My Year

When I finished, I walked out of University completely dazed. I wasn't very good at organizing my life, generally, but this time it was different. I was paralyzed, completely drained, mainly from a good kick up the arse. I've had many kicks up the arse before, but that last one was the mothers milk of all kicks in life. I felt like I had hit rock bottom.

For a month I had a cryogenically frozen image of what work I had done over the years plastered to the back of my eyelids. I wasn't satisfied with my work, but I kicked back nevertheless to recover from the stresses of the final examinations in the last month. I had a hasty plan, which was to travel. So after doing some working experience on a film set for miss Martin as a runner, I went traveling. I did this with Julia, a very special friend, and we collected ideas on our travels. On the way we passed through the Venice Biennale, the Munster Skulptur Project, the Documenta 12 at Kassel, and the opening of 798 in Beijing.

We contracted a stomach bug called shigella in Nepal in Ulambari next to Biratnagar. Which made my experiences there tainted with the taste of vomit and porridge. However, we recovered enough before the traditional wedding of a new Limbu couple to document the unfolding events. Part of the wedding was to visit the holy mountain near Morang which is the supposed origin of all Limbu's and believers of the Kirat religion. It was the closest thing to a spiritual experience that I knew of, for Julia and I and no doubt for the stupid stomach bugs.

During these travels I drew and wrote. I filmed a little and made an animation of an amoeba coming out of a beaker and putting the cork back in, and of course I took photographs. I wrote my project ideas down, then applied to Royal College of Art, got rejected, then applied to film school.

The memories of the art course were slowly fading. Buried under the mass of new imagery and memories, even those happy times became a dreamy memory to which I added and deleted details as I pleased. So at the film school, I pretended I wasn't an artist, but a filmmaker. It made everything simpler for a while. Learning how to film in Digital HDV wasn't the hardest thing in the world, and the straight forward nature of the craft made learning how to organize a cast and crew, the set and location, the props and effects, all simpler than I expected. I shot a first short film, called 'The Adventurers', which was something I was planning on doing back in the art course. People liked the film, but I thought it was shit.

I attended classes and eventually worked on a film set for a student who was also there. I used many of the skills obtained from the art course to build the sets, and I found I had to be flexible in my ideas on how to get the look the director wanted. I felt far from professional, since right next door, the real pros were building the sets to some hollywood film, films like Descent 2, and soon after that Prince of Persia, and Dorian Gray. My work got noticed thanks to some friends and I worked as the production designer on a short film called 'The Ballet', which was a story set in the 80's, so I had to go to a prop warehouse to find props from the right time period.

Currently I am working on my next short film called 'The Detective Masahiro' for now.