The past few weeks have seen our entire industry grind to a slow and painful sludge. Like most filmmakers in Tokyo, the rest of Japan and I assume, the world, I’ve seen my projects delayed, put on hold or straight up cancelled. I considered most of these to be the biggest projects of my career to this point so needless to say I was pretty bummed out.
I still wanted to make the most of it. At first, I tried to occupy myself in the same ways that reddit has told me everyone was doing; cooking, endless Zoom meetings, Netflix, video games and obsessing over the plants that have newly invaded my place.
Three platinum trophies and a freshly planted herb garden later, boredom has led me to this most dreaded of activities; self-reflection.
I came to realize this past year has been huge for me. I started to direct in addition to the editing work I was already doing. I was really lucky to have clients who trusted me enough based on my past work with them to give me opportunities and the creative freedom to make films that were truly my own.
Looking back, I realize two things:
-While every project had its own challenges, each of them were a tremendous learning experience.
-At the time, every project I did felt like the biggest, most important project of my career.
It gave me a good feeling to see that I was making progress and able to take on bigger and more challenging projects. In the following weeks, I would like to share thoughts about each of these projects, what I learned, what I would change, where I failed, where I succeeded and so on.
And so, dear reader who may never exist, I hope you find something of Value in what I will be sharing from now on.
I totally know what I’m doing.