starting over (Patreon)

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas A. Edison

Me, too, man. I can't believe I've actually come to defend my perfectionism but I truly don't think it's that big of a deal. Ha, see what I did there? No, I don't think my standards are the problem. I think the problem is trying to make a video out of trash, such as the atrocity of a  book I've tried to use as a basis for a new project. 

The first three chapters are alright and the idea is certainly inspiring, though, the more I try to make my ever shifting idea work, the less I like what's becoming of it. 

While reading through the chapters, I thought for the first attempt at this it would be cool to establish a nature theme - and so I did read the chapters, in order, sunset, fireflies, flowers, birds, dawn. And now, a week of de-clicking, field recording, brainstorming, ambience setting and browsing thousands of stock videos later, we have arrived at... trash. All of it. It's nothing new, only about 15% of everything I work on ever gets published. 

"I try my best to make this into something
But glove don't fit the hand" - Snake River Conspiracy - Oh Well

Last night I attempted to record a mic comparison between the stereo mic and condenser mic that came with my Zoom H6 set. I couldn't even half-ass that, so I'll do it over some time before showing it to you. The cicadas were rude enough to go to sleep in the 10 minutes it took me to change the mic so the ambience part wouldn't have been a fair comparison, and then I really hated the pictures I took of both. Lately, everything seems to be glitching out on me. It's as hilarious as it is frustrating. Regardless, I listened to both versions of some selected triggers and it became obvious to me that, spoiler alert, the condenser mic is just really, really bad. The amount of white noise it generates is nauseating when compared to the stereo mic, and the sound quality is sub par. As an artist, it just makes me wonder: why? Why does such hideousness exist in the world? Bad microphones and licorice and salmon colored lingerie and such. That color flatters no one! But that's besides the point. The noise is what ruined it for me and I regret the time and nerves I lost manually removing every single saliva click. I don't know if you've ever de-clicked an audio recording, but it's like shooting at flies in the dark. Because the clicks aren't loud enough to show up in the graph most of the time, so I have to go by hearing and fuck around with a single syllable for 10 minutes to remove it and then there's still a chance that removing the click will destroy the word in which case I have to undo all my work. Yes, I have tried using software, even professional ones, for this - but after running an automatic de-clicker you may aswell throw the recording in the trash because the quality will be about 50% of what you started with. And that's after already relearning to speak to reduce the clicks as much as possible. It was painstaking, nerve-wrecking and just about the worst thing I've had to do since childhood. 

And after reading those chapters I picked so many times, I was unable to see past all the things that annoyed me. Most of the writing is usable, but then as the book progresses the author has to go and ruin it with this arrogant "I've read more books than there are stars in the sky", unfunny, pretentious personality of his, references to other pretentious sounding books I haven't read, and I'm still salty about having to listen to a performance of Hamlet just to be able to read one unnecessarily pretentious quote - like, would it kill poets to just speak English?! As I was saying, the more I tried to make it work, the more I realized that I just cannot relate to anything this person thinks or feels. And I've thought about leaving out some of the writing, but that would ruin the chapters, like an abrupt ending where there should have been something more which also didn't feel right. The best parts are the titles. The titles are lovely, can't complain about the titles. 

The titles are what inspired me but everything else is honestly ruining it. I filmed these gorgeous clips of fireflies and while editing today I got so frustrated with not being able to find any stock videos that match what I'm looking for that I was tempted to just loop fireflies throughout the entire video and have it be magical - but then the book isn't good enough for the fireflies anymore. And I went field recording today for a shot of the sunset to use for the appropriate chapter, but that wasn't good enough either. I'm upsettingly exhausted. 

After all this, I did locate the root of the problem - the book isn't 'me' enough. It's inspiring in that I want to share beautiful night time footage, but I can't read anything the author wrote convincingly enough to be ok with publishing it. So I'm like, what do I actually like to do at night? In my old video 'Sounds of the Night' I vaguely describe it, but I want to show you my world. So I decided, instead of forcing garbage into a pretty mold and trying to pass it off as art, I want to make my own version of this. This may take a while, but I have other ideas to work on in the meantime, and at the very least I won't feel like I'm wasting my time on something that just won't come out no matter what. Will I be doing my own writing? We will see. 

What it comes down to is that I don't know what will happen, what turn my ideas will take and how circumstances will force me to figure out what I want. I just know that I want to put my heart and soul into each single video - and my soul has checked out of this one a while ago. 

My pursuit remains to create something I can love.