What "Starfishing" Means to Me and Various Happenings In My Life

In my Behind the Scenes posts for "Starfishing", I mentioned that I wanted to write a fourth part that involved the more personal elements of what my film meant to me and what I hoped it would mean to others.  I've decided to take a different approach to discussing those things based on some things that have happened to me lately, so this is really as close to a Behind the Scenes of "Starfishing" Part 4 that I'm going to get.

I'll start with a question.

Have you ever been scammed?

It's a horrible feeling, and one I experienced for the first time this week.  It was about 9:50pm and I was rushing to get to Publix before it closed so I could buy some groceries for the week.  I had spent a little bit too much money as of late so I knew I needed to get some cheap groceries that could last me the week.  I made it in time and got about $20 worth of food, feeling good about myself.  On the way out the door a man stopped me and asked for $3 for a bus ticket.  He explained to me that his car was broken down and he had to meet his daughter somewhere.  I would have loved to help him out for the small price of $3, but I was out of cash.  I told him I was sorry, and started to walk away but he continued to ask if there was anything that I could do.  He said he was running out of time and that no one would help him.  I really wished I could have helped him, because he seemed genuinely worried and he was only asking for $3.  At this point he pulled out a Publix gift card and asked me if I would buy it off of him.  I told him again that I had no money, so he offered to go into Publix with me to try to cash it out.  But Publix was closed, and the door was being guarded by a police officer, so we couldn't go it.  Finally he remembered that there was an ATM down the street and begged me to please buy the gift card from him.  Finally I agreed and walked with him to the ATM and withdrew $20.  On the way I got to know him a little better.  He was from Louisiana but went to school in Illinois and got a major in political science.  He was 64 years old and a middle school teacher at a local middle school.  In the 70s he played two years of pro football with the Minnesota Vikings.  He also told me he was a Christian and that he believed God was always looking out for him.  Finally I bought the gift card from him and we parted ways.  As I examined the card, I noticed some funny things.  It appeared it had already been peeled off the cardboard cover.  The $25.00 was sloppily written on the card in smeared ink.  And then it occurred to me: this is a used card and I just paid a man who told me his sob story $20 for it.  The more I thought about it the more it made sense.  He was hanging around Publix at the time he knew it closed, and told me that the card was legitimate and that I could go in and check the balance knowing that Publix was closed, but pretended not to know.  He didn't follow me to the door where the police officer was standing.  He made sure to stress that he was a good Christian man and he knew exactly where the ATM was and what the fee was (he made sure to mention it was only a $3 fee).  He also told a detailed story about his life in effort to gain my trust.  As I walked back to my car, I realized that I had been had.  It was a frustrating realization, and also a sad one.  It makes me sad to know that there are dishonest people out there who will take advantage of the people who actually are willing to help.  I called my parents and explained to them why my account would be $23 emptier then went home and called it a night.

The next day I went back to Publix and decided to check the balance of the card just incase.  I knew it was going to be in vain, but in my heart I kept this small since of hope that maybe this guy was an honest man.  I handed the card to the cashier and waited for the balance.  Finally the receipt printed.  Balance: $25.00.  I was shocked.  I wasn't scammed!  It was such a good feeling to know that not only was I not scammed but that I was able to help someone out that was in need.  Fiscally, the world seems to scream that having a good conscious can be a naive thing, and I was afraid I had learned that the hard way.  But in the end my act of kindness had paid off.  But that emotion got me thinking: what if I had been scammed?  Perhaps I simply lucked out this time and really was being naive...

But the more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that if I had to go through that experience again I would do exactly the same thing.  There are only two possible outcomes: I help the man out and keep my money, or I help the man out and lose my money.  But there is only one possible cause: that this man needed help.  Either he was in a tight situation or desperate enough to result to scamming people in the streets of West Palm Beach.  Either way, I was in a position to help this man who needed help whether he was humble enough to admit it or not, and so I sit confidently knowing that even if I had been scammed I did the right thing.  (Now this is not to say that everyone is in the position to help and should just fork over $20.  For some people that $20 could be the difference in keeping the lights on or feeding a family, and if you are not in a position to help then I believe you should kindly move on, but I was not in that tight of a situation.)

And that brings me to the other morning.  I decided to meet a friend at taco bell breakfast (PS it's really good if you haven't tried it yet) before heading into the computer lab to work some more on the visual effects of my upcoming film.  As I was leaving taco bell, a homeless man rode up on a bicycle and started a long speech about the labor pool etc etc.  Essentially he needed food, and unfortunately today homeless people have come to realize that without an explanation, most people won't pitch in to help them get the food they need.  I didn't care for the story, I told him I would go in and buy him a meal, so I did.  In this specific instance, the words of my old youth minister echoed through my head: "If a homeless man turns down a free meal from taco bell he's either not homeless or something's wrong with him."  Food is a human necessity that everyone needs, and I believe buying someone a meal is a great way to show them that there are people out there that care about them... ESPECIALLY if it's Taco Bell, I mean, come on.

As a Christian, I believe that the Gospel message is abundantly clear when it comes to helping other people and showing them God's love.  Jesus' story is full of examples where he helped people who, by all Jewish standards, shouldn't have been helped at all.  In fact, most of the great stories in the Gospels involve Jesus helping sinners who were unworthy of the Jew's time, or let alone of God's grace. But the fact is we are all unworthy of God's grace, yet He gives it to us anyway.

That is the Gospel message, and that is a message that I want all of my films to support.

I've heard the expression before, "If you give a man a fish, he can eat for a day.  But if you teach a man to fish, he can eat for the rest of his life."  This is a concept I completely agree with, and I hope that someday I will be in a position to support charities and organizations that "teach men to fish."  However, I believe this expression is often misinterpreted to "Don't give a man a fish, teach him to fish instead."  But I don't think this can be more wrong.  Sometimes, giving someone that fish can be the first step in teaching them to fish, and you never know when that fish you give them - whether it's $20 for a bus fare or a steak burrito from taco bell - could change their life forever, or even save it.

I believe that when you are in a position to help someone, there really are no negative side effects to helping them.  "Starfishing" was a small film during which I tried to explore the value of selflessness and helping others, but hopefully someday I will be able to make films that explore the values of love, mercy, grace, redemption, and sacrifice in a way that is intriguing, convicting, challenging, and exciting for everyone, not just Christians.  I want to make films with themes that people of all different world views will be proud to stand by and support, yet not lose the heart of the Gospel message.  To me, "Starfishing" is about much more than helping others because it embodies my dreams and aspirations as a filmmaker.  I hope that everyone can gather something unique from the film, but that through it all the central message of loving others and helping those in need shines through.

Weekend Project #1

Lost and Found

The prompt for the first weekend project was simple: a character loses something and then finds it.  The difficulty was in the challenge: the entire project had to be one continuous shot and under one minute.  So without further ado, here is the my first weekend project!

So this video might be a little confusing to you at first glance - and I don't blame you, even I still don't fully understand it.  FSU is a very story oriented film school.  In the industry, the quality is always going to be there.  With a $60,000 RED camera, super computers, and cheap outsourcing of special effects to Asia, the films coming out of Hollywood are always going to look fantastic.  So the philosophy of the professor's at FSU is to teach us to make a compelling story.  With that in mind, I wanted to be creative with a topic like "Lost and Found."  It would be really easy to make a video about losing your cell phone or car keys, so I decided to get as abstract as possible.  I thought to myself, "What can you lose but not find?"  I immediately thought about virginity.  How could a person get their virginity back?  As a sci-fi buff, I came up with the idea of a time machine.  However, with no special effects and a single tracking shot, I knew it would be really difficult to pull off.  I came up with the idea of contrasting day and night, and using a Calendar to show the passage backwards in time.  Our professor wouldn't let us do color correction on the video, so I had to rely wholly on the calendar.  If you look carefully at the dates, you will see that the calendar actually flips back one day.  To pull off that "magical moment" where time rewinds, we shined a bright flashlight into the lens.  While the flashlight was flaring the lens, my crew quickly cleaned up my room, opened the blinds, made the bed, and my male actor got dressed.  That way, when our actress got back into the bedroom, fully dressed of course, everything looked different.  (If you look closely at the bottom left corner of my screen, you can see one of my crew members hiding behind the bed.)  So after I submitted the assignment I went back and re-edited this project, just so that I could see it the way it was in my head.  What resulted was the following video:

I think this version looks really nice.  The day-to-night conversion turned out well and the image stabilizer made everything look much smoother.  I had to letterbox the video get rid of some of the crop factor from the stabilizer, and even though I think the widescreen looks nice, it crops out the month on the calendar which is a major downside.  This just goes to show the dangers of filming a project in 16:9 and cropping it down to 2.35:1 in post.

Problems

All that aside, let's look at some of the big problems with this video and what I learned from it.  The biggest criticisms I received from my professor and classmates was that they weren't able to clearly follow what was going on.  They grasped the concept that the boy and girl had slept together and that the girl had regretted her decision, but almost no one made the leap from that to "girl steps into time machine to regain virginity."  Believe it or not, some students did pick up on the time machine, but the ones that did all believed she went forward in time because the calendar switched from a month with no strikethroughs on the dates to a month full of strikethroughs, giving the appearance of moving forward in time even though the calendar was in fact flipped back.  The reason for this was that I didn't focus on the month of "July" long enough.  The word July only has about 1 second of total screen time as compared to June which sees 5 or 6.  I also got some comments on set dressing.  Although everyone realized that the guy and girl had slept together, many people said it wasn't clear that the girl was supposed to have lost her virginity.  One student suggested that I use more props, like perhaps open alcohol bottles and various sexual items around the room.

This video was a great exercise in showing a story, not telling one.  I learned a lot about utilizing all kinds of visual elements like props, camera movement, and location to tell a story without dialogue.

A Christian Outlook on Sex in Film

This was a pretty intense subject for me to tackle in my very first project in film school.  I had never explored sex before in any films I had made, and here I was about to explore it in a graded project that was going to be screened in front of a class of 20 year-olds and my professors.  As a Christian, I don't think there is anything wrong with exploring sex in film.  Sex is a part of life, and film is form of art.  It is art's duty to explore different parts of life.  I do think it is wrong to glorify premarital or extramarital sex in film; sometimes they can be necessary to tell a story and bring to light a greater message, but I think presenting them as good things is crossing the line.  I also think it is wrong to use film as stimulus for people's lustful desires.  Why must we get up close and personal on a woman during a sex scene?  Often times the implication of sex is all that is needed to advance the story in a movie - we as an audience absolutely don't have to see that when it is not necessary.  Sometimes, however, I believe it is necessary.  Nudity as a whole in film is a slightly different issue though - I believe sometimes it can be useful to make a more powerful point.  In Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, a young woman gets raped by Alex's gang.  Kubrick, just wanting to be raw and show the audience the true horrors of rape left nothing out.  We see the woman completely naked in a series of long takes.  It is a horrible scene, and I hate watching it, yet I believe it serves an important place in art.  It really shows the horrors and dangers of gang violence and rape in a way that a censored rape scene never could.  That scene from Kubrick powerfully inspires people to go out and try to help other people that are put in similar situations.  I believe that exploring the harsh realities of life is something that film not only can do, but something that film should do.  Sex is no different.  In my opinion, I have an obligation to objectively explore these realities of life; I should not glorify what doesn't need to be glorified, yet I should not censor things that shouldn't be censored.  As a Christian, I believe in one truth.  Part of that truth is an objective reality that we live in.  As a Christian filmmaker, I would like to capture that objective reality on screen, hopefully leading people to the conclusion that there is one objective truth and that that truth lies in the Lord our God and his son Jesus Christ.