march 1, 2009: "Froshlife" by shang

Sure, I had always enjoyed making videos in high school with my friends, but I had never seriously considered film as a career until I participated in a school-wide film festival my freshman year at college. It was my first experience as an actual director as well as my first time running through all the motions of film production - from storyboarding and scheduling to color correction and green screen keying. Now with an excuse to skip class, we spent two weeks filming nonstop summer shots in the dead of winter, which we quickly found out can be quite... excruciating. It wasn't surprising that it wasn't long before we all despised the project with every ounce of our being still left unfrozen, and yet deep down we all had the same unspoken understanding that despite it all, it would be well worth it in the end. It definitely was worth it – enough so to convince me that film was what I wanted to do from that point on.

Right before the big screening, each production crew could be heard bragging about their own finished product. One girl was especially egregious in her zealous praise, and as it turned out, I was lucky enough to have her sit right next to me. I’ve always been prone to getting nervous cramps before a big event, and this was no different. It didn’t help that our film was to be one of the last screened. By the time it was presented, my stomach had cramped so badly from nervousness that I couldn’t even sit up straight.

As soon as it began, the whispers started, and my already dying stomach did another painful flip – by now I didn’t know whether to feel scared, excited, or just extremely in pain. I was too lost in my own world to even tell if the audience laughed or cried in the right places. And then… silence. It seemed to last forever. The film had ended, and yet the room was wrapped in a cloak of total quietude. I looked over to the annoying girl from the opposing crew beside me and saw the expression on her face. Only an hour earlier she had been in a passionate craze over her own team’s video, and now she seemed completely mesmerized, or maybe just furious, at the creation of another’s. Then, she began to clap. Others caught on, and immediately the cavernous, silent room erupted into thunderous applause. It was at that moment that it really dawned on me that to create film is to create something bigger than life – something big enough to move people, to arouse their emotions, even bring them to tears. It can crash through even the most resilient of the barriers we erect to touch our souls, reminding us of simple things in life that truly matter to us. To me, it was definitely a form of art worthy of pursuing.

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