I love movies. I try not to think about the thousands of hours I’ve wasted repeatedly watching “Fight Club,” “Being John Malkovich,” and some of my other favorites. When we went skiing in Utah one year and stumbled upon Sundance, I was amazed by how bad some of those movies were- amazed and inspired- like, “Wow, I could definitely make a movie that gets into Sundance because these suck!”
This week I began to see how hard filmmaking can be because I’ve finally made my first “movie,” an Indiegogo campaign video for PGSS. It is 54 seconds long and took me at least 20 hours to make. I just finished it a minute ago and I’ll be so sad if no one watches it. I’m a perfectionist about certain things- I think 80% of the movie has not changed since hour 5 while 10% of the movie has changed 1,000 times. Obviously I wasn’t a perfectionist about a lot of stuff like sound editing- I think I’m not super into sounds. During the creation of this film, I learned to use and hate iMovie with its infuriating bugs and basic features that simply don’t work (come on, Apple- how hard is it to figure out a file system? This is basic stuff), although it was really easy to learn.
It’s not “Exit through the Gift Shop,” but “Save PGSS” is my first video so I’ll probably watch it repeatedly until I make my next movie. The footage came from past years of students filmed during their summers at PGSS, and also from Ray He, Dan HL, and mitri. Thank you guys so much for making videos of how PGSS has changed your lives! I wouldn’t be surprised if this film launches you all into well-deserved movie-stardom.
So yeah, watch my movie debut and go to
http://indiegogo.com/pgss. Please tweet and share this video because the algorithm that selects videos onto Indiegogo’s front page cares about tweets, etc. If you tweet and share this video, I will get my cat to do a flip for you!
Cool fact: if you show this video to someone and they aren’t moved to tears and immediately inspired to tweet it, Facebook it, and donate to PGSS, you should stab them in the chest where you will find a mess of mangled metal wires instead of a beating human heart.