Alright, so should I get this out of my system? Should I tell the story of why I’ve had a big “film block?”
It’s a really, really heavy story. I warn you. And why would – how could – a Handicam bring about such an uproar?
Well it did.
In 2007, I had a very good year in terms of sales. I was finally able to purchase a good DV cam so that I could finally experiment with video production. I had BIG plans. I researched cameras and got a lot of advice from people in the know about how I could make an actual motion picture. I got me a Sony TRV 900. If you don’t know about this camera, it is the first of the Sony DV, hand-held cams that were decent enough to make a movie with. They are basically equivalent to buying a $5000 camera today, but I got one on eBay for $500.
It worked great, but the body of it looked like it had been dragged behind a car or something. I didn’t mind because it worked and I knew what it was really worth.
The reason I was interested in video at all whatsoever was because I was ULTRA inspired by a film called Tarnation. This film gave me amazing energy to put together my own autobiography as a documentary art film, complete with animation, footage of my parents, personal diaries, and the like. It would be very similar to what director, Jonathan Caouette did in Tarnation, but without the billions of hours of footage he had. He was documenting his family since he was a very young child! Kind of amazing. Not kind of, totally.
Anyway, people had always told me that I should write a book about my life, but I never felt I was a very good writer. I really thought that once I got this camera, it would bring out some big, talented filmmaker in me that was dormant or something.
That didn’t happen.
Nonetheless, I still very much wanted to pursue my documentary and I had ideas to begin getting footage of my parents in their weird little habitat in Las Vegas. And I realized that I would probably have to go out there quite a number of times before they would be used to having a camera in their face and start to act natural with me filming them.
So I began driving out to Las Vegas to visit them.
I think I’m going to have to tell this story in parts.
Sorry.
Part Two to come soon. 🙂