My day job is as a videographer for an esteemed academic institution in New York City. I shoot and edit videos, mostly of faculty who are engaged in research. Some faculty do work and research in far off places like Brazil and Uganda. It’s wonderful work that I love. The only downside is that they can’t send me to Brazil or Uganda to shoot the faculty at work there, so I rely on using the “Ken Burns effect” with stills to liven up the faculty talking heads. The videos tell straightforward narratives.
The last couple of months I’ve been collaborating on a music video with an artist friend.
The music is avant-garde jazz and the video is experimental. I shot most of the footage and am editing it, but I don’t consider myself the director; I’m relying heavily on my friend because a) it’s her project and her vision and b) experimental is not in my comfort zone. Without a narrative, without a beginning, middle, and end (doesn’t necessarily have to be in that order), I’m pretty much lost.
I’ve always imagined A Life’s Work as deviating from the by-the-books documentary mold, but I never thought of it as an experimental documentary, either.
I’ve been at my day job for about a year, and over that period I’ve learned a lot and found solutions to problems, solutions that I’m using as I continue to work on ALW. I’ve also made shooting and editing choices at the day job because I need to work quickly, or because I don’t have the resources, or because it’s “good enough.” I worry that kind of decision-making will carry over, unconsciously, into ALW. I don’t have this concern with the music video. Maybe because I don’t spend as much time on it as I do on the work at my day job? Or maybe because experimental is out of my comfort zone and I need to take some lessons from an artist who works more abstractly so that I can bring some of that into ALW? Or maybe because I know I’ll never get that experimental, whereas it’s possible, in my efforts to get the film done, I’ll take the easy route, the “good enough” route.
I feel like I’m walking a tight rope. We’ll see how I do.
Do you earn your living in a field related to your art? How do you let the good stuff from your day job into your work and keep the bad stuff out? What other challenges do you face?