A New Journey Begins

As artists, we need to continually be in creative motion. We need to be involved in a handful of projects at any given moment so that we stay on path and remain artistically fulfilled. In other words, if one project doesn’t work out or doesn’t quite take off, then you have these other projects you’re working on. Conversely, if one project takes off and then that chapter finally comes to an end, then you have other projects to jump into. Let’s say you’re in a series and then it goes on hiatus for the summer. Cool. Now get back into class and put up some new scenes or shoot a short film over the summer based upon that script you wrote while you were shooting your series. Staying in creative motion is a cool, built-in defense mechanism. An artistic shield that keeps you moving forward from one project to the next.

I say all this because a few days ago, I outlined my next film script in 32 minutes! I am a huge fan of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror and my script will pay homage to these great shows. I am so excited and proud of myself because as soon as the idea flashed across my mind, I jumped on it and didn’t question it. I didn’t throw away my idea because it was too big or too crazy or too this or too that. If you remember, my first blog entry of 2017 was a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”:

To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,–and our first thought, is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

I detected that gleam of light that flashed across my mind and jumped on the opportunity to outline my script. In 32 minutes. That is the power of following your genius. I can’t wait to write the script and shoot it in the near future. I’m clear that I am the protagonist in this. The focus of the story. And I want to go the other way in the casting of my co-star. And my instinct is right about how I want to cast my co-star and present this casting as the paragon of what I’m looking at in my story.

Creation is definitely tied to the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary definition of “Imagination”:

We would define imagination to be the will working on the materials of memory; not satisfied with following the order prescribed by nature, or suggested by accident, it selects the parts of different conceptions, or objects of memory, to form a whole more pleasing, more terrible, or more awful, than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature.

And I’m excited to get to work!

Until next time, keep Chasing The George!

P.S. I outlined my script in 32 minutes and it took me 32 minutes to write this blog entry! How synchronistic is that?!