The Twenty-Two Hour Day

I have a full-time job and when I'm not there I 'm writing, shooting, or editing. It is a lively pace but can be difficult. As often as we can, my wife and I try to join our activities. On certain mornings she goes rowing on White Rock Lake, often starting out before dawn. Sometimes I drive out with her and take my camera.

These early morning shoots at White Rock Lake serve two short film projects. One is called TZANATAL, which is a collaboration between me and video-makers Jason Crow and Miles Ryan. TZANATAL is the examination of a miracle. More specifically, it focuses on the moment  when the awe in an awe-inspiring event begins to fade, and people go back to their routines. It is interesting to me that a time of awe is not sustainable. The status quo may be cracked open but it heals quick. Glorious or awful events only keep their shape a little while before the mind straightens them in memory, correcting course for a rational, "normal life." The second project featuring White Rock Lake has the un-cheery but striking title, THE PURITAN WAY OF DEATH. The voice over is a narrative poem that plays with some of the water and desert imagery in Puritan intellectual history -- some of the very ideas that lead to the start of this country.  For desert imagery, I am planning a day of shooting in Wichita Falls, a town that the arid plains will probably reclaim in my lifetime.

I'll put more about these new short films in later blog posts. What I want to discuss today is the pace of filmmaking and maintaing unrelated, full-time employment. My job type job is in retail. The plus is that I never have to take work home with me. I am free before or after shift to make movies. But the pace of balancing both often requires at least one day a week when I am woking nearly 24 hours.

I choose not to work an entire 24 hour day. For me, there is something demoralizing in it. I want the sense of one day ending so another can begin. A sense that life is not all work or not all striving to make films that get noticed. Not to say that every day is toil or joyless. I do enjoy the work of poetry and filmmaking, and, as I mentioned, my wife and I often coordinate activities - - a special pleasure. Nevertheless, there is that one day a week when I feel the need to work double-time, as it were, in order to move projects toward completion.

On the day the above video still was taken, I woke with my wife at 4:50 AM. I got my camera gear together, she her rowing gear, and we were both at our business at White Rock Lake before 6:00 AM. I shot at the lake for a couple of hours, then returned home to pick up the drone, a 4-propellor outfit that flies one of my GoPro cameras around. The city is extending the Katy Trail near my house and, although the work is not complete, a wonderful pathway between the trees has been created. I fly the drone through the trees to good effect. My work here takes about an hour.

Back home, I download the lake and drone footage. I start experimenting with the footage for the projects that I mentioned. I limit myself to an hour on this work. There is a larger, feature-length film I want to make. I vowed to do at least one thing a day toward realizing this project. And so I spend some time on the script.

By this point my wife is home from a post-rowing coffee outing with friends (this story occurs on a weekend.) We spend a bit of time together. But then I have to get ready for my job in retail. That shift begins at 3:30 in the afternoon.

When I come home from shift, it is nearly midnight. I catch up on correspondence (always tying to add to my mailing list) and then do some more work on my script. When I'm too tired to write, I look at pictures - - the footage I shot that day. Both the raw footage and the edited footage - - looking for things I may have missed on the first go. Soon enough, it is 3:00 AM.

Next morning I will be up at 8:00 AM to see my wife off to work and then look at footage again before my shift starts at the store at 11:00 AM.

Mine, of course, is not a unique situation. All the artists I know have day jobs and often those jobs are in unrelated fields, which disallows opportunities for serving employers and muses at once. I write all this down as experience, not complaint. Unless I miss my guess, mine is a typical portrait of the artist working in the U.S.A.