Hey Flobo here and I have something to confess.
I’m an independent author and filmmaker! I know, earth shattering right? I mean, I say that practically every week. But you see this week, allow me to be a little existential.
If no one buys my books, am I still a writer? If no one sees the films I make, am I filmmaker?
Deep right? I have dreams of you, dear reader, checking out my blog and being so impressed with my posts that you buy a book or two. The odds of this are slim, but I do it anyway. I know that you in fact have to “take a chance” on me by dropping your hard earned cash on something I wrote. While I know I’m in this creative line of work for the long haul, every so often friends and colleagues try their hand at a creative endeavor that means something to them. Do you know what I do? I. Buy. In.
Why? Well there’s that whole “karma” thing about putting good into the universe will only bring good vibrations back your way, but there’s something else. In fact, let me tell you a story:
Before I was a poor and starving writer, I was a poor and starving film school student. I admit that this seems like an oxymoron as most film students have SOME kind of money, but this guy willed himself to attend on luck and student loans (I should tell you that story one day). I’ve made films as per the course requirements, no matter how confident I felt about the project. Why? Well for us, the big deal was getting into film festivals. No matter how vapid, how insipid, or outright stupid a film was, film student directors tried forcing their opus into the “film festival circuit”. You could argue the reason was because every director has some odd fantasy of being scouted by Scorsese himself at these things, but I’m trying to keep the blog positive.
Short story even shorter: The films I worked on? They pretty much went nowhere. Now, the last year I was in school a classmate needed some financial help with getting a film made for his directorial thesis. While the subject matter wasn’t exactly my cup of tea,I chipped in, as an “associate producer”. Of course, the flick becomes the “most successful” film (in terms of festival appearances) I was ever involved in.
So that’s why when another former film schoolmate was looking for funding for his next project…..
…I bought in. Sure there’s the immediate enjoyment I will receive if the film goes somewhere awesome like Cannes. You know, so I can brag about it to my friends and such. Beyond that, I am taking a chance in a project that would have been out of my scope if it were up to me, but it is a project that another person seems passionate about.
You could think of it like how “Steven Spielberg Presents” was slapped on every entertaining cartoon in the nineties, and so his brand was engrained into a new generation of people. Or you can think of yourself of those wealthy renaissance patrons that kept artists on retainer so they can commission new pieces on a whim. I guess what I’m saying is SUPPORT THE ARTS because you’ll never know what you are going to expose yourself to unless you take a shot on something. This should go “doubly true” for us creative types. Wanting someone to consume our works without sampling art from other sources could end up hurting us from an intellectual standpoint.
Or karma. Definitely that karma thing.
–Flobo
Flobo Boyce 