Marketing is the shittiest profession in the world, because it's all about how to manipulate people to think or do what you want them to. More likely, it's about trying to make them think or do what someone else wants them to. Advertisers and market researchers have to constantly navigate the fact that no one wants to fucking talk to them because they suck so hard, so they do things like pretend to be Average Joes on forums, or update their own wikipedia pages, or manufacture amateurism in those bullshit viral videos. The best marketers are the best liars. The really great, super-rich ones, are the guys that have learned to lie to their friends, their family, and themselves, and do so every day of their lives.
These are the band names I'm reserving the exclusive right to use in the future:
Trailer Park Bingo President D and the Gumshoes Laphy Taphy Mealy McGee and the Ramshackle Bandits Raptor Tractor Hey, That's My Cheese Bill Trist and the Sloots Macrame, Bitches Radiohead
Should any suchly-named band start making money off of my awesome creative prowess, then I expect to get some free shit.
Well, the movie turned out a lot differently than most of us expected, in the sense that there was no dialogue and an only vague sense of story. A lesson I learned making my senior project was that atmosphere, pacing, and high-concept, are no substitute for appealing characters and drama. The style has to support the content of a story, not subordinate it completely. However, I think the need for communication and trust was made clear in the process, so hopefully we can grow as a creative group. Also, it made me want to write stories more regularly. Maybe one of them will be good.
Working on a 48 hour film festival project this weekend. It feels really good to make stuff for myself again, instead of for other people. Not that I have an issue with other people, or the things they want to produce, but...there's some stuff I just don't give a crap about and have to work on anyway.
Are people going to look back on this decade in film and refer to it as the "post-apocalyptic era?" Because there's a strange fascination among filmmakers right now, myself included, towards that subject matter. I like the severity of the situation the characters are put in. Something about a complete lack of resources and companionship brings out the truth about a character's identity, since they no longer have social mores or ambitions shaping the way they behave. It's also about the farthest you can get from the everyday and still maintain some modicum of realism. It's also a version of the world that gets closer and closer to home each CO2-burning day. Maybe the extreme setting is a byproduct of action and sci-fi movies that one-up each other intensity-wise until there's nowhere left to go but Crank 2: High Voltage. The age of shocking action films is at an end, I think, at least until holograms or some shit get invented.
I only bring this up because our film's approach has already been decided upon. Our characters will inhabit a barren post-civilization wasteland. Keep in mind, of course, that our genre has yet to be set by the festival's organizers. At this point, I'm all for a non-sci-fi post-apocalypse. In fact, I would prefer it. I'm so fucking ahead of my time, I want to comment on post-modern fiction. That's post-post-modernism, bitches. So I guess I'm crossing my fingers for romantic comedy, musical, or family film.
So I just decided against working for Apple, which to some, including part of myself, may seem like a pretty dumb move. Getting paid extravagantly for work that so perfectly matches my aptitudes kind of makes me feel like I've totally and completely actualized in a capitalist framework. I'm pretty sure, though, that it wouldn't make me happy. It's strange to think, then, that using my aptitudes to the fullest extent that society values them doesn't necessarily make me happy. I shouldn't complain that I'm good at math, even though I pretty much hate it, except that I feel that by not using the skill to make a shitload of cash, I'm shortchanging myself somehow. What if I'm a better quality assurance engineer than I'll ever be a storyteller? Should I settle for what I'm recognized for being inherently good at, or should I open myself up to criticism and embarrassment by pursuing a fairly personal field about which I have limited proficiency, like filmmaking?
