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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Why do you do it?

Zakaree Sandberg said:
because i would assassinate myself if i had a 9-5 desk job
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Nothing's wrong with 9 to 5 desk job. You can use 8 hours to imagine/write your future film. And still get paid. :)
 
If a congressman is ispired enough to imagine/write a movie (that inspires me) I would easily respire (To breath easily again, as after a period of exertion of trouble.) :)
 
Zakaree Sandberg said:
because i would assassinate myself if i had a 9-5 desk job
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Oh...I hear that one LOUD and CLEAR!! :) I don't even know how people in the production office can stand it...albeit, the ones in accounting who sign my checks are my faves, and I encourage them to work as hard as they can! j/k Lorrie :)

Tom...:beer: I could not have put it more eloquently.
I have been an artist and musician my entire life...I seriously cannot think of what I'd be doing right now if my parents hadn't thrown me into the 'creative mix' at such a young age.
I do, however, have my own beliefs about religion coming from an extremely religious family...and although I don't go to church or practice in any way, sometimes, when I see the beauty in nature that you kindly remind us of thru your awesome pics, I can't help but think there is something 'bigger than ourselves' giving us the opportunity to share in the beauty, and be inspired and influenced by it to create...and in turn, be inspired by those creations.

For what it's worth, your vid 'Learning to Fly' does just that. :beer:
 
Coco said:
If a congressman is ispired enough to imagine/write a movie (that inspires me) I would easily respire (To breath easily again, as after a period of exertion of trouble.) :)
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That will rarely gonna happen - and sometimes I have the feeling that the task of making good, entertaining and meaningful films are amongst the most complex ones on the world...
 
Nothing wrong with 9 to 5 dayjobs, pays for the bills.

Many in here will have them as well. There are other ways of course, like having rich parents or nicking social welfare (in Europe). But commercials that pay off a full fledged Red package must be scarce this days and you talk about personal projects..

The question hasn't any relation to the output though, so I don't get the sense of it. I have read answers on questions like this from people who really have no taste that sound like those from Picasso.

Success in this biz seems to come down if you are a good with people (or more to the point a dazzler) anyway. Sorry for the rant. :)
 
Tom said:
Like others, I feel an overwhelming NEED to be creative. Second, I want to leave this world at least slightly better than it would have been had I never been born.

When you are writing something good, or shooting something wonderful for stills or cinema, or editing moving images to the perfect music, and everything is clicking, you can find yourself very much "in the zone" -- detached from, and elevated above, the world around you. This is an inner peace, when you are channeling forces beyond your waking thought.

I always think of that incredibly epic guitar solo Jimmy Page did in the live rendition of "Stairway" on the "Song Remains the Same" film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFQC4gr_tvk

Watch Page at the 1:58 and 2:44 marks. If you look at his face and eyes during this solo, he's not even "there," not conscious of where he is, or that tens of thousands of fans are watching, or that lights are shining on him and the 35mm cameras are rolling. He's not aware that 30 years later someone might be sitting on a mountaintop in Nepal watching the performance on an iPod, having a chill race up his spine and his existence elevated, if only for a moment. Page is only existing -- a conduit for "forces" beyond our waking knowledge. When you're really, truly in the zone creatively, there can be no higher feeling for an artist, because there can be nothing truer.

I am without religious belief, a subscriber to existentialist thought, which posits that the only meaning in life is that which we ascribe to it. And so for me, beauty and wonder are what keep me going. Without something beautiful and wondrous, one might sink into a meaningless funk, and give up on life. Religious people can find meaning in their beliefs, but for others, we can find meaning in our experience, and our ability to share it with others.

Can there be any greater spirituality than sitting on a high mountain, beside a moon-dappled creek, under a blanket of thousands of stars listening to the first movement of Beethoven’s 14th piano sonata and pondering that the Milky Way you are gazing upon is really a collection of 200 billion nuclear stars, beyond which lies 200 billion more galaxies? This to me is wondrous! Perhaps the birth of a first child could top it, but I haven't experienced that yet. If a moving photograph of the heavens can trigger these thoughts and feelings in others, I have shared something worthwhile.

For years I worked as a political speechwriter, which combined my love of writing with my desire to make a positive change in the world.

But the beauty of cinema is that it melds even more artforms – writing, music, editing, photography, storytelling – into one statement by an artist and his collaborators. This is why someone like Terrence Malick quit his job as a writer and philosophy professor at MIT to join AFI’s first filmmakers’ program, along with the likes of David Lynch. Malick recognized that through film we can improve the lives of others, while at the same time fulfilling ourselves. Imagine I spend 2 years making a film. 20 years later, some guy who is down on his luck, having lost his wife or his job or his desire to follow his dreams – if this guy watches my film and only for 90 minutes forgets his sorrows and feels an improvement in his life, maybe even some hope, then I have accomplished something. :thumbsup:
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That's a beautiful post, Tom.
 
Danish P.V. said:
The real world is so boring. So I wanted to created something that doesn`t exist.
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The real world isn't boring, it's terribly interesting but not at all adapted to us, and we are only partly adapted to it. And that's hard. As a boy I always wanted to live in a story instead of the real world and I still get more excited by a story than much of daily life (although the number of stories that hold up is getting smaller and smaller). To be able to live in a story that I really wanted to live in I wanted to make my own. So I wanted to be a writer and studied English and American literature in Leiden and UNC at Chapel Hill. After 6 years I knew I wouldn't be able to complete a novel, so I picked up an older ambition, becoming a painter, so I went to the Gerrit Rietveld academy (artsschool) in Amsterdam, where after the first year I decided I shouldn't stick to one medium and mostly did photography. Now I have been active as a professional artist for several years, but the old urge to make stories and the older urge to make pictures finally combined in a logical conclusion: to make movies. the pana dvx100 was enough for the art world, but not for movies, and along comes Red!! (and several subsidies from Art funds :)) Actually Red came at exactly the right moment.
 
karapetkov said:
The "real world"... what does that mean, anyway? :)
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The "Real world" is a reality television program on MTV. First broadcast in 1992, the show is the longest running program in MTV history. :cool::)

---

And here's what the legendary armenian film director and painter Sergei Paradjanov says:

"I guess it's beauty. I get high when I create beauty.
I search for beauty in people, in life, in portraits.
It's hard making films and it's hard living in cinema.
But it's even harder living without cinema."
 
creating!

creating!

What a beautiful thread! There should be more like these. We spend a lot of time with numbers values expressions and skills. We should never forget that creativity and story is the heart of said expressions. Its amazing journey we are on. I for one would feel so empty without it. Keep on creating. It moves us forward. Even a bad film... can tell us much about what we are or where we need to go.
 
I remember the moment I knew I was going to be a filmmaker. As a child, I watched a lot of films, but they were all films made for children. When I was 15, I saw my first rated-R film: "The Terminator". I was completely enthralled! I had never seen a film where I was completely connected to the characters and their plight. The next day, I went out and bought a DVD player (back when nobody had them, and they were just becomming affordable), along with Terminator 2. After watching Terminator 2, I knew there was no turning back. Terminator 2 is still my favorite movie to this day. :}

For myself, I feel it is less important to have something to say than it is to have something to share. When watching cinema, you may be watching a two-dimensional image, with actors, fake violence, unrealistic worlds, and special effects, but the emotions that are induced are indeed real.

Some may say that films are used for escape, are a luxury/waste of time, are fake or ultimately meaningless, but I feel that cinema exercises the one aspect that makes us most human: empathy. The human ability to epathize allows us to partake in experiences that aren't our own. When I am making films, I am experiencing the story through the act of directing, and I want to share this experience with others. If I can give someone a reason to show real epathy towards characters that don't exist in the physical world, maybe this can help people understand one another better.

I am not a preacher, and do not want to yell at people through film. I view the cinema as a shared experience between the audience, the characters, and the storytellers, not as a dictator that shouts his opinion from behind an elevated platform.

I am still relatively new to filmmaking. Filmmaking is difficult starting out. It is like learning a new language, and as a child, you are going to have trouble communicating as clearly as what you have imagined in your mind. Luckily, I am making some good steps, and am learning a lot by doing. :}
 
I saw back to the future 2 as a kid.. saw MJF cruisn around on that hover board.. and instantly decided I wanted to be a film maker so i too could cruise around on hover boards (when not shooting of course)...

then I found out that the hover boards were attached to long poles and a car:/
but I still like making films:)
 
In my late teens I was not mature enough to accomplish an academic education and ended up as a junior spark in Berlin. My first paid job as a cameramann was a 48 hour shooting day when the Berlin Wall broke down. Now I'm 42, dad of two, and working as a writer and director for commercials and similiar productions. On my way I forgot to become a physician but started my own business which is now over 20 years old. I'm not a veteran but a seasoned beginner - you never complete training. My tool set expanded continuosly: First a camera, then lights, then bigger and more lights, then bigger cameras, then editing bays and then the pencil (laptop) which became the master tool: Nothing is more challenging than developing a new story. But I must admit I love cameras and lenses - in my heart I never quit the camera job.

To answer the question: I don't know why I make films. I slipped into the busienss, I guess I'm not too bad at it and love the recognition I get from time to time. No need to start something new but to improve and try to reach new levels.

Hans
 
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