The Up Minute

Life's made of minutes. One minute you're up, the next minute you're down. The good thing about a down minute is that the next minute you'll be up again. I forget where I heard that from.

I do have much weighing on my mind. Mostly about Monster Cops and what needs to be done next. I've sort of been fighting for time to work on it. My timeline is shrinking, and as usual I pressure myself to get more done than I can. I have to come to terms that there just isn't enough time, not when you have to juggle everyone else's schedule as well as you're own, especially when you're not paying anyone. Welcome to nobudget DIY moviemaking.

The past few days have been a very fast succession of up and down minutes. Just in the past few hours it's been a very long down minute. I normally do a good job of staying positive, but just too much to juggle, and the normal frustrations of moviemaking. We all do it. We create something and then we begin to doubt ourselves. Doubt that our creations are even worth anything or that your ideas and dreams are even going anywhere. That's the down minute I was stuck in as I was cleaning the kitchen I was entirely too tired to clean, and I still had the Monster Cops agenda on my mind.

For the past few days we'd actually been checking the local Fox TV station to see if they were playing the Midway Wicked Woods commercial I had worked on. Occasionally flipping over to the station to see if it would pop up. I saw nothing but commercials for every other haunted house. Tonight as I was scrubbing our George Foreman Grill (yes we have one and we use it often) I looked up at the TV in the kitchen when I heard my voice over.

I'd done work on commercials, made videos and segments, seen my work on TV before, but tonight it was a welcome sight to see this particular commercial. I really love the voice over work I did on the ad, very proud of it. And although I'd done this kind of thing before, it was still nice to see something I produced be broadcast to a wider audience. It always feels good to finally get your creation to where it deserves to be, in front of people.

It put me back on an up minute. Suddenly cleaning the kitchen and scrubbing the grill wasn't so bad. Hey at least I have a kitchen and a roof over my head. There are people in this world who have much less. At least I can say I've put ads on TV, I've made short films that have played in fests, and I've got a movie on DVD. I'm actually very lucky. I mean I do have a George Foreman Grill after all.