For the last several years, I’ve wanted to make films. This spawns back to my days managing an ice rink when me and Matt Knadle would watch snowboarding videos, and when Casey Neistat had a TV show on HBO he made mostly using point and shoot cameras. I was inspired and I tried my hand at making films. They were really terrible. I gave up thinking I didn’t have the skillset. I didn’t realize that even though Casey Neistat was using similar cameras to mine, he had paid “The iron price*” for his skill set, in other words, his film making came from years of experience and hundreds of short films. I was focused on the cameras he was using and thought I could pay “The gold price*” for the skills . It didn’t take long for me to give up.

In more recent years I’ve gotten back into film making, largely in part thanks to people like Andrew Roger and Django Greenblatt-Seay as well as encouragement from people like James Morgan and Matt Hova. I’ve gotten “okay” at making things, but I want to get into more film work, it seems like the only thing that ever crosses my plate is video work and commercial work.

For the sake of this article and my opinion:
Video – Work that documents an event. It’s not meant to be Artistic, just in focus with decent audio. Boring.

Film – Work that utilizes angles, cuts and a whole slew of things to create and shape a story. Exciting!

Commercial work – Somewhere in between depending on the client and their budget.

I often got frustrated that no one seemed interested in making films with me. Often times friends who would benefit from it didn’t seem interested or gave the “Yea let’s do it SOMEDAY” response.
Recently two things occurred that have motivated me a lot.

First, this article about Seth Rogen, who whether you know it or not has actually produced several Hollywood films. The take away is that people that want to make films should just make films. The act of completing projects is what gives you respect. Certainly, most of you know someone who is working on a project they’ll never complete and you just kind of humor them when they talk about it. I was totally that guy.
Secondly, Casey Neistat joined Snapchat and has been producing films created using nothing more than an iphone and the Snapchat app.  Reminding me that you don’t really need a whole lot to make interesting films. Hell you can do it with a cellphone in portrait mode and an app that limits you to 10 seconds and requires you to touch and hold the screen to record.

From this motivation and a mostly empty July work calender, I’ve decided to drop the excuses and “Just make shit”. I’ve also decided that to help push away my current lust for an higher end video camera I’m gonna try to make a lot of these using nothing other than my lowest quality cameras – a point and shoot I bought for $25, an iPhone 4s and a GoPro Hero 3 Black edition. I’m not sure what will come out of it, but at the very least I’ll gain some valuable experience making films and hopefully win some respect to get people interested in making them with me.

*I’ve been watching a lot of Game of Thrones lately and I really like this phrase.