Self reinvention but really rediscovery

I just got through watching seasons one and two of The Guild, which, if you have not seen yet, you should. (Thanks Joyce for giving me a good excuse to remain unproductive for another night.) The writer for this series is Felicia Day, who also stars in the series. I learned about this web series initially after watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog but I never watched it until tonight and it's brilliant.

One thing that makes this web series so amazing is that Felicia Day actually is a gamer; she's a WoW fiend as well as a professional level violinist.

Upon discovery of these facts tonight I was reminded of something my good friend Matt Troy once told me Freshmen year: "you make what you know,". While making what you know is something that can be stretched and reconfigured into different shapes, I think about what I've been doing.

Recently I've hit a dry spell. Excuses upon excuses pile up as I sit on scripts that have yet to be completed and projects that are yet to be completely edited. I wonder frequently if I'm any good at what I spent the past four years of my life studying and I've come to the conclusion that I'm pretty talentless.

I remember a conversation with my friend Ming Hu. We were discussing people with talent vs. people that work hard and categorizing different people we know into those respective areas, a very small number (one or two) fell into both categories. Ming and I both agreed that we are both people that are the product of hard work, which is difficult to fully come to terms with because there is an acceptance that people with talent will always seem to be a step ahead of you.

However, tonight I sat and thought about people with talent verses people I perceive to have talent and I believe that I have been able to distinguish those whom really have a lot of talent verses those who just stick to what they know and make that work, using their genius in their respective areas to give them the boost they need to bridge the gap that I seem unable to cross myself.

Felicia Day has created a wonderful series starting with a premise she knows very well and making it her own. There are multiple talents mingling together there that, when combined, makes an amazing and terribly entertaining product.

I wonder what I know. After flooding myself with craft and technique for four years at NYU I still have yet to discover a distinctive style, and I honestly don't want to. (I hate specializing because I hate the idea of having to say I don't do something or being told I can't do something.) However, art mimics life, not the other way around and while I hate to put it this way, but film making, in many rights, is an art, and in order for me to fully master it I need a life for it to emulate.

This is where my self reinvention takes place. I guess self reinvention is off, it's more of a self rediscovery. The life I abandoned four years ago is something that needs to be retrieved and reintegrated. Now I just need to figure out what I like doing and go do it.