Hello. My name is Aaron, and my world is film.
During the day, my mild-mannered, film professor self blows the artistic minds of college students; but when the sun goes down, I don my cape of academia yet again, this time as grad student Aaron. Every waking hour (and most sleeping ones too), my brain overflows with visions of Hitchcock vs. Tarantino, Scorsese vs. Spielberg, and Kurosawa vs. Miyazaki.
Now those are some Celebrity Deathmatches to get oddly excited about.
To be fair, burning a candle at both ends is quite a trick.And as soon as I find out how to do it, I'll let you know (Thank you, Groucho Marx).
And there it is: the way my brain works. A stray comment in conversation about butternut squash immediately finds new life as the start to a BAFTA winning indie film. (To Squash a Squash - yes, I'd like to thank the academy ... and farmers everywhere.)That unbelievably small town we just drove through while searching for a farmer's market? A few moments in my imagination and it's now the setting of a murder mystery so viciously imaginative that even Jack Nicholson would come out of retirement for the leading role.
Even the simple act of walking through a store whose decor whiplashes between Halloween and Christmas sparks tremors of ideas in my lightning rod brain.
It's great to have ideas and, wow, can they come from anywhere; but none of those concepts could have even been introduced to my brain bin had I not been open to them.
Everyone has an imagination when they're born, but somewhere along the way, many people lose it. Life is a draining experience - bills, family, calling in sick with just the right amount of faked, over-the-phone symptoms to be believable but not cause a panic. Just like it takes work to become good doing things, it also takes planning to stop doing and listen.
Deep down, we all want to be creative in some small way, but few take the time to listen for it.
Where is your creative voice? What inspires/excites/angers/touches you?
I encourage you to breathe in the midst of your wild life and listen for creativity.
If I'm being honest - and I am - the film world is not always creative. The simple act of spending a large majority of my conscious life studying the good with the bad, the visionaries with the vision-less, weighs on my own creativity. It's hard to breathe when you have deadlines coming out of both ends.
That's why this blog exists - to maintain an outlet for honesty in the face of insanity. To inspire you and myself toward creativity. We can do it.
Now go out there and find your idea. I would take the time to encourage you more, but I just had an idea...
