I wanna be a filmmaker
I finally settled on a solid zine idea: bring the instax instant film camera my friend Steph gifted me and her shitload of film to NYC on Sunday and take a bunch of photos. Aim for interesting shots, pray they don’t come out crappy haha. But that’s okay, I need at most 8 that are truly good since the zine is 8 pages including covers.
I wanna take it a step further and upload the photos to Canva and insert yellow subtitles. I’m inspired by Lora Mathis’ ongoing project “It’s a movie (in my mind)” where she placed lines of her poetry on images she took. Extremely fascinating and I’d love to pull off my own. Just make up a movie from the mess of polaroids I’ll take hehe. That would be fun. I also wanna create background collages physically and then tape the photos, one on each page. To bring out the atmosphere and tone I want to project. And I miss collaging anyway.
I think the only thing I’ll do on Canva beside subtitles is just adjust the brightness and saturation. I wanna try to use it minimally. It’ll be a fun experiment and it’ll help me grow creatively, as a writer and artist and a hopeful one day filmmaker. I see really cool open calls like for short films on intimacy. And the Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn offers free monthly workshops where you can screen online or in person your 20 minutes or shorter film! No other barrier than that. Here’s the flyer and IG post for July’s which is coming up quick. If I ever shoot anything and refine it, I’ll definitely show it there.
There’s also a film festival that’s currently requesting submissions for poetry films. It’s called Cadence Video Poetry Festival and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t watch this year’s entries online. Based in Seattle, they seem really cool with workshops and even a virtual book festival of participants. They’re accepting submissions til January 15, 2025 so there might be hope for me yet haha. I won’t proceed unless I have a solid idea and poem. I know it’ll come.
I’m excited for this Sunday since I’ll be taking a writing workshop with Trisha Low whose writing I admire, at Wendy’s Subway. It’s “What Sickness Can We Live Together With?” and I’m certain I’m gonna learn a lot about myself there. You can read an excerpt of her book Socialist Realism here and it’s pretty enthralling. I’m so tempted to buy her books so she can sign them and so I can read them in full but I should be mindful of my spending. Plus I want to check out thrift shops in the area. I’ll figure out what to do before this weekend.
I’m in good spirits right now. I’m enjoying my life and I don’t lack in anything severe. I’m working on myself and I see how I’m improving quite a lot. I’m grateful to have the life I get to experience and I hope I’ll remain this aware of how lucky and blessed I am. It’s great fortune to be able to work on your passions, create art, and attend classes taught by people you admire. I’m so glad I can see more and more my Possibilities and what I want to go for. Being a filmmaker is not something I would’ve really considered even a year ago, so it feels good to see it now. At the moment I just want to focus on short films I can make by myself. It would be interesting to see what I can finally fully express if I add motion, montage, shots, angles, and editing to my art. I’ve written, performed monologues and poetry onstage, recorded audio, but never truly delved into videos and what they can manifest. This feels like a great step forward and I wanna go for it.
Wow I’m a lot more serious about this than I thought which feels fantastic. Let me finish some projects, meet pending deadlines, and see where I’m at after this summer. I’ll give it more thorough thought when I have less on my plate for sure.
I’m excited for what’s to come. I always have something to look forward to and a lot of it is my making. That feels like a rare thing to say and I do not what to take what I can do and get to do for granted.
Never.