Stepping Back – Accepting Amateurism

Project Brief 3 has been a stressful project for a perfectionist like me. I had given myself the task of understanding the After Effects interface and, as is to be expected, that made work long and mistake ridden. This week I was unable to go to the workshop so I decided to ask family members about my film and what I should do to make it better.

I find at one point or another during editing the content starts to lose meaning. Your brain has seen this information so many times that the editing feels slow and the narrative direction seems warped. After spending so much time cutting up and rearranging my interview I found that I had reached that point. I couldn’t entirely tell whether the narrative made sense, because I had seen the entire interview, not just my cuts. The possibility of my own assumption as to knowledge that was reaching the audience being different from the actual content was a worry so I showed my work to my family members.

I was showing them for another reason too, however. Working on the scribble effect in After Effects had been an experiment and I knew it looked unprofessional. Showing them was a step back from my work to remind myself were I was. With setting myself the task of understanding multiple new pieces of software its impossible that the result would be perfect. This was a in-between step that needed to be taken and I needed to come to terms with the fact that, to expand as a practitioner, I need to make mistakes. I need to make unprofessional content to reach a professional level.

As I let the different members of my family look at my work, giving feedback about the flow and the animated scribbles I felt a sense of relief. My perfectionism was effecting my work ethic with an overwhelming sense of dread, and getting other peoples opinions let me take a breath and see how I could change the direction of my editing. Just like everyone else entering into this degree I have high expectations of myself. My mind is constantly in the clutches of my future plans and the knowledge that my place within the industry will be a difficult one for me to carve out. It is difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that mistakes do not show my inability to achieve, but maps out the way forward for me. If I ignore these projects, with all their imperfections, I will have no path forward. I will stagnate.

As I restart work on my project with fresh eyes I am looking to be forgiving of myself, to allow myself my mistakes and see them as the map that they are. I am not an animator, so my sketches will, for now, only be sketches. The flow will be effected by the different software I have used to create makeshift effects. In the last 2 months I have had to learn Premier Pro, After Effects, Audition, Photoshop, and Lightroom, which can be seen in my work… but soon it wont be that way, my work with smoothen out, and for me to move past what I am now I need to work to the best of my current abilities and seek out my future, not in my dreams, but within my skill. I need to finish this work and understand that it wont be industry standard because, if it was, there would be no reason for me to be in this degree anyway. I must accept, and welcome, the fact that I am, for now, an amateur.