Learning From My Failures

Failure is a sore subject for me, because I've failed a lot with my artistic endeavors. My greatest failure is a feature-length film I shot in 2006 called Reaper. It was a neo-goth microbudget fantasy epic. To this day, I still hold that the film's concept is incredibly good. I just wasn't prepared to direct a feature-length film, and got myself in way over my head. While most beginning filmmakers have a hard time getting through pre-production, and successfully shooting their film, I've never really had a problem with all that practical stuff. What I always fail to account for - starting with Reaper - is the personal toll the film will take on me, and whether it's a sustainable project in the long run, both on my money, and on my time. Reaper cost about $7,000 to create, and we shot the whole film: about forty hours worth of footage. But then school ate my time, and I didn't get a chance to edit the movie for two whole years. By then, I could look back on the project and see how much of an amateur I was - so I actually never finished the film, even though it had been shot. It was still early in my growth period, where I was consuming new information about filmmaking and evolving as an artist very quickly. Because of this evolution, my work had a brief shelf-life in my own mind, and became out-of-date with remarkable speed. This same concept also applies to my web series, which we started shooting in 2007, and is still in the post-production process. I learned from these experiences that it's vital to finish what you start in a timely manner. It's a terrible feeling to have a project lingering, hanging over your head, when you know even as you're editing it that it's old news, and you could create exponentially better work now.

Generation Why is an interesting case study, because it was a series conceived as a single, solid story, told by only me, the director - a big no-no if you're creating content for the internet. It wasn't collaborative enough, making little effort to engage our audience beyond begging them to watch our stuff. I view this as a conceptual problem - not a marketing problem. We should have approached the series one episode at a time, and found a way to integrate our audience into the creative process. By conceptualizing the series as a single entity to be shot all at once, then uploaded at a later date, I short-changed myself and my cast. Not only could we have built more of an audience - we could also have created a better product, with input from more people.

Another massive failure was our film Sanctuary, which was a nightmare to shoot, and isn't turning out very well. I wrote the script for that, and was very passionate about it, then I was somewhat shut out of the creative process on set. My lesson learned from that experience was to choose with extreme care the people you work with. Will they be prepared? Are they interested in power or playing the politics game? Are they positive? Do they know what they're doing? Most importantly: do they care? After that project, I understood why so many film and TV writers complain their work is trashed during production.