100 feet of light

It starts now! Just got the first roll of 16mm film from B&H Photo. Now begins the fun, impractical and very expensive hobby of shooting 16mm (and syncing sound to it). Next step is to get an old camera.

I recently read something in Mark Forster’s Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management about “commitments vs. interests”. (I know, I know, another time-management book.) The idea is that it’s easy to have a laundry list of things you’re interested in, but if you want to get anywhere with any of them, it’s good to focus on one (or one at a time) and pour yourself into it with daily effort.

The 15th James River Film Festival–especially the luminous films of Ken and Azazel Jacobs–came along just in time to remind me that what needs real attention is film. And not film that gets converted to video and shown on an LCD projector. Real, fragile, tedious, gorgeous, bright 16mm film. I’ve always stuck with Super 8 and felt like 16mm was too out of my league, too hard to edit, too expensive. No more! Time to dive into it and practice. Until I have the right equipment, “daily effort” may mean selling weird electronic detritus on eBay to raise funds for a camera. Or it may even mean figuring out how to get a film grant so I can shoot some small black-and-white documentaries. A month after the film festival and I’m still obsessed. I hope to post more progress here soon.