It has been more than 10 years since my cousins and I shot our first movie. Who would have guessed that what began as boys, bathrobes, and broomsticks bolting around with a camera, making movies during summer vacation; would become so much more than a hobby. None of us knew what we were doing, but we had fun. As a kid I loved to draw. And paint. And sew, tape, glue, carve, photograph and pretty much everything else that involved creating things. I also had an obsession with technology, all kinds of it. Telephones, microphones, TVs, radios, cameras, calculators, computers, tools, you name it, I was drawn to it. Legend has it that my parents once bought a toy phone to keep me away from the real one, but I wouldn’t really play with it. I wasn’t fooled, I wanted the real thing. My toys were real telephones, mics, cardboard, and costumes; Imagination was my playground.
Years passed, and one day, I discovered it:
Start>Programs>Accessories>Paint
Untitled Paint? Then it began. Finally my fascination with technology and art could overlap. I drew all kinds of stuff in MS Paint, it was a blast. I showed my dad an intricate multi layered castle board game that I had made in Paint. “We can do better than that” I seem to remember being said, or perhaps that was just a figment of my imagination… Summer 2002 (I think), he brought home a copy of Adobe Photoshop from work and introduced me to it. I played around with it for a bit and decided that it “is just a complex version of Paint. I don’t need this.” I thought to myself. Boy was I wrong, sort of.
I didn’t abandon the thing, don’t get me wrong, I was intrigued, I continued to experiment with it and see what I could use it for. Scouring the internet I stumbled across an article about lightsabers. Somewhere in its midst I recognized the PS7 icon, an eye looking through some kind of lens border. Huh. I kept digging and found a couple tutorials about making lightsabers, both mentioned Photoshop. Huh. That complicated mess was worth another look. The tutorials gave me a basic overview of how Layers worked and what Levels did. and that was all I needed.
Within the next couple weeks I had learned a lot, this is one of the experiments from that time. The first visual effects shot that I did.
I have learned a lot since those good old days, but the spirit and energy of this event still moves me along today.
