Blazing Clouds of Mediocrity: This end.

I graduated.

Against all odds I graduated.

Normally you take general requirement classes in the BEGINNING years of school so that at the end you're free to focus on your major.

But I didn't know how all that worked when I started.

Advanced writing, Physical science, and Statistics: the bane of human existence. The only thing standing between me and a degree. I just got the grades back and by some miracle I passed them all with C's. I got an A on my interpretive essay with comments, which means I must have totally bombed that final paper.

Most people wouldn't be very happy with that.

I'm ecstatic.

The enthusiasm meter was at an all time low as this semester started. I'd planned on finishing these classes in the Fall to make room for a capstone film project this semester, but the car accident, doctor's appointments, and recovery usurped the classes, and sianara to los capstone. This was the unfinished business semester. The last burning hoop to jump through for my bachelor's degree.As the semester progressed I struggled to find time for my classes in the slew of writing, photography, and film work I was planning. I'd started this new thing on my net book...The Nag List. A text document subdivided into categories like school, work, freelance, photography, writing, makeup, film and so on. I used to write lists on the backs of envelopes and the margins of notebooks to remember stuff when it got to be too much.

This was the same thing but in digital form with more categories to help me remember projects that slid to the back burner and beyond. I was excited. I'd never lose a great idea again. Whenever I had one, I'd jot it down for future development. The list grew. So did my confidence. But my grades didn't. I couldn't find time in the day for all my homework. Each unit test would bring lower scores. My ship was sinking. I was going to fail.

Faced with this strong probability, I halted everything else I was doing.

The nag list was all still there, but my focus fell on only the top two categories, School crap, and Urgent School Crap(the one marked in red). I stopped going to work, stopped writing. The mountain of photos I'd taken last Christmas would have to wait. I stopped everything to focus brain, body and mind all day every day on minutia. Nothing else existed for me.

...Loved it.

I remember the feeling I had walking out of the testing center following my Science and Stats finals. I was sure with both of them that I'd ride out with a high F. I'd already flunked Stats last winter so I found no comfort in knowing some of the answers. The bulk of it was incomprehensible to me.

I walked out to the scan-tron machine feeling like a firing squad victim. It'd be nice if I they missed, but hitting their target is what they do and these tests weren't designed to help anybody. The kid at the machine took my test and slid it into the machine.

He said, “Thanks.”

I moved to the monitor displaying scores with a ten second refresh rate and random placement in the line up to protect your privacy. 

“Cmon sixty!” I plead to myself. 

I'd done the What-if calculator thing they provide online and felt that if I could just get a solid 60 or maybe even a 59, I could ride the curve and pass the class.

 I scanned for my student number I neglect to list here for fear of privacy violation. 

There it was.

 0505. 

And just to the right of it-

My jaw dropped.

I checked the student number again.

Seventy WHAT! 

I'm naturally bad with numbers, but after a three hour bout with that garbage I'd be hard pressed to spell kat correktley. I turned around and went back just to make sure I'd read it right.

Oh five oh five. Seven and another number! (note: bad with numbers. I don't remember nor does it matter with scores in the low end of mediocrity) I'd done it! I'd more than done it! I did that both days!

Most people would feel pretty jipped about that, but I was happy.

It was finally over.

The last couple of days have been sort of blurry as I regain my equilibrium and catch up with stuff at work. I've felt broken. I haven't been able to write or draw or do anything. My desire was just kinda dead. I worried that school killed me. But today I felt it again. I still feel rusty as I type this, but my light's coming back.

I deleted the School category from my nag list.

Now I can start looking at what I left behind. Turn a few burners back on. I feel my life coming back.

I've got to get back up.

Good things are coming.

-Stay tuned

Pursue your dreams

Find your passion and perfect it.

Made me smile to see someone pursuing something they're good at. Lovein it at about 1:38. Chariot's of Fire- "God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure." I like to think everybody's got a little of that in them. Too much minutia gets in the 
way too much of the time.

So find some way to do what makes your heart sing like this cause without it the world dies.

Impossibleness

Many years ago, there was a little boy who wanted nothing more than a horse. That's actually a lot to "nothing more" about. But he knew this and so his desire hurt even more because there would never be a way to fulfill it. His yard was too small and the lack of fencing meant he couldn't have a dog either... his second biggest hope in life. He did end up with a couple of gerbils but I digress. The horse!

He knew he couldn't have one in a million years. That joy was reserved for knights, cowboys, and Indians which he noticed got the best deal overall because they also didn't have to attend school or wear clothes.

So the only way he would ever enjoy anything close to horse ownership would be to draw them.

But horses are hard.

Horses are agonizingly hard to draw. No matter how he tried he couldn't seem to make the blobby figure on the page resemble the regal form in his mind. His horses looked like bad Halloween costumes for bumbling detectives. It was all this little boy could do not to go out and sulk.

Luckily his mother knew a little something about art and decided it was time to teach this boy to draw horses. But what might have been a simple drawing lesson turned into something that would change his approach to life forever. That's what I'm going to talk about today.

Down the hill from our house was a little pasture with a couple of old swaybacked ponies. I was very proud of knowing they were swaybacked. You had to know a lot about horses to know that's what you call old horses. We took a couple of note pads and went and sat down in the gravel on the side of the road. Mom patiently showed me how to look at a horse and notice the more basic shapes that make up the entire horse. If you've ever looked through a “how to draw” book, this is what they teach you to do. I still remember the order. We started with the oval curve right there in the crease of the hind leg. The horse was facing left. My knights would ride left forever after. She showed me how to lightly pencil in the swayed back and barrel of the horses chest followed by the curve of the neck and then the head.

In all of this I was learning to see. For the first time in my life I noticed that the hind legs were turned backwards on a horse. No wonder my previous attempts had looked wonky. Drawing a horse, the impossible task, was suddenly doable when I learned to sit down in the dirt and study what was really there. And so a little kid learned to do something he'd wanted almost as much as his own horse.

The bigger picture is the way this experience changed my life. My parents fostered a culture of creativity. We didn't have much money, but luckily we had a few things that mattered. There were some tools in the garage, a sewing machine in the sewing closet, a pottery wheel and kiln we were lucky enough to never find a buyer for, a kitchen with an oven. There were a few things there and we were lucky enough to find some surplus materials here and there. There were big roles of fabric from Grandpa in the closet, some scrap wood from down on the tide flats. Some rope, some newspapers, some clay. Library cards: Eight of them, and weekly trips to dig through the mountains of books at our local branch... maybe they were more like hills but we checked out a lot of books.

Basically it all boils down to one very important life lesson:

If you want to do something impossible, you only need to sit down in the dirt for a while and study it out. There's always a way to accomplish things. You may not get it right the very first time but find your passion, dive into it, and let that drive you on to greater accomplishments doing things other people say are impossible because they're too hard.

Learn. Live. Live. And Learn.

Happy Birthday Dad!

The first time I ever played with color

Many of you will think this video is unwatchable... fine.

I post it as a symbol of something we all should strive for.

This was the first time I ever played around with color grading. Ever. Now that's what I do for a living.

For four years I'd been playing with vhs deck to deck editing, but there was no way to make the footage look different although I tried various methods.

But within a few short years, Mini DV hit, computers got a lot faster and more affordable, I got out of High school, and all of a sudden things that weren't possible before were.

a similar change is taking place right now.

I remember rendering the first few clips and playing them back. This little project back in 2004 filled me with an excitement I've been recapturing ever since. some of you will scoff at this, but others will remember similar break throughs on their own projects when you learned how to do something you never thought you could do before. That's what I'm talking about.

There are lots of different people saying different things about the new DSLR's and the digital revolution. The fact is that technology is changing again, and things that were never possible before suddenly are. People in the industry scoff at it sometimes because they don't need cheaper smaller cameras. But on the ground floor are thousands of individuals like you who don't have all the tools.
SCARCITY BREEDS CREATIVITY- So what does this mean?

It means that a lot of people are going to spend lots of money on cameras and equipment thinking they're going to make hollywood quality feature films- and then fail. not because the equipment lacks the power but because they do.

But some won't fail, because there's something rooted deep inside of them that fills them with excitement and drives them forward. They'll create new ways of doing things and new techniques with the tools they have- and they'll succeed.
Why?
Passion.
You do what you love because you have to. Its like breathing for them.

So here's to progress, passion, and creativity. Never surrender.