Today I woke up in a startled daze

The sound of a passing street sweeper woke me up this morning. It wasn’t graceful. It was one of those alarming, legs shoot up in the air, body spasms that result in messy hair and uncoordinated eye blinks. I looked and saw I was 2 hours ahead of when I regularly wake up but decided it was a nice change of pace, giving me time to deposit rent and write this post; which is a mixture of good and bad.

Today is the second day of our third spec commercial for the online crowd sourcing service called Poptent, which has given out exactly 0$ to me and my crews as of this date, however my labors are not for direct monetary results but for down the road and my inevitable second demo reel in which I showcase all the work that has failed to catch the attention of corporate “clients” that pay for the prizes given out by Poptent.

I have become overly comfortable with my position as producer editor in regards to the commercials, I don’t even bother with a call sheet as I find the formality of it to be too much for such simple shoots. I have to compensate for my crew’s inabilities while trying to divide responsibility amongst willing parties. It is one of those tricky positions where you want results but you can’t yell at the people not giving them to you because its not personal, and yelling makes things personal. But I have decided I want to yell. I want to kick and scream everytime something gets in my way, hinders my progress, or stains my products.

Screaming is our soul’s only catharsis.

The past couple months have taught me one vital lesson in my pursuit of perfection; and that is there is no perfection in this business. One man’s vision comes from the collaborated efforts of many, and every new set of hands, every new eye that comes across your frames is a new interjection of an idea, a new layer of complexity to add to the final decision of what stays and what goes, and what is seen and when. Perfection is subjective and will never be attained when it requires the skills of many. It is good to start with the ideal perfection as it leads to passion and passion leads to motivation in others who may not be as attached to your work, but it will always be the bane of your creative efforts as you alway fail to realize what is pure in your own thought; you only see the mistakes you make and the errors that hindered you from making perfection.

The only real fault is thinking you could have perfection in a world of imperfect elements.