It Happens

So I'm doing this Campus Movie Fest thing at USC.  It's a five minute short film competition, that I found out the day before it started and my friend Ayush asked me if I was interested.

Now, his question was most certainly not the catalyst in what may appear to be a sudden change from physics to film this semester.  Instead I saw it as more so the straw that broke the camel's back.  Over break, I was questioning a lot of the reasons behind the direction I was taking with my life.

Science, it's not easy by any means, but once you struggle for the 4 years of your undergrad and get that degree, job security, money flow and overall stability is pretty much guaranteed in America.  The government is always going to want people who can make weapons or new high-tech computers.  And maybe in the next decade or so they'll even start caring about alternative energy research. Just maybe.

However, over the past year and a half of doing research... I've realized that while my mind finds it absolutely fascinating, my excitement comes from reading articles and presenting my results.  Not from actually performing the research.  I actually found the process to be quite tiresome and uninteresting.  Which is unfortunate because I've wanted to be a scientist since I was about seven years old.

And I could go into teaching, but I'm not the type of person who could honestly work a 9 to 5 job.  I know that, my friends know that and I think even my family knows that.  I do my best work when I'm allowed to throw all my time and energy into one project from start to finish and do it all in a burst.  If I was a professor at a university, then I'd be doing fifty different projects at one time and not really going very far with any of them for years.

There's a lot of draw to film for me.  There's the technical aspect of editing and understanding the mechanics to make a "pretty picture."  But there's also this free will that goes along with the video camera.  It's not the same as taking a picture, where you're trying to catch that one moment, which I completely respect because it's a difficult task to master.

But film is the before and after of that one moment.  You develop an entire story or emotion or idea leading up to that pinacle "snapshot" moment and then you allow the subject to relax or fade to black or in the case of M. Night Shamalan twist and contort in every which way (not always with the best of results).

Film allows me to show others the way I see the world for however brief or long it may be.  I haven't put a film together in two years after I committed myself to the realm of science.  But I've felt unsatisfied for a long time and now I'm starting over from scratch.  I'll be sure to be posting my by Tuesday, so be on the look out.  It won't be anything spectacular, just me and one of my many inspirations having fun together.