Project 1 Write Up

Project one for me happened by following a set of curious synchronicities of interest. Over the summer I fixed what had become a terrible sleep cycle. I had trouble in the spring (after several illnesses) getting up in the morning. To the point of getting to bed at 7pm one night so that if I slept 12 hours I would still wake up to my alarm clock ready for class at 8am. Instead I slept through my alarm clocks until 3:30 in the afternoon.
I began to fear going to sleep fretting that I may never wake up at the time that I wanted. Over the summer I was running a bit in the mornings and walking everywhere in Portland. This exercise kept me from wanting to smoke cigarettes. It also made me want to eat better, do more, and all of a sudden I was getting sleep, breathing fine, and not needing 3 or 4 cups of coffee to get me through the day. Oh Yeah, I smoked, had a pretty bad diet, and drank tons of coffee every day.
These habits had developed over the last three years slowly and I never thought too much about equating these habits with my sleep and sickness problems. Pretty stupid. I was glad to have solved my own health problems without thinking too much about it and had a great summer.
The first week of school rolls around and I decided to join the human behavior group. I regretted not joining the hands-on building group but remedied this later in the term. I chose to think practically rather than romantically about human behavior because in the past I had been so romantic about it all. (writing stories, making movies etc). I sat down to think about what would be practical in addressing human behavior and it occurred to me that taking a look at the brain and how it worked might give me some insight. I hunted around on Ted.com for videos on neuroscience and what a goldmine that site is!!! After watching many I ran out and bought Oliver Sach’s book “Musicophelia.” I had also taken a liking to Jill Bolte Taylor’s examination of a stroke and what it revealed about the brain’s spiritual sense of connection and separation correlating to hemispheres. Soon what started as a small amount of research on the way the brain works turned into an obsession. A whole new angle or lens for me to observe the world and human behavior with! My junior year the obsession had come in the techniques of Buddhist and zen meditation and the mystic poetry The Upanishads. I became very obsessed with the idea of connecting the understanding of this organ that controls us with a better understanding of existence. Its fair to say I became romantic about my notions of discovery.
The love of my project research had me branching out to new articles which branched me to new articles and videos and books and magazines and of course I needed to stay awake and focused for all of this so maybe I should just have a cigarette and drink coffee and stay up late. I’ll just get up early and drink more coffee it’ll be fine.
That’s how I got sick. I had a bad cold which turned into swine flu as well. It was not the strongest sickness by any means but you better believe it threw off my whole sleep cycle again. I despaired. Whats the use. I can’t do anything right. Blah Blah Blah helpless blah blah.
The point of all this is that What occurred to me while I was sick was oh gee, I fixed all these habits over the summer how could I have fallen back into them. I kept researching. I bought a book called In fitness and In Health. It explained the direct correlations between compounds in our foods and a healthy happy brain. It explained the connection with energy and happiness to exercise and that one can’t work without the other. It explained how in order to be happy and have good relationships with friends and family you had to be in the moment but to do that you had to be healthy. It was this book that had me get out of my head again and back into my body.
Musicophelia had led me to a fascination with out “glitches” and I began to wonder about how machine-like we really are. This led me to a new obsession with science fiction and as midterms rolled around I could only listen to Del Tha Funkee Homosapian, Kid Cudi, and the master David Bowie. I also watched star wars and The Fifth element all the time. I began to despair again over the existential worth of existence as the love of mystery in my world view turned into a belief that we have peaked out the foodchain, and dusted the skies to a point that all life on this planet will die unless we learn to repurpose everything.
I do still wonder about that.
But a great thing happened to me while I was sick and struggling. I came home late one night from the studio and threw in my VHS of wayne’s world (which I hadn’t seen in like 6 years) and laughed my ass off ! !! I realized that no matter what, whether we all need to change our lives to save this planet, whether disasters come wave after wave and we have to think about survival more and more, we still need to laugh. And that as wrapped up in an apocalyptic worldview as I had been by reading up on different things (and science fiction which reallllly makes you paranoid) I could still laugh, the great human joy and relief! The acknowledgment of one’s mortality! Joy! It was the only medicine to get someone to take care of themselves and go running and eat right.
So, sick (but getting better), still alone too often and self-absorbed in my project I set out to make something simple and funny for my midterm project. I decided that helping the class and my friends (all college students) not take themselves so seriously was a good angle. I created storyboards for each of the 22 set-ups from a scene in the movie Rules of Attraction and thought that would be a great technical challenge for me to replicate the shots well enough for the design of a good spoof. I then thought up a few different scenarios. Basically I wanted one person to walk through their day happy and calm because they ate right, worked out, loved other people and life and take that to an extreme that someone could laugh about. I then thought the other could be exhausted and awful, and that at the end they would interact and it would be sad/funny. This is sort of what I did. However, having problems shooting had me reshoot once and with a worse camera and with my friends instead of actors. That being said, on a technical level the rules of attraction spoof could have been much better but story/concept/editing/acting wise I felt alright about what I got. It was good enough to give me the courage to start writing again everyday and when I edited it and watched it it made me laugh and I was glad to have come to such a joyous conclusion after such a struggle with things not as fun.
If I could do it again I would plan a whole short film around a funny tragic character who has trouble socializing and speaking well because he/she is tired and stressed unnecessarily from a bad diet and lack of sleep.