I Wanted to Blog, but I Didn't Have Much to Say About My Movie, So I Just Started Typing

I lost the list of baby names I had saved on my computer. Every time I'd see a name I liked I'd put it on the list and I cannot find it anymore. Maybe I just saved it with a different name. I always wanted kids, not babies, but little kids. The minds of young children seem like an opportunity for me to teach values and instill ideas that will last throughout that person's life. I always wanted to sit down with my toddler cousins and try and teach them about an alternate way of thinking, my cousins are the type of people that obsess over Jesus. I never wanted to convert them, just give them something else to think about. The issue that I have with Christianity is that they have the Bible. It isn't the Bible that ruins Christianity, it is the fact that people choose to interpret it in the way that benefits them most. A solider can go off to war and kill a bunch of people, but in the eyes of the Church he hasn't sinned even though the Bible says don't kill. People try and pick and choose the parts of the Bible and that isn't fair. I am fine that the Bible says to that being gay is an abomination, what angers me is that the hardcore Christians are trying to stop gay marriage, while there are still a ton of wars going on in the world and a ton of killing. I'm pretty sure murder is worse than sleeping with another guy. I don't know how I even ended up talking about this. I just kind of did. Anyway, the name I was going to add to the list was Ezra. I found a blog where this little kid named Ezra wrote about a TV show I love called Portlandia. The kid is like 7 years old and he is adorable. I want my kids to be like that. I don't have a motherly instinct, I have a fatherly one. I want to have a relationship so that I can teach my children, and see them grow up the life that I would have wanted. Everyone wants that though. My parents wanted that. I am living their dream life, but they had pretty low standards. Not starving was what my father wanted for me, and my mother wanted me to have a good education. It is hard having parents that were like the ones that I had. Most people have that feeling of, "oh yeah, people are dying of starvation while I'm complaining about my stupid problems" but when your parents where starving then you really think about it a lot. Whenever I have an argument or a problem I always am able to take a step back and evaluate the situation, and when I do that then the issue seems unimportant. And then you start to take a look at your life, and start to ask what it is you are doing for the world that is starving and dying. Then you feel guilty, especially because when you hear the stories of people who were able to rise from the poverty and violence, and realize that if you were in the same position you could have never accomplished the same things. I just sent in an application in for an internship in NYC. It is paid, and I hope that I can get an interview. My aunt is an intellectual, she is a college professor, but I wouldn't ever use that to classify her profession. Her job is to learn and be smart. She is nearing in on her doctorate now. She read over my resume and the application questions I handed in. She made her revision and I accepted them and emailed it to the organization. The place is called Transportation Alternatives, and what they do is fight for different kinds of transportation methods, so they would be the guys who got the bike lanes and bus lanes and stuff like that. I don't have any personal connection to that cause, but it is a cause nevertheless. I figure that you have to start somewhere, and even I am not curing cancer, or feeding the hungry, at least I'm not just sitting around waiting for something to happen. I hate being still. Let me rephrase that, I hate doing something stupid. I hate watching TV unless it is smart, so now I only watch a couple of TV shows that I love, and the news. I watch the news now like I used to watch Nickelodeon when I was little. I remember when my family first got cable. I was in the third grade and I had always envied all the other kids because they could watch Spongebob while I was stuck watching Cyberchase on PBS. Now that I think about it, I would have rather not have cable enter my life because it made me stupid. I was a really smart little kid, and I would be the kid who asked all the super advanced questions in class. I remember while in first grade my class was learning how to subtract and my teacher told us that we can't subtract a higher number from a lower number, then I thought she was an idiot for believing that, because a few days ago I saw an episode of Cyberchase where the theme of the episode was negative numbers. I mentioned it to her in front of the class and I still remember the "oh shit" reaction she got. She didn't get that way because I was smarter than her, she got that way because now she had to try and explain to a class of mindless cable-watching kids, the idea of negative numbers, because if she didn't then we'd just tease her about it forever. Now I am old enough to handle cable television, I know what I should and shouldn't watch and I didn't have that control of myself when I was younger. I used to spend hours watching whatever was on TV but now I never watch live TV, I always just watch what I have recorded on my DVR because commercials bother me. And I watch most of my TV shows on the internet because it is easier that way. On the new Macs they have an outlet for the HDMI cables, so I connected my computer to my TV like it was nothing, and I can watch TV on an actual TV.
I edited my movie today and that was interesting. The plot of the movie that a girl finds a magic mirror that can do things to other people, so she starts to mess with her bully, and then at the end she kills her bully. I filmed everything but the parts with the mirror. I don't have any dialog, which is weird. I like talky movies, but whenever I try to make my movies talky the dialog ends up sounding stupid. My scripts for talky movies are driven by what the characters say, and there is very little movement, so I think that when I'm ready to make a movie with dialog, it wouldn't need it for you to understand the story.

Q4 Plans

Recently I’ve been putting most of my effort into film. I want to continue with that for the rest of the year and probably for the following years in STAC. I like finished products, even if they aren’t good. If I can finish something and move on, I’d rather do that then spend a quarter working to make something perfect. I don’t want to waste much time at all writing scripts for movies because so often I feel that I just waste so much time trying to come up with a “good” idea. Right now I want to work on more technical aspects of film because that is where I need the most help. I am obviously working with collaborators, the actors in my films, and my friends that I discuss my film with. I like showing my films to people but I don’t like having to explain myself to them. I feel that if I have to explain myself then I obviously did something wrong. I just finished a previous project, and I’m going to start a new one now, but I am still don’t have any idea what it is going to be about. I want to finish at least two films this quarter but I hope to finish more. My plan is to work on a film, be given a deadline, and then move on. I want to be graded on technical stuff mostly, just because I want to get better at that more than anything else. My idea is that this quarter I can finish a number of films and can be graded on the progression of the quality of them, rather than me spending all my time on a single project and be graded on the quality of that single one.

I am extremely crafty. I’ve always been this way and I never really use this skill I have for anything other than small little side projects I do when I’m bored. I do a lot of hand sewing and I’ve been playing around with the jewelry making equipment my father has. I make alterations to my clothes and make small accessories with my sewing knowledge, and I play around with wire a lot, making cool stuff that would ultimately end up lost. I figured that if Danny has spent the past few weeks making puppets I could do something along those lines. I know that I could make a much better puppet than Danny just because I know more about just hand crafts in general than he does, and I have nimble fingers. I don’t know exactly what it is I would do but I know that I could make something incredible. I you looked, the voodoo doll I made for Grace in December was extremely detailed, and very well made. That doll had individual strands of hair, and I’m not sure that people understand how hard that was. I took yellow tread, and I made hair. I didn’t do the shit way and cut out some felt and glue it on, I figured out how to make what seemed to be extremely realistic hair. And I also sewed together a doll. I don’t think many other people did that. That doll probably took me a collective 20 hours, and a good portion of that was spent on just getting the hair on. I want to work on another project like this because it calms me. I like working with my hands with delicate things, and I am pretty good at it. I had an idea to try and make puppets to show off to Danny that he should have taken some of my advice in making his puppets, and that it would make him angry and messing with Danny is always fun. I know that I shouldn’t make puppets because I’m not going to bother to actually make a scene for the puppets, but I did have the idea to make maybe a more interesting diorama of some scene that I could come up with. I don’t know how this will be useful to me other than that it is something that I like to do, and I’ve been wanting to make a larger project around what I like to do. I think I want to stick with the idea of the diorama, and first I guess I’d need to find a concept to start building around.

            I remember watching a lot of Charlie Chaplin films when I was younger, and I thought that I should read his autobiography. I am learning film and I don’t know much about him, and I figure that it would be good to learn about someone as significant as Charlie Chaplin is in the film industry.

http://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Chaplin-My-Autobiography-Charles/dp/0452270782/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366074592&sr=1-1&keywords=0452270782

I edited today. I started with a rough edit of just getting all of the pieces together and when I got home I continued and started to fix some more fine details. It still isn't done, I wanna re-film the part when I am kicking Emily because that is confusing and some other stuff. But that shouldn't take too long, and I could get it done in less than a period. I picked out a song to use. It was written by Alexandre Desplat. He writes music for a lot of major motion pictures, he recently wrote the soundtrack for Argo and he did the soundtrack for The Tree of Life, and the song I choose of his was from Moonrise Kingdom. On of my favourite things about that movie was the music. It fit the movie so perfectly and I started to listen to that soundtrack without the movie behind it. His stuff kind of fit the movie but at the same time didn't. I have more to fix and that's what I'll be doing tomorrow. Here is what I got so far.