Reality is Hard, Cinematically Speaking

Hand me a keyboard and I will paint you a picture with words. A lump will emerge in your throat as you wait with baited breath at the edge of your seat. Goosebumps ripple across your arm, standing on edge. As your hair slowly begins to rise, the cold air surrounding you begins to dance and tickle your skin. The air is electric. You inhale it into your lungs and finally, you’re ready to embark on a journey that will alter you on a fundamental level.

See, I’m good. Like, damn. If you could see the back of my arm, goosebumps. So believe me when I say I’m currently face planting on the freshly cleaned gel coat that lines our cockpit. Why? Because YouTube makes no fucking sense.

It doesn’t take anyone more than like three seconds to see that YouTube is a drastically different world compared to traditional filmmaking. The videos themselves are a drastically different style and they throw all my filmmaking techniques on the floor and stomp on them. Everything I learned about film goes off deck along with the fish carcass. In the end, I realize that I know nothing.

As I slam my head into the desk forty seven times editing a video, I start to become confused. Normally, I would write a script, followed by a never ending re-edit, I started to create shot lists, storyboards, overheads, and a million of film sounding things. Now, I don’t even get a script. Before, an entire world sprung forth from my head, like Athena jumping sword first out of the head of Zeus. Now, I stare at a ton of footage waiting for some inkling of a story to jump off the screen. From scripted to reality. As a fiction writer, all I can say is, man reality, like real reality, is hard. In the filmmaking process though, this is just the launching point. Normally I would still have a mountain of other things to do before that camera starts rolling, but for the sake of this, let’s jump ahead.

Lights, camera, action! Now, do that again five hundred more times, slightly changing something every time. Somewhere in the several hundred hours worth of footage exists a beautiful shot, thought provoking performance, and a complete film. If you fail, then you just do it again. If you fail again, no worries, we always have tomorrow and most likely a dozen more tomorrows after that. It gets repetitive, tiring, and it’s the most fun you can ever have while getting paid. Unfortunately life doesn’t happen on repeat like this though. I get one shot. One. That’s it. Oh shit. Filming is hard with no plan. It doesn’t even come close to speaking on camera though.

Let’s get Shakespearean and break the fourth wall. Long before video bloggers were staring at the camera and telling the world every single little secret they held dear, a man named William was doing that. Someone would stand up, say fourteen lines and bam, history was made. You felt something when those last two lines were read. By time the camera came around, you didn’t look at it. You avoided that lens like the plague. If you moved past it, your gaze would just keep going and pretend like it didn’t exist. Now, you’re telling me I have to talk to it? Talk to the black glass thingy I was taught to avoid? Yeah, my SAG AFTRA card didn’t prepare me for this moment. It’s hard, like really freaking hard. I was taught to ignore it, now I focus on it. It’s weird.

After you film, you download literally hundreds of hours of footage. Once that is done, some schmuck has to sort it all and label it. If you’re not that wealthy, like myself, you have to go through it all yourself. 99 perfect of what’s there will never see the light of day. Finally when you emerge from the cave, and the shadow figures that have danced in front of you your entire life are gone, you’ve got picture lock, a film emerges, just in time for months of audio mixing, soundtracks get laid,vfx, and finally coloring All the while you’re collaborating with your partners about the nuances of random sound effects or color gradients, details that for most people would be largely insignificant. Clap clap clap, yay we are all happy with art. If at this point you’re staring at me with your jaw on the floor thinking I’m insane, I’m right there with you buddy. This is the film process in a nutshell. Now, to take this and slam it into a week, filming videos with no plan, and no storyboards, and then somehow making that into a good story that people want to see. I’m at a loss.

My entire career has been about spending ungodly amounts of time crafting the perfect story and bringing it to life. Now, that’s out the window. Instead, my goal is to capture life and all its beauty, and then turn that into an enticing story, and still somehow maintain a cinematic experience. Everything I do now is on the fly. The only planning I get is to plan out where our journey takes us. So, how do you craft a story when life itself doesn’t follow a clear concise narrative? Now it’s just pure, undiluted, life. Capturing video as it passes us by. I long for a script I can pour my world into, but that doesn’t work here.

Whether I want to admit it or not, I got lost in translation. Our videos aren’t bad, not even close. But are they as good as they can be? Also not even close. I know our talents are so beyond what we have created, but we feel like we are running a race we didn’t prepare for. Why is that, you ask? Well, because we weren’t trained for this. We were trained for a different beast, and that’s what we are trying to do. We are trying to fit this new format into our classic format. We know that is not what we should do, instead we should adapt. Learn to live in this new space, with this new medium. It isn’t easy. What once was a several months long process is now condensed into a little over a week. Just like me shoving a world onto a paper, I’m not shoving months into weeks. I suppose that’s a feat in and of itself.

I personally have struggled to put the videos together, constantly wondering if they are even worth the time. The last creative thing I created was nominated for two emmys, and this isn’t that. My inner demons rise to the surface and tell me what we are creating isn’t good enough. Which, to be honest, is true. I know we are capable of doing better, but first we have to discover ourselves again. To find our new voice and new style in this new medium. There is so much we can and want to do, so, if you stick with us, I promise that what we give you will be an amazing journey, cinematically and thematically. Walk by our sides as we find our new voice, and discover who we are in the sailing video world. Hopefully we can sail side by side Uma, Delos, and La Vagabond one day. Until then, we hope you enjoy the journey with us!

Jake