Originally written on Christmas day, 2014.
In late 2007, I had no direction in life. I had a notion I’m attracted to acting and photography, but I have never had picked up a video camera im ny life. A few months earlier, I came back from a winter-long stay in New York, where I realized I don’t like big cities.
I was back in Provincetown, alone, in a town with barely a living soul on the streets in the winter, wondering where do I go from here. My visa was about to expire, but, it didn’t bother me much. In fact, In fact, it had no bearing on the course of my life, at least, none that I was aware of.
One day, I opened up Adobe After Effects and started editing a simple video I found somewhere on my computer.
That arbitrary action, performed out of boredom, would later prove to be an invaluable source of understanding of what I can do and what I can’t do in post-production.
Yet, at the time, I still didn’t know where would my life go from there. Just before the spring, on a nice day in nature, near my house, I was watching the gras swaying in the wind in front of the ocean. Without thinking, I said to myself “I should make a movie here.” And, just like, the idea was born. And, many more ideas kept coming in the hours, days, weeks, months and years to come.
At first, most of the plot would be set and shot in the dunes surrounding the town – what is now only the first part of the movie. The longer the ideas kept coming, the further the plot kept developing.
I bought a camera a month later and started shooting. Most of those early shots ended up unused, as I haven’t had developed outline of To the Other Shore for another several months. It would be another few years before the movie was renamed to “To the Other Shore.” The working title was “Wake Up.”
That outline consisted of every shot I intended to take for the movie, including the position of the camera. Little did I know, position of the camera, and, sometimes, the action performed would be determined based on the specifics of the location and the possibilities presented therein.
Nonetheless, the foundation has been created. It wasn’t until almost a year after I got the camera that I bought the computer capable of downloading contents of the tapes I was shooting on.
By the time the new computer was released, I had over 15 hours of footage shot on 15 tapes.
As one might expect, I downloaded it and kept shooting.
And shooting.
And shooting.
Although, most of the components have been changed, that computer still serves me today. The camcorder is long gone, and the tapes with it. It broke down in 2011 and, instead of repairing it, I decided to sell it for parts and use a friend’s camera for whatever little was still left to shoot.
After almost a decade later, over a 100 hours of footage shot, thousands of hours of filming and editing, the end result is still bears surprising semblance to my original outline from 2008.
As unlikely as it may seem, an idea born out of seemingly nothing, nourished over the years, has flourished into the single greatest achievement of my life to date.
Not that I feel I deserve any credit for creating that idea or building upon it – it came into my head spontaneously as well as anything I did with it afterwards. The only credit I do deserve is for not abandoning it.
Perhaps the time has come for that to change. Perhaps it’s time for my idea to go into the world without me and live its own life.
Kind regards to you
and good luck!
Marko
