(28) Coming Clean

I have been putting up a front so I need to come clean. 

By no means is my voice or my personality inauthentic, but what I've been saying is. I have been creating this false sense of promise that my work is going along steadily but in reality it is not. None of the footage that I have produced have been work that I am proud of. I have been making countless excuses and I making something that does not reflect me. It's not what I wanted to make and it's not doing my own personal grievances any justice. 

Around a year and a half ago my mother passed away. It is one of the hardest things that I have ever dealt with and it still is. Every time I think of her I yearn for her to be here. Since the beginning of the school year I wanted to make something in memory of her and make something that would allow me to release any suffering I have within myself. When this project started, I thought that I would need to plan every single little detail in order for this project to be good, but instead this has stifled my voice. I was so rigid in my planning I gave no chance for myself to think outside of the box and let the creative juices flow. Unfortunately, this has cost me greatly and I am now stuck creating something I am ashamed of. 

Before anything else, I am an artist. 

I create things because I want to express what I'm feeling. I do not care about grades or deadlines, I care about my work. I care about its quality, its authenticity, and its ability to say something that is true to me. I want it to be personal. I want it to expose layers of myself that I didn't even know exist. I need it to be true to who I am and what I do. If it is not, I have failed. 

I have been failing my project. I have been so focused on reaching deadlines I forgot why I really wanted to do this. And so, I am going to do it again. I'm letting go of my worries and I'm going to let myself create. I'm going to do it with this newfound passion in me, and I'm going to do it because I want to. Granted, this will be very hard work, probably the hardest work I have ever done, but in my eyes it is absolutely necessary. 

I am going to finish my last film project on a high note, not because I am anxious to get it done. I have already re-shooted some of my footage and reworked the intro and I am already finding that it's so much better than before. I'm going to have to work fast and hard but I know that it'll work out. It will because it needs to, I need to do it right for my mom. 

I apologize if this piece is a shock to my last posts, but I needed to get this off of my chest. I can't wait to tell you guys what I've finished doing next, I'll keep you guys posted. :)

(27) Stop Motion Time!

Hello everyone! :D So the diorama that I ordered last week for the stop motion animations finally came!

Ta da!!!!

This means I finally get to start working on my stop motion animations and finally get those shots out of the way! I was playing around with the box and some additional equipment that I'll need to get it done and everything is looking really nice. What I'm planning to do is use the lighting from the box and some colored LED lights for any other shots and then with drawings of figures that I made I'll be able to animate certain stages!

I'm planning to have the animated clips to represent my "headspace" and the character I include in it as myself attempting to navigate through the stages of my emotions. When it came to drawing the character I didn't want it to look like me, but rather a sort of 'identity', serving as a vessel for me to process what I'm feeling during the film (I'm really hoping that makes sense, it makes perfect sense in my brain but trying to type it down sounds pretty confusing, my apologies if that's the case). But anyways this means that I'm almost at the final stretch of the production stage!

Painting out all of the figures I'm going to need, I'll finish painting them and start working tonight!

I can feel that I'm nearing towards the end of this project and the thought of that is really relieving but at the same time a little weird. I guess I'm just really antsy about how this project is going to look once I'm finished with it all. Hopefully my vision will be translated, I'll keep you guys posted!

(26) Updates on Permissions

Hello everyone :) 

In blogpost 22 I mentioned that my therapist offered to help me to distribute my film to a grief counseling program for teens in Miami Dade. I agreed because I thought it could be an amazing way for me to get my project out there in the real world. Talking about this project in the educational sphere is one thing, but seeing it actually out there and seeing how people react to it would be an incredible opportunity. Since I am using copyrighted music, I wanted to get permission from the artists or labels to use their copyrighted music so I run into no issues about it if I continue to take my project out there. 

Unfortunately, It's been almost a full month and I have received no response from any emails I sent out or calls I made. This hiccup is making me wonder if I should reconsider using the music I have for copyright-free music. I'm not selling this project to anyone so maybe if I just credit the artists it should be fine? I'm not really sure how it all works and from my searches on Google it really seems like a case by case basis...

Also I'm planning to edit multiple songs that I have in one track, so by altering the music I might run into some problems there. I can't imagine that I would be hunted down for using copyrighted music for a project but I don't want to take my chances if the owners of the songs do take offense to what I'm doing. In any case this means that I might have to go back to the drawing board and find some time to find new music. This shouldn't be hard to do, but I'm afraid that I won't be able to find the tone of music I'm looking for. 

Since I'm working on the production now I'll sleep on this issue for tonight. I'll keep you guys posted!