“What am I doing again?”

“It’s a self-portrait.”

“Okay” said Donald, “but what do you want me to do?”

          I thought for a bit... I thought for my whole life – the short story that I have led so far, the ballad of confusion and youthful potential that rings out with every breath and thought that escapes me, the magnum opus of my career that is everything that I am beyond this film project, beyond my next assignment, beyond my next expression, beyond my next obsession, beyond what could possibly be a hundred years of happiness and a few adolescent seasons of depression – what do I want to do? What do I want him to do? I pondered about a sunflower confined to a Styrofoam cup. Despite its enclosure, it expressed an untamed visual vibrato and always looks towards the sun. I equated this to a domesticated cat that always keeps its chin up. Only knowing the roof it lives under, it explores the street unafraid, driven by its own curiosity. I thought of the kid who felt lost and ambivalent toward his future but couldn’t help but beam at the idea of growing up. The same kid who glides atop his roof with his Polaroid camera on an evening where the sky couldn’t decide whether to be pink or blue, ready to captures the private beauty of the San Fernando Suburbia view. So that’s what I wanted, and that’s what I told him, more or less.

“Whenever you’re ready.”

          The statement was posed to him but lingered around me. I precariously sat on the edge of the roof looking through the camera at the silhouette of Donald before the vivid sky. I sat there toggling with the focus, and at that moment it all seemed so clear. The figure through the lens was no longer a globule of unanswered questions but rather a potential career. The lens acts as an extension of myself, an extension of all that I am and all that I want to be. It divulges this world of art and uncensored entities of the human mind to this seemingly insignificant idealist: me. I saw myself through that viewfinder – this impending future and life altering reveal – it wasn’t perpetual euphoria, nor was it constant bliss. It was none of that, but what it was, was real, something I could not dismiss. Surrounding that colorful sky and clear-cut silhouette were all of my plausible successes and all of my possible failures, but none of it a regret. The only thing that stood in front of me and this future that no longer made me feel unsteady was that lingering statement…

“Whenever you’re ready.”

          I felt this scene of life being captured, I felt the art form as an extension. I heard the call of film to be mastered, I heard the call to break the convention. This promise of a future of beauty and of art made me hopeful, it gave me order. In a world where life could so easily fall apart, I will make it mine with a camcorder. This concept that provides me with so much elation has infiltrated my life as a dream, and now manifests itself as my own creation. I desire to be one with the sun flower, the liberated cat, the young dreamer, and everything in between. At this moment I want to use film, not just to entertain. I want to use film to make the world expel a long-needed burst of laughter, weep at those forgotten constants of the human experience, feel those ambiguous demons inside each and every one of us, and rid the world of the mundane. I have chosen to be one with those times of hardship, ecstasy, and the human experience medley. I long to experience this and take the world head on because now, at this moment – and forever – I am ready.