I make videos for a living, and I’d like to think I’ve got some skill in the arena. I absolutely love what I do, and this means I also make videos for fun. So I’ve had a bit of a problem on my hands for some time now. If you do any creative work, you may have found yourself in the same pickle, and I don’t envy you one bit.

A passion is a wonderful thing, but making your living by your passions presents some pretty unique obstacles. For example, my head is always brewing one thousand new, wonderful ideas, from the documentary on live action role-play I’m currently babysitting in preproduction to the time-lapse exploration of DC I’d like to complete, but after eight hours of working on somebody else’s film five days a week, coming home to work on my own is often the last thing on my mind. There are errands that need to be run instead and more pressing business to attend to then the several hours it would take to log my own footage or research a better microphone in my price range. Yet, the ideas still come, and it wouldn’t be a passion if I didn’t feel compelled to act on my ideas. It’s the curse of the passionate.

I’ve written in the past about my filmic frustrations, and while I know those words were little more than the fit of a petulant and impatient toddler refusing to eat broccoli, there was some truth behind it. I don’t want to make the kinds of films most people make. But what I didn’t realise was that I actually did. Well, I wanted the same production value. I wanted the decent budgets and the generous timeline and the collaborative process and a little bit of the film festival ego stroking. To put it another way, because I make my living doing video production and postproduction, I know more than the average joe about everything from timecodes and framerates to solid state recorders and mini mols. I know how to frame a shot and I know how to edit for continuity and I know how to mic an actor. So why don’t I do it in my own films?

That’s a complicated question. To make a high-value work, you need a lot of things (e.g., aforementioned budgets, timelines, and collaborative geniuses), and I’ve been wanting the high-value work without putting in the effort. Take my most recent film idea: a video log, or vlog. It’s not a novelty; I’ve been blogging for years and don’t plan on stopping now, I’m already actively involved in social networks, and I’d love nothing more than to jump on the new media bandwagon. I travel a lot, I’m interested in video, and I think I have something to say. Sounds like a perfect fit, right? So why did it take me a whole year to get it together? I didn’t got to the store.

More specifically, I didn’t got to the store because I was sure they’d be out of milk. Did I call to check? No. Did I go to the dairy counter and ask? No. Did I decide I could eat cereal sans milk? No. I just stopped buying groceries in case there wasn’t any milk at the store. It seems absurd when you look at the analogy, but in my brain it seemed perfectly logical to not bother even starting a film if I didn’t think I’d have any of the resources required to “do it right.” I wouldn’t bother to shoot anything because I knew the audio would be subpar, the framing off (it’s hard to shoot yourself without being able to see your shot!), the exposure wacky, the music mixed wrong, the graphics shoddy, the story weak, and any number of self-depricating reasons I could manufacture to put off ever starting. Then I realised how insane it was to stop making movies of any variety because I couldn’t light it well. Hello?! the critical studies side of me shouted to the rest of my mind. What you say is more important than how you say it. True, but instead of saying something, anything, I stopped talking at all to avoid my stutters and mispronunciations, or in filmic terms I stopped making video to avoid the inevitable concessions I would have to make if I wanted to get the project done. This was not just an inconvenience because, as Chris Wanstrath can tell you of creative work, when you kill off your side projects, you’re effectively killing your joy.

My standards were bogus. First of all, this is the Internet we’re talking about. That’s my audience: the people who gave us the Star Wars Kid and Snakes on a Plane. This is the land of Rick Roll’d, All Your Base, and Two Girls, One Cup. People talk into the camera for eleven minutes straight and still get subscribers. Dooce writes about putting her baby in a cardboard box and has one of the most well-known mommy blogs out there. Needing to have the next great indie sleeper hit before I’d put it on YouTube is the definition of bogus. It’s still true that I don’t want to make Must Love Dogs, but I’ve decided to let go of the production quality. Second of all, thinking I’ll ever have the time, means, and will to devote to my side projects is idealistic to the point of insanity. It’s more important that I make movies again than it is that they be the ideal movies in my head, since that state is pretty much unachievable anyway. Comparing what I am about to make to some ungrounded idea in my head is ridiculous. So, I’ve lowered the bar. Make a movie, production value be damned. Let it be out of focus. Let it be shaky and noisy and grainy. Who cares if it’s only roughly edited, or if the music doesn’t fit? My prioritisation was all out of whack. First, make the movie, then worry about how it looks. Move the energy, make more films, and improve that way, not by painstakingly deliberate scrutiny. What my film actually does counts infinitely more than what it could have done, and what it says is what matters, not what I said it would say. Spend more time focusing on what you’ll be doing on camera than what you’re doing with the camera.

Once I stopped cutting myself off, my vlog started to pick up speed. Having actually made a few of them has only reaffirmed how much more meaningful it is to have gotten them done that having them golden beautiful gems of genius that lived only in my head. It’s been a journey, and I’d like to share the first of what I hope will be many. I do “know better” than the shitty camerawork and crappy audio, but that’s not what matters. I did it. That’s what counts. With any luck, I’ll have learned enough about bogus standards, absurd reactions, and the importance of regularly nurturing my creative spirit that I’ll keep on doing it and it will keep on counting. That’s the dream.