed by a cold week, and my job search has followed suit–things seem to briefly heat up, and then promptly cool off. Hurry up and wait. Regardless, I will have more to contribute to the actual storyline of this site (“Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo tries to start a film career in New York”) soon. Stay tuned.
Life as a twentysomething can be somewhat of a rollercoaster, with small things adding up very quickly to collectively push you in a positive or negative direction. If I had to describe my life in 2006 so far with one word, offhand I’d go with “unhinged.” Why, exactly, I would find myself in a situation where I could only use one word to describe my recent life, I don’t know. Maybe at a job interview, where they ask you, “if your colleagues could describe you with only one word, what would that be?”
This brings me to the job front. I haven’t said anything about any job at all on this site, for fear of jinxing it, or possibly complicating an opportunity before it was set in stone (also, why would I want to advertise which film companies were hiring?). Readers who actually follow this site are likely wondering what I’m doing with film these days (and, despite the number of daily hits I get, I still firmly believe there are approximately 0 of you that I don’t already know personally)–in terms of projects, or the job front. In terms of projects, I’ll post something soon. In terms of jobs, we have to go back to November, when, just as I was finishing cutting my shooting/editing/animation reel, and just as I was printing out my updated resume, Joshua Newman from the blogrolled Self-aggrandizement.com (and, more relevantly, Cyan Pictures/Long Tail Releasing) sent me an email soliciting a meeting in New York over coffee. Despite my claim on the still-temporary “about” page of this site that the odds of me getting a job from someone who saw my website was equal to “however bookmakers express the number zero,” Cyan/LT was getting its hiring plans together for 2006. As I was headed to NYC anyway, I moved the trip up and met with Josh in late November.
Cyan Pictures is an indie film company in New York (more info here), and from our meeting it seemed as if I was a perfect fit. There seemed to be very little affectation at the company, which is characteristic of my own attitude towards film–I may think something incredibly pretentious, but I won’t say it, at least–and a certain pragmatic attitude towards movies prevailed, in that it doesn’t matter how terrific a film is if no one sees it, and it doesn’t matter how revolutionary a film is if no one understands it. Knowing both sides of the film world all too well myself–the snobbish film theorists who I suspect no longer actually enjoy any movie, as well as the glamour-seeking, knowledge-free celebrity-worshippers–it was a refreshing change to find a company that seemed to share my buying-into-none-of-that-crap attitude. As Josh wrote recently on his blog, “I love movies but hate the movie industry.” Everything seemed to be a great match–when I later told my friends that Cyan/LT was looking for “opinionated assholes,” there was universal agreement that the job was right up my alley.
Cyan also recently started a distribution arm, Long Tail Releasing, which takes its name from the concept behind Chris Anderson’s soon-to-be-released book (and his blog, which I’ve been linking to from this site since day one–long before I knew anything about the Cyan/LT gig). Long Tail is based on the premise that not all films can or should be designed for a 3,000-screen theatrical release and a multimillion dollar advertising campaign. The rise of digital distribution and the tearing-down of geographical hegemony (accompanied by the proliferation of me stringing together words that are unnecessarily polysyllabic) has resulted in the possibility that smaller and more dispersed audiences can make a film a success, through new distribution models. These include: online stores with downloadable content, such as iTunes, Google Video, Movielink, and a host of others, as well as unlimited rental services like Netflix and Blockbuster Online. Even the rise of online superwarehouses like Amazon.com contribute to a significantly reduced cost-of-shelf-space–Amazon can stock everything with very little overhead, whereas a brick-and-mortar store can only stock the thousand or so most-popular titles. There are also video-on-demand channels on cable (as well as indie channels like Sundance and IFC, the latter of which has been running Long Tail’s first release, This is Not a Film, seemingly 5 times a day). Finally we have the upcoming shift to digital projection in theaters, which will result in a long-overdue elimination of the high cost of printing and shipping film reels across the country for a theatrical release (which nullifies all of the penny-penching that an indie filmmaker went through to shoot their piece de resistance for $40k in the first place). In short, film distribution is changing very rapidly these days. The much-talked about simultaneous release of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble on TV, DVD, and yes, that old place–the theater–just happened two weeks ago. It’s a very exciting time for filmmaking–especially independent filmmaking–and Cyan/LT seemed like an absolutely ideal company to get in bed with.
Speaking of getting in bed, let’s move onto the topic of girls, after which we’ll revisit the job front. And then I’ll tie the two together.
Dating is something I’ve wholly avoided talking about on this site thus far. It’s entirely too easy to get yourself in trouble when dealing with the specifics of romantic intrigue, especially since there is generally a delay between actual events and when you write about them (look no further than the fact that I met with Josh in November and am just posting about it now). Timelines (and girls) could seem to overlap, and the last thing anyone needs in a relationship is more ambiguity and/or confusion. And whether or not I tell a female friend about this site, the uniqueness of my name lends itself to effortless Google-stalking. But the best blogs are the most honest ones, and dating is too large a part of twentysomething life to avoid the topic entirely. Plus, in this case recent dating events dovetail nicely with recent job events, and together they contribute to a larger theme. I think.
After the interview and while I was waiting to hear back from New York, I went back to my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. Despite the fact that none of my college friends were living anywhere near the south, and despite the utter lack of social or creative infrastructure I had in the area, I was tied to NC for one reason: physical therapy. I won’t go into a long history of my right-shoulder maladies–this post is already approaching novella length–so here is a quick summary: I started having shoulder problems sophomore year in college, and over the last five years I’ve seen seven shoulder doctors, done thousands of hours of physical therapy, had countless MRIs and X-rays, and undergone two surgeries. This is another post in and of itself, but suffice it to say, I’ve had to really scrap to get the shoulder to the point it is now (some doctors–and even friends–told me to give up and just live with it). Right now, on a good day, the beleaguered joint is probably at 80% of “normal.” So what happened to it in the first place? Nothing, or too much–take your pick. I”ll explain it some other time, if anyone cares. Regardless, I finally found a terrific physical therapist in Cary, NC, and over the past four months, the shoulder has made a lot of progress. I’ve been able to play basketball again (except for that other setback), and I even picked up the camera a couple of times.
What does all of this have to do with dating? Well firstly, I was establishing why I was in NC. Secondly, I started dating one of the assistants at physical therapy. She was the pursuer in this case, which was nice, but that was partially because I was still with someone else when I started PT there (and yes, ladies, one was over before the other began). A few dates later, things seemed to be going very well. She had gone after me, and had succeeded in getting me to like her. But then one day she calls me up and says she’s “freaking out” and that she “needs some space” (which, as we all know, is a death knell–but I stayed optimistic in this particular case, due to a number of factors, such as her being the pursuer). Despite all the little doubts in my mind, I allowed myself to think it was still going to work out. The moment you let hope die… You might as well just give up, in life.
And then–nothing.
This is what I hate about dating. Girls don’t just like a guy, they like a guy’s situation. And as I’ve told my friends repeatedly, I don’t have the infrastructure to support that kind of thing. Put it this way: this wasn’t the first time I’d gone out with girl from the University of North Carolina–student or graduate–who had lots of friends in the area. And each time, I was going in as the lone gunman. It’s not easy. As the lone gunman, you won’t necessarily be thwarted in your efforts by your actual target–let’s say the President–but rather by those close to the target–the Secret Service. President=girl. Secret Service=her friends. And all it takes is the efforts of one agent to undo all your preparation: the prosthetic nose, the plastic gun, the bullets in the rabbit’s foot keychain. If her roommate doesn’t like you, oftentimes that’s enough right there. Dunzo.
The point is this: a guy will never tell a girl, and a girl will never tell a guy, why they don’t like the other person. They’ll tell their friends in a heartbeat, no problem: too boring, too fratty, big ass, too nerdy, no ass, no ambition, small boobs, small package, too hairy, not hairy enough, bad kisser, too much baggage, lame friends, annoying laugh, whatever. And while these are all concrete reasons, the real reason is usually something less explainable, and more arbitrary–in other words, something that could’ve been helped, if only you’d known. But you never will.
So the rejecter never tells the rejectee why. I’ve been on both sides of this, having offered up numerous ambiguous severance packages, and also having been infuriated by the sheer obviousness of a girl’s made-up justifications (the severance package analogy went nowhere). Despite the fact that I’ve never seen the show, and never will, I can tell you definitively what the real answer is to the question behind Emily’s Reasons Why Not: “I don’t know.” And yes, I’ve been the bearer of bad news plenty of times, but that doesn’t make the following statement any more believable, coming from a girl that pursued me intently for a month: “I just don’t think I want to be with anyone right now.” Then why were you on my jock?! At least get creative. Tell me you didn’t like the dryness of my kneecaps that one night, or the way I enunciate “defenestrate,” or the shape of the mole on the left side of my head. At least give me something.
And that brings us back to the front lines of the job… front. The terraforming of the film-distribution landscape. The firebombing of the capital city of… whatever. You get the point. A few emails and an interview later, things were going well with the job at Cyan (I should note that despite me posting about both these issues at once, one is obviously of significant importance, whereas the other is just a flash in the pan). Against any expectations I had of the job market in New York, Josh had gone after me, and had succeeded in getting me to like his company. Stop me when this sounds familiar: Despite all the little doubts in my mind, I allowed myself to think it was still going to work out. The moment you let hope die…
And then–nothing.
The ballpark start-date Josh mentioned was February. He invited me out to Sundance with the company, and told me to check in every week. Given that he’s a young, successful CEO of a startup film company who also has plenty of other duties, I didn’t expect to hear back from him often. All I could do was do my part, check in, and hope the job didn’t fall through. I forwarded an updated resume, and sent along some references from my previous job as a video producer in NC. But the last time I heard back from him was mid-December, and here we are on February 11th (which is, coincidentally, physical-therapy-girl’s birthday–now useless knowledge). I can’t (and would rather not) count the number of times I’ve emailed and called, and today, being in the city, I stopped by his office and scribbled a hasty note (“he’s out for a couple of days,” the receptionist said, but honestly, who needs to be in their physical office these days anyway, except for meetings?). The last thing you want to be as a job applicant is an annoying stalker, especially if you’d rather be known as an independent, clear-thinking, master of your own destiny. Now I’ve become the clingy, needy girlfriend–and as in relationships, it’s because the balance of power is uneven. Then again, on the flipside, when pursuing a job, you want to show grit, to show how much you want the job, to show you are not deterred from anything easily. My choice of words there is no coincidence: Josh’s blog recently linked to this Psychology Today article about “grit.” I’m not even going to thinly-veil this self-endorsement: grit–or whatever you want to call it–is probably one of my defining characteristics (of course, I may be seeing myself through rose-colored glasses. It’s a saying–in real life, your eyes adjust and eliminate the tint). But the interesting thing about grit (or the slightly-different “ambition,” which Time published a less-interesting cover story on around the same time) is that it’s a quality that takes time to discover. When I ended up writing every single line of my high school senior film project–after four friends struggled with the more-difficult-than-expected challenge of putting actual pen to actual paper–I didn’t think anything of it. The movie had no redeeming qualities anyway. But then in college I ran into every problem imaginable on my junior thesis film, and I surprised myself with the lack of emotion or even hesitation that I reacted to unforeseen problems with. It took sheer pragmatism to fix the problem and move on without batting an eye. And it’s not until you’re out on your own that you realize how different you are from other people–and how rare that kind of drive is.
Okay. Now I’m just blatantly self-selling, and no one wants to read that. The point is, giving up is always the easy way out, and no one ever accomplished anything by taking that route… and now I’m preaching, and no one wants to read that, either. Here’s the final, relevant point: in both of the above situations, when you’re playing the waiting game, you can either assume the worst, or you can assume the best. And despite the fact that everything you’ve learned in life may be telling you that you’re SOL, it still does you no good to assume the worst in either situation. If the girl just wants to be single, or the job no longer exists–or if she met someone else, or the company filled the position–then you’re fucked no matter what you do. Thus you’ve gotta sack up and stick your neck out, and take a chance. In both cases you have to approach the object of desire as if it’s still rightfully yours; if you admit you like her then you risk have your balls ripped off, and if you show how much you want the job, then you risk having your head cut off (the solution to a mixed metaphor–balls/neck–is to stick with it). But you’ll never get either one by assuming the worst. Here I am, writing this in a Manhattan Starbucks, unaware of where the road ahead is going to take me (although I’m actually taking the Subway back–and that’s a better analogy for my current situation anyway, since I’m not in any kind of driver’s seat, in life, right now). My crotchetal region is a bit sore, and my head’s on the chopping block, but the axe hasn’t fallen–yet. And that’s life: optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Does nothing in this world last? A scant three days after posting my demo reel, I’m back with a shorter, tighter version that is half as long as the previous one. Forget you ever saw the original. There’s no new material here, just new music–and a bunch of shots left on the cutting room floor. It’s at the same link.
This new version is in response to some constructive criticism I received from the fine frequenters of Creative COW, a forum of media pros (COW stands for Communities Of the World, although if you’re going to capitalize “Of,” to be fair, you should also capitalize “The,” which would make it COTW). The gist of the sentiment there was that my reel was too long, and that my music choice of The Chemical Brothers was questionable. So for this version I decided to buck the really-fast-electronic-music trend, and cut the reel to the O’Jays’ 1975 funk classic “Give The People What They Want,” which I believe is topically hilarious, especially given the current political clime. This new music choice may seem even more questionable than a lyric-free, fast-paced synthesized song–but if someone isn’t going to work with me because of the music on my reel, then it just wasn’t meant to be.
If you do choose to watch this new reel, I hope it’s a more enjoyable minute-and-a-half of your life than the three minutes you may or may not have spent watching the original.
After six months of writing reactionary blog posts, with nary a video posted to demonstrate my filmmaking prowess, I have finally uploaded my 2005 Demo Reel, which I will now commence shopping around.
This site is named No Film School because it’s supposed to document what’s it like to try to establish yourself as a filmmaker without going to film school. Yet most of my posts here have been about pop culture–not film theory, or career struggles, or really anything relevant. So, finally, a topical post on this site!
The demo reel is meant to demonstrate your abilities as an editor, cinematographer, or animator–or, in my case, all three–and is usually more important than your resume, education, or personality. Often it trumps anything that would typically matter if you were trying to get a normal, non-film job; the exception is connections, which are even more important than the reel, and which I lack above all else. One of the reasons some people go to film school is to make connections, which in my mind is not a good reason to go to any school.
For my reel I stuck fairly closely to the tried-and-true demo reel formula, which goes like this: cut a visual montage of your best material together and set it to a fast-paced song of the electronica variety, lasting about three to four minutes. Alternately, if you have outstanding material, you can choose a more dramatic, slower song, and hope that you stand out from the crowd precisely because you have veered from the established formula. I, however, did not. This time.
The first song is by The Chemical Brothers (I chopped it up a bit) and the second is by M.I.A., whose work also graces the new Honda Civic commercial, as I recently discovered. Because the idea of a reel is to make it as commercial as possible, and because she has a song featured in a mainstream ad right now, I must therefore be commercially viable, right? Even though I’m told that MTV won’t play her video because she mentions the PLO.
Above all else your reel is supposed to demonstrate craft; there’s not a lot of art or meaning in these things. So don’t expect anything other than me trying to show that I’ve done a lot of stuff, especially given my age (or lack thereof) and the budgets I’ve had (or not had). But if you’ve ever wondered if I have any abilities besides writing opinionated reactions to things I’ve seen/read/heard, here’s your chance to actually watch something. More to come.
Breaking your ankle in two places? Fun. Breaking it after you’ve just finished six months of shoulder rehab? Even more fun!
It’s not really swollen much anymore, although it was a week ago. You didn’t need to see that, though. In fact, you didn’t need to see my foot at all. Sorry.
I wrote “hilarity ensues” in the description of this site because I figured there’d be a lot of obstacles preventing me from establishing a film career in NYC, and it’d be fun to document them. I didn’t expect that breaking my foot before I even got to New York would be one of them, though.
EMPLOYER: Hello, is this Mr., um…?
ME: Bilsborrow-Koo, yes.
E: Right. We received your resume and we’d like to get you in for an interview next week.
M: Ahhh… I can’t really do that, see, because I have to elevate and ice my foot five times a day right now, and, well, I can’t really travel 500 miles–
E: I don’t see where on your resume it says that you’re an unhealthy bastard.
M: I shoulda known from the kids! They called me Mr. Glass!
E: I thought it was Mr. Bilsbor-whatever.
M: It is. I could probably make it up there in, say, a month?
E: Hahahahahahahaha.
[click]
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