My First Video

When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I remember writing this report about our future goals and writing something about making toys, being a scientist, being a writer, and an actor. I think, bottom line, I just wanted to enjoy myself. I always did. Even though I wrote a lot and still kick myself for missing the signs, I was more interested in playing that focusing on a career.

No, really… at thirteen, I was building K’nex swords, wearing a costume cape, and pretending that I was a hobbit, fighting in Middle Earth. There’s video footage of it that’s apparently going to come out eventually, despite my sincerest wish that the footage is destroyed along with my “Barbie Girl” performance. I wish I could say that I’ve grown out of these habits, but I’m an adult: if I wanna wear a cape and pretend like I’m fighting the forces of evil instead of my own depression, why would anyone want to take that small amount of joy away from me?

But your younger years are meant to be times for experimenting with who you are going to be. You’re still forming your own interests and desires. My mother has this philosophy that “kids should be kids, while they can.” There’s a lot of truth in that, and I guess I got a lot of being a kid.

So much so that, by high school, I still didn’t have a solid plan for my future. I still wasn’t even sure who I wanted to be. At the time, I knew two things: I liked movies and I liked playing.

I often hear stories about “how much high school sucked.” I’m constantly admitting that I loved high school. Granted, not everything about it was perfect, but I still look back and view it as the best time of my life: I had a girlfriend and my life had yet to be complicated by sexual relations, I made some of the best friends I’ve ever had (and still have to this day), and I didn’t find the pressure of having standards for my work overbearing: I made things just to make things, did my best, and was proud of my work.

And, of course, the moment I define as the catalyst for my whole life, oddly enough at almost exactly the halfway point through it (at the time of writing this).

Multimedia.

A class about making digital media, such as video, pictures, and… well, that was it, really. Nevertheless, I met two of my closest friends in that class: Peter and Steven. We did a few projects together, mainly because we sat together in the corner by the windows and the front of the class. It didn’t take long for us to become legends in that class, largely due to Steven’s amazing talent and Peter’s charisma.

If you choose to define “coming of age” as “a time or event in your life that would be the crux of your story so far,” then this story is really about the three of us for me.

While we started out doing random things for school projects, we always had bigger ambitions than the curriculum. We never just wanted to do the project, we wanted to do the project and make it a truly unique experience, at least for the class.

Being gigantic fans of Star Wars, we would often talk about the movies, lightsabers, and watch a ton of fan films for inspiration. I had seen some fan films before, even Star Wars ones, so the concept wasn’t quite new to me. But something about this video really changed me.

The fan film is question was “Ryan vs. Dorkman,” a short lightsaber duel between two competing visual effects artists. I was baffled at how young they looked. Being raised by movies where teenagers are portrayed by thirty-year-olds, watching these two twenty-year-olds made me think: “these guys are in high school and they’re making lightsabers.”

You know that moment in movies where the hero sees the love interest and everything slows down, a love ballad starts playing, and the movie holds on these two as if to say, “these two are the only two in the world?” That was my reaction to watching this video: I was smitten by the concept of making movies.

Of course, that’s only the Inciting Incident. The true break into Act Two would’ve been when we filmed our own lightsaber duel.

When you’re a fan of a movie, you always dream of being right along-side the villains (I mean heroes) and being a part of that world. Star Wars was (is) definitely the top of that list for me. Who doesn’t want to swing around a laser sword capable of cutting through anything or use the force to pull objects closer to you or push them away or fight in space battles or talk with droids and aliens? The time between Steve asking if we wanted to do this and me saying “yes…” I think “millisecond” would still be too long a time to describe how fast I replied.

We met up at Steve’s house. He had prepared a couple of prop blades for us to use and had acquired his dad’s old camera (twenty years old at the time, I think). He took us to an empty place, and we started filming.

It may have been one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. We spent an hour shooting, had no rehearsed choreography or dialogue, and no plan. This is what I was talking about earlier with your younger years being all about experimenting: that’s essentially what the film was.

I remember watching myself, on Steve’s first test edit, wielding that red lightsaber. Finally, I was one with the Star Wars universe. This video had combined my two passions: movies and playing. I was happy. I was energetic. I was complete.

Doing this project had filled me with such a euphoria that I’ve basically been chasing that same high ever since. Movies had no longer become a hobby of mine… I was in love with them.

Of course, as with most relationships, there are going to be good moments and bad moments, and things are going to change with time.

I spent most of high school just doing whatever film project I wanted. I tried out Harry Potter, Hamlet, and even my own Star Wars films. But I was also experimenting with more dramatic movies. Ones that allowed me to deal with some repressed feelings about being bullied.

I began to enjoy watching more serious movies and relating to the personal struggles of the characters. Thus, I became enamoured with a desire to create more dramatic work. But there’s an inherent clash with my personal desires: drama movies are either good, boring, or they’re so bad they laughably good. In time, I think I forgot how fun making movies could be. I had gone from doing as many as I could to suddenly being incapable of making one more than once in a while.

My understanding of cinema has also changed too. As I have pursued this career, I’ve begun understanding what it truly takes to make films and the effort and work that goes into them. And what’s worse, I’ve learned that “just because it’s good doesn’t mean you have to like it.” I could work for two years on a passion project and still lose in views to the guy that filmed his reaction to the latest movie trailer.

So I don’t really know exactly where I transitioned from happy-go-lucky wannabe filmmaker to depressed artist cliché, but I do know that the biggest problem is that it’s been so long since I felt the same high that “Peter vs. Brandon” gave me or even something similar.

And yeah, looking back on this film, it’s easy to see that we were just inexperienced kids making a passion project. The choreography is terrible, the camera breaks the 180-degree rule constantly, there are tons of continuity errors, and the acting is terrible. But here’s the thing: As my understanding of cinema has grown, it has also evolved.

Citizen Kane is widely considered to be the greatest movie ever made, but I really only hear film critics talk about it. Compare that to movies like The Room or Sharknado, and I’ve seen so many people’s faces light up when they talk about it. What’s good isn’t always popular, and what’s popular isn’t always good.

Whenever I watch this short, I don’t cringe like I do some of my other projects. Maybe it’s just me remembering how fun it was or knowing that this was the moment that bonded me with two of my closest friends or seeing myself with an “actual” lightsaber for the first time. Inexplicably, though we’ve all done objectively better work, “Peter vs. Brandon” remains, to this day, my favourite project that I have ever worked on.

Though I doubt either of them really hold it in high regard, this moment, this experience, this project was the crux of my journey. The reason that I am what I am.

For better or worse, my biggest “coming of age” moment in my life was the experience I had making a lightsaber duel with my two best friends.