Hey everybody,
Eleven years ago I made a movie called Pavement Tune. The movie never really came out or even got finished. I was having some personal issues at the time, one of the actors hated me (he probably had every right to) and all of this led to the movie not getting done. On top of all of that, I thought that the movie was a big pile of crap. Hence, I buried it and whenever I did Film Festivals for Bored in the USA and Wits End, I always said that those were my only two movies.
About six weeks ago... I found a dvd of a rough cut and had the idea and just putting that on YouTube as is. I thought it would be really cool to see how far I've come from making bad unfinished movies when I was 20 to not quite as bad and finished movies that I make now. Then I started tinkering...
With just the dvd rough cut, I started editing random chunks of the movie. I trimmed the film by 20 minutes, I added some foley sounds and got creative with some other segments. The movie is by no means perfect. It was shot in standard definition and the only audio I had was the .wav from the DVD. But the movie is not the disaster that I thought it was.
It was cool to take the first thing I made and look at it through the eyes of someone who made two feature films, countless shorts and other projects since. If I could go back and give advice to me in 2009... I would just say "have confidence. You're going to be okay".
When this movie didn't get finished and didn't become the perfect Mumblecore runaway hit at Sundance, I thought that it was the end of the world. I did not focus on the parts that we got right and all of the great learning experiences in between. I wish that I would have had a little more fun and had a little bit more self esteem back then. This would have saved me so much time on my filmmaking journey. I wish folk filmmaking and YouTube would have been around at the time... because I may have learned this lesson sooner.
I'm proud of this movie and ALL of the people that were a part of it. I hope you watch it.
