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Are We There Yet?

I am absolutely loving the “when-do-we-pop-the-champagne” postings from Lane and Steve last week. Boy oh boy, do they hit home. Three and a half years into making a documentary film (and still shooting!), you start to get emails like this one from friends who have been helping you along the way: “I was just thinking about how I was single when we started the movie, have dated two people, and got married to a third before the movie was finished. Not that I’m saying you’re doing anything wrong, just that a lot can happen.”
No offense taken. And mazel tov!

But yeah—a lot can happen in three and a half years. In a “character-based” documentary, you certainly hope for lots to happen. For arcs to form. For transformations to occur. But apparently 3.5 years, though merely a blip in the timelines of some documentary productions, is an eternity according to certain acquaintances who make TV commercials. Or pastry. Cue the wide-eyed stares, clucking tongues and shaking heads!

It’s certainly hard to keep momentum and enthusiasm up for a project over the long term. And hard to balance the stress with gratitude.

I’m in the thick of it right now, gearing up to shoot quite a bit in October, writing another round of grant proposals (please, let us get just one!), and trying to get our web presence up-to-date again after a bit of a post-fundraiser-party-over-extended-producer-induced hiatus.

But as Werner Herzog once said (in an anecdote courtesy of Elizabeth Gilbert), “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist … now stop whining and get back to work.”

He’s right. For all the “dark days” that come with the territory, I do feel incredibly fortunate to have cobbled together a method with which to pursue the career of my own choosing. And even if they don’t involve champagne, I’ve certainly had my share of moments that are bright and sparkling reminders of that good luck and achievement.
For two weeks this past August, I taught Screenwriting and Video Production to 12-17 year-old kids at a sleepaway arts camp in Connecticut called YPI (Young People’s Institute). They also offer Photography, Dance, Acting, Creative Writing, Musical Theater, Songwriting, Poetry and Drawing. I would have died to go to this camp when I was a kid. It was my second summer teaching there.

I could go on for days about all the lessons I’ve learned from camp, but there is a particularly crystalline moment that stands out for me from YPI 09.

It was Friday night at the end of week one, and I was sticky and sweaty from having hauled the projector and a mess of cables across the grassy lawns of the boarding school campus. I had (barely) slept in our classroom the night before, untangling some technical issues with file exports and waiting on renders. I hadn’t yet recovered from my apartment search or the fundraising party or the whirlwind wedding in Wisconsin the week before. I was a hot mess.

Fortunately, nobody could see (or smell) me from my perch in the projector room. But I could see them.

Everyone at the camp was assembled in the theater, after a full day of watching presentations of all the other classes’ work. Film would present last. You might think a group of adolescents in a hot auditorium would be squirrelly and impossible under these circumstances, but they weren’t. A buzz had been building. They could hardly wait to see the films.

I looked down at the camp from the projector room. My students went to the front of the auditorium to introduce their projects—a western and a mockumentary!—which they had collaborated to write, act in, shoot, and edit in just three days.

The lights went down. The films played across the big screen, the musical scores reverberated through the huge room. The audience laughed at the right places. They cheered at the end like we’d won the Super Bowl.

And the look on the young filmmakers’ faces as they trailed out of the auditorium was, as BeBe would say, “The Deal.” Sheer pride and accomplishment and joy. Their movies were brilliant and off-the-wall. In the privacy of my little overhang, sheer exhaustion gave in to overwhelming emotion. What a cool thing, to be able to help facilitate that kind of experience for young people who are just bursting with creative ideas. And a screening like that is, of course, what every filmmaker dreams about and hopes to enjoy themselves one day.

Nothing against drawing or dance or any of the rest, but film to me is simply the ultimate art form. It has the potential to synthesize all the others and come out with something greater than the sum of its parts. For all the headaches and scraping by, there is nothing else that I would rather spend the rest of my life trying to get really, really good at. Y’know, besides being a loving and patient human being and all that.

Oh, and I might also recommend a champagne-like alternative for those nights where you’re just starting to hit your stride around 1 am—for when there’s so much to do and everyone else is out having fun or getting sleep and you feel the need to treat yourself somehow: Kombucha. Oh yes, the anti-oxidant-rich health-giving food-coop-hippie-staple fountain-of-youth super-food “wonder drink.” It took me a while to acquire the taste for it, and the gunk that floats in it (it’s supposed to be there!) isn’t so appetizing, but now I’m officially hooked. Unfortunately, it’s not much cheaper than champagne, but it does come with bubbles. I swear it gives me an extra kick of energy and focus—even as the fermentation offers the slightest hint of a buzz. My favorite is the grape flavor. Pour into stemmed glass for added effect. Cheers!

Emily Branham is a filmmaker living in Brooklyn, New York.

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