Artistically, I have been having problems lately. Really for the entire school year I've been having problems with the work I'm making. I just hate some of what I'm making. I literally look at it, and dread having to touch it. I feel that everything I'm making now is so far from what I want it to be. It feels heavy and just opposite of the way that I work. I haven't been able to just draw in a long time. Everything I do has that connotation that it needs to be a finished product, rather than sketches or quick pieces. I have problems with composition, and that's very apparent when I'm trying to set a up a painting. The work that I make feels like executing out a plan. I have blueprints and I work to make that blueprint a reality. I much rather prefer making that blueprint. When I start projects on sketch paper, I love it. I make it so that it works with graphite or charcoal, and I find it difficult to transfer those pieces to larger paintings. The spontaneity of painting that I was so accustomed to feels like it's gone. I wish I could take everything I know now, and put that into my mind two years ago. I could do so much more with that time. And by having a larger body of work and more experience, what I have to go through now would feel a lot less intense.
I feel like I'm putting off making the art I want until after college application are due because I feel that what I want to do isn't what colleges want to see. It's depressing, and I shouldn't think that way, but it's hard to think any other way sometimes. After applications I'm going to dive into technique again. I need practice with basics and get away from my goal being finished pieces. I want to paint and draw more of the things that give me difficulty, rather than try and avoid those things like how I do it in my current pieces.
I feel that I'm forcing myself into a block, but it'll only last another month, so that's not unbearable.  I want to get back to focusing on myself next year. My apps are due January 1st, so a lot of what I'm thinking about, fits right into the idea of a new years resolution. I want to start to get myself happy again next year so that I can accomplish more. I feel that technically, I haven't grow in a while, and that bothers me because I know that I could be doing much more.

In addition, I wanted to reflect a little on my first paid job. I feel sometimes that it takes over my life, even though it doesn't take over most of my time. Like for example, I don't like to change before I get to work because it takes too long and I don't want to have to carry around more clothes in my already heavy bag, so most of my style is variations on my work uniform. Also, sometimes I feel like I'm on call. At least once a week, someone from the bakery will call me and ask me to cover for someone or work an extra day. I say no and then all of a sudden I'm unreliable. The truth is that I don't care very much about that bakery or what happens to it, but I am expected to care. I don't want my job in the future to do that to me. If I truly care about what I'm doing then that'd be great, but this automatic expectation that my boss has for her employees is that everyone is willing to do anything for the bakery. I don't want to invest in this. I do the job I'm paid to do. I don't want to do any extra because I don't care enough. I'm a fucking artist and I'm getting pressured to dip cookies in chocolate like it's the end of the world. That's not worth my stress. The only thing that keeps me wanting to come back is that I know that by saving all my money, I can have enough to travel. I plan to go to Europe this summer and explore. I don't know exactly where I'm going, but that's part of the adventure. I surrender a part of my freedom so that I can experience a better different freedom later down the road. It's poetic and works like a mantra on those days when everything feels like shit. It's Thanksgiving this week, and there goes what ever vacation I might have had. I've never had to work on a serious holiday before like Thanksgiving, so the feeling is weird. I wish that I could be able to juggle the job like a hobby, but lately it feels like a defining factor of who I am.

Reflecting on this Film

It's done.

To say we didn't run into problems with filming would be a lie. To say we fucked the whole thing up would also be a lie. I don't want to lie in this blog post, so I'll say the truth; we didn't focus enough when we should of. Really it's my fault, since I signed up to be the leader of the project.

The first two days of filming went really smoothly. We had a schedule and we knew exactly what we were doing. I think that's where we ran into problems later.

What I liked:
Vika's house is a perfect place to film. It's has so many parts and angles that we made her one space feel like three separate houses. It fits the film tonally and gave the film personality. I also really liked Jzabelle's acting. It was surprising how good she was from having little experience. The camera doesn't love a lot of people, but it loves Jzabelle. I tell her to do act bigger and she actually does it. She does her best work when she's comfortable and I think she loved all the parts she had in the movie. She had to be distinctively different with each of her appearances to really justify having her play all the smaller parts. I was talking to her about how she should go about doing her police officer part, and she really bought into it. I used a trick I had learned a couple years ago in STAC to get people to act for the camera, I told to practice the movements and lines so I could see how it looked on the camera without actually filming it, but I would be filming it. It worked. But it didn't need to, because she did great without it in the next shot too. Really everyone's acting was pretty good, apart from mine. I had a problem with it, but by the time I was editing, I decided to let it go. I would normally take many shots so that I could get the acting totally right, but when I'm not filming, I don't know if what I had just done was okay or not. I should have looked back after every take to see if I was good or not, but I didn't, and now I know that I should. I had never really been in a group where I was the most experienced filmmaker, so if I ever needed to play a part in other films, I could rely that everyone else would note my acting, like in Shiana's film last year, I was constantly having to redo everything because Shiana was extremely picky, which was a trait I tried to reflect in this film, but even here I should have done more.

What I didn't:
After editing the first bit of what we had filmed on the first day, I came back and realized that there was a plot hole in my script. I had it that Vika and Grace went straight from the hospital to the sperm daddy's house. When they leave the hospital, and are in the car, you do not know where they are going. This problem is solved within a couple of seconds because of a line Vika has that explains why they're there and who my character was. I tried to fix it, but I didn't write anything to fill that gap, I just asked Vika and Grace to improvise, which I found out was a mistake. We spent a good half an hour trying to do that, and almost everything we got to fix the plot hole was useless because it either looked bad, or the fix would have changed more than that specific scene, and I didn't want to go and refilm the hospital scene because I had edited it already and I realized that adding any more dialog would have ruined the fast paced feeling that the scene needed. The other problem was the last scene. I wrote a scene that was way too out there. It would have taken another day entirely to film that one part, and the chances of it being confusing were extremely high. Especially because it takes place in Vika's tiny bathroom, where not only is it hard to get a good angle, but also because I had to make sure that we never actually saw the baby in the bathtub, because it wasn't actually there because we don't have a baby, real or fake, that we can get wet. Also, we had to film that entire sequence in 25 minutes because we were running out of time and I couldn't stay after even for a second. If there was one thing I could fix, it would have been that. We spent far too much time fooling around that day, because we didn't have much to film, and we had started late because we were waiting for Emily to finish her musical preview thing.

Overall, I like the film. It's funny and it was fun to make. You feel more comfortable when you're making something that's supposed to be ridiculous. Buddy films are just that normally, two people going on an adventure doing silly things, and that's exactly what it feels like.

Recently I purchased a standing mirror, because Egon Schiele had one and I thought that it would be a good investment. Honestly, it was. I've realized recently that there are different moods to when I create art, and I make different products in those different moods. Whenever I am in Ganes' class, and in most cases drawing from imagination, I am not focused, and the work I make is shows that. Because these pieces are worked on for for weeks, but only for about half and hour a day, they seem all over the place, and there is a lot more detail on the mindless work that I hate. Like for a piece I'm working on now,  I am using reflective paper and attaching it to my piece to look like a broken mirror. It's work I would never do at home, and it's very time consuming. The feeling I get with the mirror is very different. I start something and then I have to finish it. My mind goes to a place that it doesn't in a classroom, and the work I make, I like more. Really, I don't like working anyplace besides my room. I need a certain environment to get that feeling that creates work I like. And I need time. Just because I have an hour of free time, doesn't mean I can just spent it drawing. I realize that I don't start actually getting good, and getting that feeling I like unless I've been working for at least an hour or two. It's complicated to explain, but it's like a spectrum. I can only create a certain type of work at the beginning of my drawing, and only after that can I really get focused and do the work I like.
I've been working a lot on my portfolio lately. I hate all the bullshit besides that. There is so much I have to do besides my art to go to school which really doesn't make sense to me. I wish I could run away and work on art for a month without anyone bothering me. There are things I want to learn but it always feels like there is something in my way that is preventing me from learning those things. What's the point of being a student if you have that problem. My job is to learn, but right now, it feels like my job is to fill out forms and sit through useless classes. Even this year, I spent so much time trying to create a perfect schedule, but I still find the same problems. I'm not learning French and Spanish at the speed I want to, art class is basically a lunch period without food, and english, economics and health are things to fill time. It doesn't feel like I'm learning anything, and that makes me angry. That's why I'm excited for college. No matter where I end up going, all the schools I'm applying to have foundation years. Spending a year just drawing and designing is what I long for. My average day is waking up at six, sit through classes all day, spend four hours a work, and then come home and do my homework for two hours. I can't learn if my life feels like a wheel turing the same way everyday. Weekends save me. I can paint and draw, while I listen to french and spanish music and that teaches me more than everything else I do.