My Life?

So, I attempted to participate in "Life in a Day" (no really, I did!) but honestly the only thing it proved to me was that I am a person who is meant to be behind the camera and not in front of it. I filmed throughout the day, trying to capture the mundane and the exciting (everything from my nightly yoga routine to installing art at the inner harbor) but I couldn't capture anything the way I'd envisioned. Lack of pre-production, lack of an actual video camera (I used my digital point and shoot which features a simple video option), and my embarrassing tendency to stutter on camera all got together and wrecked my footage.

Under normal circumstances, I love shooting documentary, I just don't want to be the subject. But, maybe, this is a new challenge for me to face. I could feed off this massive video blog culture and attempt to document my life on a similar, grander scale. I haven't heard of anyone writing their memoirs to film- I could give it a go.

The trouble with film is that it simply cannot lie. When the Lumiere brothers invented the first film camera, it is said that they discovered the fountain of youth. For the first time a person could truly be immortalized; not just their smile in a photo, but every element of them that makes them familiar- their walk, their hands, their expressions, all captured for the public to study.

That is a microscope which I am not prepared to live under, though many people have embraced their immortalization via YouTube and reality shows and such (a quick digression- if you haven't seen We Live in Public yet, please, do. Currently on Netflix instant). I am realizing that much of my life is led in secret. I love spending time alone, sorting through ideas in my mind that end up as songs and sculptures and prose. I just don't feel comfortable confessing my thoughts, my loves, my fears, to an anonymous camera to be forever written into the memory banks of the internet. I'm not strong enough to be so vividly vulnerable.

Maybe that's why I should try.

But, in any case, here are some small samplings of the larger body of footage I captured over the course of the day, for your entertainment, for Kevin Macdonald's judgement, but mostly for my memories.