Blog Post #1 2/22/17

For my creative writing blog I am going to be taking a picture every day and writing a super short story or quote about it. I chose this goal because of how it will help me to get better at two things that I have been working on for a long time. Photography and Writing. Both of these are important to directing, the career that I wish to have someday. As a director you have to be able to write a story and know how to translate that story into a visual form. In this project I am reversing that so that I take the visual form and turn it into writing. 

I am using this project to get better at photography because by forcing myself to take a picture every day I will have to learn what looks good and what doesn’t. After taking so many pictures I will also learn to be creative with what I am taking pictures of and the ratios of the pictures I take. I also hope to experiment a bit with lighting and taking pictures at different times of day and with natural, staged, and ambient lighting. Although I will be taking pictures with just my phone, I will figure out the forms of photography that I like the most and least. Hopefully by just taking lots of pictures, I will be able to take the skills that I learn through this project and translate them over to taking video and making movies, because so many of the frame and lighting aspects are the same.

The second part of this project, the writing, I am excited to write less than I normally do. This may sound weird, but what I mean by it is that often when I have an idea about something to write I want to only write about it and make that one idea into a full movie/script/novel. Very rarely is that possible, and so I end up just leaving many of my ideas as an outline or beginning of a story. By forcing myself to write something every day, I am cutting off the possibility of trying to write a ton about it. This way I will be able to focus on just writing a well crafted paragraph or two. Because I will be taking pictures of things that I see every day, I will also be forced to write about different things than I usually do. I am a huge fan of fantasy and sci-fi, so that is what I normally like to write about, but that is not what I see in my everyday life (if it is I would recommend seeing a doctor.)

Overall, I am looking forward to doing a project that forces me to write about and take pictures of things that I normally wouldn’t, while also getting better at two skills that I am constantly trying to improve upon.