Doc U is “a 15-week nuts and bolts documentary mentorship project at SPNN”, but more importantly it was the opportunity to do something I had always wanted to do - learn to shoot and edit video.
I am no great finisher of things. The potential of an unfinished thing has always been more enticing to me than the idea of the finished thing. But clinging to all of those lovely unrealized possibilities comes at the price of never finishing anything, and never moving on. Never making a second thing that’s a little better than the first, etc.
In July we had a crash course in camera work and then it was time for action. After doing my primary filming, I sat down to look at my footage and proceeded to learn a great many things from my mistakes.
There was a part of me (the part of me that starts an RPG over once I get a better sense of the game engine) that wanted to go back and reshoot everything. But it wasn’t practical, didn’t work within my project timeline and budget. In a way I am glad for this. It forced me to look within the shots that I thought were totally horrible and find the bits that were good. To comb through and face my mistakes and say “oh, but this part here is kind of nice actually, let’s pull that.” Because making mistakes is a part of learning a new skill, and as difficult as it is for me to grasp, does not mean the entire effort was a failure.
Last week, as I sat in an edit suite at SPNN fine tuning the final cut of my documentary, I re-envisioned my entire project at every turn. I was overwhelmed by the ways I could have done better, new insights appeared out of nowhere with no time left to give them due attention. The urge to start over from the beginning was so strong. In many previous creative endeavors, I have given in to that urge. But this time, I had a deadline.
A deadline can be a powerful motivator. Last November, I finished a rough draft of a novel for NaNoWriMo, and it was my greatest triumph of will in years. The whole point of that adventure is to reach your 50,000-word objective in 30 days. This is largely possible due to the power of the deadline. A deadline in a creative project makes you take stock of the project as a whole and decide what is worth your time. It makes you sacrifice things in the name of reaching your goal.
As I exported my final cut last week I watched the progress bar, thinking about all the things I wouldn’t be able to change after that point. I asked myself if this was the best I could do with what I was given, and I wasn’t really able to decide.
It was at this moment I remembered a line from something Neil Gaiman wrote to motivate NaNoWriMo authors. He discusses a similar thing, this “ugh my project is horrible and awful and I can’t bear to go on” feeling. He laments to his editor, who reminds him that he has that feeling every time, and that all of her other clients do as well.
The line that stuck with me was: “I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.”
It made me think of directors cuts. It made me imagine artists wincing as they looked at acclaimed works, wishing they had the chance to go back and fix just this one thing. It made me wonder if any creative person ever feels like their finished thing is perfect.
There’s a part of me that will probably always think I could have done a little bit better. But there is a bigger part of me that is really amazingly proud to have finished. And all of me is ready to take what I learned in my Doc U project and use it to make my next project even better.
Last spring I ran a 5k after 32 years of being sedentary. It took a few months to get there, and in the end it wasn’t especially pretty, but the point is that I did it. I finished the race. When I forced myself to exit Adobe Premiere for the last time, it felt a lot like wheezing my way across that finish line. Beautiful and satisfying in its imperfection. Bravely accepting the choices that were made. Walking away better equipped to take the next step on the next adventure.
