inspiration

Those Who Eventually Find The Magic

dizzyfernway, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

 

DSLRguide has been one of my favorite channels since I started messing around in YouTube. Back to front, you can really see the progression of his work as he’s continued to put content out there. He shoots a lot of his material with an entry level Canon T3i, and still comes away with some beautifully constructed and graded videos.

It’s not just the visual element I’m into, though. Most of his videos take an almost blog-like format, not a vlog as people know vlogs to be today, but more of an essay-like style, where he starts with an idea and tailors the entire video to explain it. The material ranges anywhere from How To Edit Videos (for Beginners) to not as simple as ‘follow your dreams’, and the variance is great – it means that I can keep coming back to this channel whether I want to pick up some new tricks or not. But he posted a great video recently on the struggle of inspiration and how artists constructively use discontentment to reach the gem in the rough. I’ve gone ahead and shared it above so you guys can give it a watch yourself if you like.

I feel as though artists and people living and working in creative circles definitely do have this funny relationship with discontentment. I think it’s important to step back from your work once in a while, take a look at what you’ve finished, and be happy with what you created. This end product – this poem, this video, this picture, this story – that’s you, condensed into a form outside yourself, rife with the emotion you carried through the process of creating, and here for posterity now. You made this. Be proud. But at the same time, that voice inside that demands that we express ourselves somehow almost necessitates that we not stay too long in that state of contentment – that we need to get out there and start making our next big thing. That we tear down our monuments and build something finer. That we shred stories because we can do it better this time.

It’s this beautiful vicious circle that leads you to better things if you choose to ride those waves instead of getting washed along with the tide.

So yeah. Do it.

Those Who Eventually Find The Magic

I Hear “Creamy” Being Used To Describe Paper A Lot…

dizzyfernway, , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

…and I get it, but it still sounds kind of gross sometimes.

Why am I thinking about creamy paper? Well, I started journaling in earnest the other day, despite what I said in this post from August of last year. Maybe I’m just in a different head space now. I don’t know. I talked a lot about how there was so much minutia that I’d have to lay out on a page – that I’d just end up boring myself over the sheer amount of nothing I’d be committing to what’s basically now written history. But I’m reading that now and thinking about how much we forget with every day.

As human beings, we’re all, at least, acutely aware of the fact that we don’t retain everything. But if you sit back and think about the sheer amount of dust that’s piled away in that head of yours, it’s all a little bit staggering. And I sort of rage against that aspect of, well, being, by making videos – committing certain memories into visual containers, and stringing them together into projects that I want to share with people.

But you can’t save everything. And the amount of video it would take to even try would be exhausting. Hell, just look at vloggers dropping in and out of the Youtube game nowadays.

I think my problem was that I was thinking of a handwritten journal as something for posterity outside of myself first and foremost. And while I do think it’s true that all writers write with even a subconscious want for someone to read their work outside of themselves, I’m thinking more and more recently that I do want to do this for me.

Thoughts on their own just kind of vanish into the ether after they’re had – regardless of the context, emotion, or weight behind their conception. Yeah, I can’t save them all, but I can save some. There’s something comforting – almost meditative about putting them down in this little black (fourteenfuckingdollar) Moleskine I carry around with me.

I Hear “Creamy” Being Used To Describe Paper A Lot…

Upwards

dizzyfernway, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s been exactly a week since I hiked the Stairway to Heaven in Vernon, NJ. I’ve got a mess of footage backlogged on my computer, and I’m still not completely sure what kind of video I want to come out of it.

On the other hand, it’s been about a month since the FOMO video came out.

I keep going back to the process of making that video in my head. It was this structured (though completely chaotic) process that saw me with a script in my hand, a rough shot sheet laid out, and a somewhat cohesive end product when all was said and done. Before that point, my actual method for shooting a video was just to have a camera on me while I was doing fun things – the video would show itself as long as I had enough footage.

And I feel like I shot lots on top of that mountain in Vernon. The clips I’m trying to string together definitely feel the way I felt while I was up there, if that makes any sense at all. But I guess I sort of miss the clear direction that working on FOMO had me create.

I feel as though I’ve got to keep the quality of the content I produce for the channel moving constantly up, all while juggling this drive I’ve got to just put stuff out there – to have something to show for all this time I’ve got on my hands now.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Upwards

[AUDIOCOFFEE] Sepia

dizzyfernway, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

 

Whaaaaat? Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while might remember the old AudioCoffee series I used to do on here. Well, I decided to flex the old creative muscles again and try and put that concept into video form – you can check out what I came away with in the embedded video above, or check out that and more on the Fernway Films Youtube Channel. We’re looking to get more frequent and really start growing in the community, and we’re counting on you guys to help us out. Give us a look, toss us a like, tell us what you think, share the video with people who might like it, and if you really really like what we do, maybe hit that subscribe button for us. We’d really appreciate it. 🙂

The transcribed poem is going to be in the description of the actual YouTube video, but as per tradition, I’ll go ahead and post it below, too:

Sepia

I don’t get stuck – I just think a lot.
I’m my head, I’m
constantly seeing the
world with this
sepia tint.
Not enough to
make the memories feel
ancient –
but enough to make them feel
warmer.
And it doesn’t matter if it ends up
being warmer
than it actually is.
I just don’t like having to
clench my fists when I remember.
As if the world doesn’t have enough
of that.

[AUDIOCOFFEE] Sepia

After binge-watching a certain blogger…

dizzyfernway, , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

watchingthetrains

I’ve been on an absolute Casey Neistat binge on YouTube lately. It’s downright shameful. I was never much for vloggers in general – the idea of living life constantly at the end of a camera always conjured up notions of blatant personas and dis-ingenuousness to me. But it’s hard to look at a guy like Casey and call him false towards his audience. I really enjoy the borderline voyeuristic dip into the life of someone as driven and inspiring as he is.

One particular video – don’t ask me to tell you which one, they’re all starting to blur together –  had him talking about his transition into everyday uploads as opposed to one every month or so, and how the swap helped him not only gain the following that he has now, but gave him a better idea of his voice as a content creator. Essentially, the takeaway was that his main excuse for only producing content on a monthly or even more spaced out timeframe was that he wanted the finished products to be perfect – but that mentality really just served to keep him from pumping out more.

And I don’t know, hearing it put that way just really made sense to me.

I’ve got a few not-quite-half written novels sitting on the backburner that is my hard drive, shoved off into virtual corners because I felt a little iffy about how they were coming along. I could put it some way that excuses me more, but hell, that’s really all it boils down to. I got a little worried, and dropped them in a bin, and now they’re not done. If I wasn’t so damn concerned, I could at least have some finished drafts to work off of – maybe even a finished project with my name on the cover.

So maybe it’s time for a change.

I know my track record’s not the best with this blog. At the very best, it’s little more than an online folder for me to dump my thoughts, recordings, and creative work – hoping it catches the eye of someone out there. But maybe if I really start pulling weight – posting content as frequently and consistently as I can – I’ll find a clearer voice somewhere in the muddled mess of ideas I’ve got swimming around in this skull of mine.

It is right around 1 AM, on July 13, 2016. The domain name on this blog renews in two days, on the fifteenth.

Time to put in work.

 

After binge-watching a certain blogger…