jpommier

Lots of fun! Excellent work! I really like that last shot.

This is another existential filmmaker post spawned by a few recent threads. You've been warned. Also spoilers for a film.
Recently I saw a film that articulated a question I didn't know I was asking. That film was "Frank" the story of a talentless, wannabe songwriter/keyboard player who is recruited to join a band led by a man who wears a fake head at all times. You might have seen it floating around Netflix, and maybe you even disregarded it because it sounds gimmicky, or the poster looked like quirky nonsense, but I decided on a lark to watch it, and it was absolutely devastating. The "protagonist" of the film seems like a nice, sweet guy in the beginning, until he starts exploiting Frank's talent by secretly filming and posting videos of their rehearsals to youtube, eventually earning them a slot at SXSW. He tells Frank "People love us." to which Frank replies "People love us?" The pressure of the show, and pleasing an audience cause Frank to have a nervous breakdown. This film resonated with me in a major way. I watched it once, over a week ago, and I'm still thinking about it. I thought about how fame and success never occurred to Frank. He just created music for the art and expression of it, and when faced with the pressure of a major debut performance at a festival, he creates a terrible song that he thinks is his "most likeable song ever". The entire experience breaks him.
The whole film forced me to think of my goals as a filmmaker. I've wanted to be a filmmaker since I saw the Making Of Jurassic Park on TV when I was six years old. In high school, I got serious about having a career in film after seeing Pulp Fiction and El Mariachi. I then discovered the French New Wave and John Cassavetes, and I wanted to make honest, devastating, achingly truthful and beautiful masterpieces of cinema. I made my first feature at 21...and now I'm almost 28, with not many shorts, and not a single follow-up feature since my first. My first feature was extremely disappointing to me. I was obsessed with it for years, and even tried to make a quasi-remake of it, which was a disaster. I've been struggling to come up with an idea for another film that I like. I haven't been able to finish even a first draft in two and a half years. I used to be able to crank out script after script, draft after draft with all the blind confidence in the world. And since my feature, I've come to the realization that I only really have a few basic themes that I keep going back to, and I keep trying to force myself to think of something different, to be a different filmmaker, but I'm not. And now I'm questioning my goals.
I've wanted a career making indie films so I wouldn't have to work a crappy day job. I've been working the same crappy day job for almost four years straight, except for the nine months where I moved to LA to pursue my career. I could't even find a day job to pay the rent. Toys R Us interviewed me twice and wouldn't hire me to work in the stock room during the holidays. I sold a bunch of my lenses, and the DVX100 I didn't use anymore, for rent money. I moved back to my hometown a year ago, broken and miserable. A year later I'm in a great relationship with a woman I'm moving in with in a month. She also has a three year old daughter, and though I thought I never wanted kids, now I can see myself raising this child with my girlfriend, and marrying her. We both see it. She's extremely supportive of my filmmaking, and doesn't want me to give up. But I just feel discouraged. Discouraged that my films will never look good enough, have good enough acting or be important enough. And I still want to make films, but I'm wondering why I want, or need, to be successful at it. Before I got "serious" about it, I used to have fun making movies. The same group of friends and I would get together and film shorts on the weekends. Most people here I'm sure had the same experience. I think all I want now is to form a troupe of actors/crew members and make cheap movies in our spare time for fun, and perhaps never even show them to anyone else. I'm accepting that I'm nowhere near the level of talent as Francois Truffaut, Paul Thomas Anderson, or David Lynch, and it's okay. I'm giving up on success. I just want to make shit.

This is a recent short that I did. My wife and I were originally making it to use as a sort of announcement that we were having a baby (only our immediate family knew about it) but I also wanted it to stand alone as a fun little short. After shooting the bulk of the footage my wife went into labor the next day so we had to do all of the quick zoom/close-up shots weeks after. Better late than never!
 
Since I was unfortunately in the video, I had to rely on my wife for shooting most of it and when we couldn't operate the camera ourselves, we called over my Dad and a friend in the middle of the night to help us shoot. All three of them had absolutely zero experience shooting anything and as a testament to the NX1, they all learned the basics of the camera reasonably quickly.
 

This is a recent short that I did. My wife and I were originally making it to use as a sort of announcement that we were having a baby (only our immediate family knew about it) but I also wanted it to stand alone as a fun little short. After shooting the bulk of the footage my wife went into labor the next day so we had to do all of the quick zoom/close-up shots weeks after. Better late than never!
 
Since I was unfortunately in the video, I had to rely on my wife for shooting most of it and when we couldn't operate the camera ourselves, we called over my Dad and a friend in the middle of the night to help us shoot. All three of them had absolutely zero experience shooting anything and as a testament to the NX1, they all learned the basics of the camera reasonably quickly.
 

This is a recent short that I did. My wife and I were originally making it to use as a sort of announcement that we were having a baby (only our immediate family knew about it) but I also wanted it to stand alone as a fun little short. After shooting the bulk of the footage my wife went into labor the next day so we had to do all of the quick zoom/close-up shots weeks after. Better late than never!
 
Since I was unfortunately in the video, I had to rely on my wife for shooting most of it and when we couldn't operate the camera ourselves, we called over my Dad and a friend in the middle of the night to help us shoot. All three of them had absolutely zero experience shooting anything and as a testament to the NX1, they all learned the basics of the camera reasonably quickly.
 

Hello,
I wanted to just share a short travel film that I shot on the NX1 (pre 1.20 firmware) of my trip to the southern part of Iceland.
http://vimeo.com/117027464
I was initially looking at a GH4 to replace my old 7D but opted to wait for the NX1. I wanted another hybrid camera that could do a decent job with stills and video. So far, I'm really enjoying the camera! There are a lot of things to like and a few things to loathe (i.e., rolling shutter, oh my god!).
I just wanted to share and say thank you for covering the NX1 so thoroughly on the site.
Jeremy