Day Four

All my questions are answered.

I got in today feeling even more nonchalant than before. I pretty much walked in and acted like I owned the place. Which is not true. 

Lens with motor, zoom control, and battery

A student from New Tech high school in Coppell was shadowing Joe around today so I had company on my journey through the camera-world. Nice kid. Pretty quiet. I could tell he was bored because he kept wandering around the shop. I don't blame him for feeling bored. It was even slower today than the past three days. There weren't any preps to do. No orders even came through today. We just hung out, rigged up cameras, and set them away. To my credit I rigged up an audio mixer, a shotgun mic, all to a camera with ease. I'm getting better at this! Of course, most of the rigging is obvious if you just look a little closely. Insert slot A into tab B. Connect Input 1 to Input 1 jack. Then put Output 1 into camera. Indubitably obvious to the casual observer.

We mostly just hung out. Talked some. Ryan explained to me about the position of a focus puller. I did some focus pulling of my own. On the Nikon. I still don't like it with all the attachments. It's just easier to use a motion picture camera instead. Either way, I was successful in keeping up with Ryan. He'd move the camera, I'd have to adjust the focus to keep the target in view.

Joe (left) and Ryan (right) at work

Of course we saved all this work for when Mr. Ash showed up. We saved the Nikon rig for that. Ryan kept me busy while Mark Beasley talked to him. Ryan was teaching me all about focus pulling. I would walk from side to side on the camera. Ryan rigged up more pieces. Everything looked very clever.  We put on a very good show considering naught 20 minutes earlier we were sitting around just talking. Albeit we were talking about camera stuff, but it certainly didn't seem to be the best use of my time. Ash came. We worked. He took off. Things went back to solitude.

Unfortunately Ash reminded me I had a screening for my films back at school. I hurriedly got out of my internship early and raced over to the screening. Thinking back: that screening probably wasn't worth all the teeth-gnashing or broken traffic laws. Nobody had any questions to ask me. It was all the usual films I'd seen twenty times before. Still, rewatching my films and remembering what made them successful put all my doubts yesterday at ease.

You see the true strength of a film lies not in its composition or its acting or its special effects. The true strength of a film lies in the story being told. If the story is told well then it will draw success to it. Accolades accompany a good film because it is a good story. The truth behind filmmaking is that the best stories are the ones told with passion behind them. Films made for paychecks do not hold up. But a truely great movie is one made by a director and producer and writer who are invested in what they're doing. If they care about the story they're telling they're gonna tell it good. Then, when the story is told people will love it. That may not always be the case, and plenty of people make plenty of films that are just paychecks, but just remembering that success comes with a story you care about is a measure of comfort to me. I love the stories I tell. I think I can be successful, it's just gonna be a long journey. 

I can't wait to see where this journey leads. This week it's lead me to MPS studios for a view at technical expertise. I'll do a clever review about what I learned for my final report tomorrow. Tonight, for all you readers (or reader) out there just be aware that I'm feeling much more confident about my career choice. I just want to make more and more movies now.