As creatives sometimes we tend to have a love/hate relationship with our work. Looking back, I have been a creative most of my conscious life and even tho I have not always called myself one, there was always a constant search that took me through a creative route. Perhaps a constant search for that dopamine release, that ephemeral moment, that mix of euphoric pleasure that one feels when you see yourself creating what you love to create.
When the pandemic hit we where forced to take time off. But our creative force doesn’t understand that. I remember feeling the levels of unreleased creativity rising, feeling like when one has to hold it until the next gas station cus you drank too much coffee, physical pain.
After a wile I develop other types of creative outlets that will talk about on another post but what happened almost a year after completely blew my mind.
Is amazing how the people you meet along the way on your creative journey can come to the rescue in so many ways. On summer 2021 I received a call from a good old friend and producer form Denver CO, a place I will always have in my heart as it hosted many years of my life and was where I first started my career as a Filmmaker.
I just finished shooting my third feature film in Colombia earlier that year and even tho it was an amazing experience, I promised myself I would be more picky with projects coming my way as I was trying to take my career to the next step. But again that would be another blog post.
My Producer friend had a “very interesting short film with a first time director” project he wanted to talk to me about. As many of us know, sometimes those words can be very scary. To me they where, specially at that moment when I just came back from one of the hardest shoots I have ever lived back at the Colombian jungle. So even tho I was a bit skeptical, Ive always trusted my producer and his instinct for projects so I agreed to a call with the director.
I constantly hear people say things like “zoom meetings are just not the same… I prefer meeting in person” Let me tell you about what happen in the first 5 minutes of my zoom conversation with Emma, the director of the film.
I felt safe. We hit it off right away! It felt like we where both speaking the same language creative wise, in terms of story, characters and style. Not only that, I could really feel that my cinematography (which has evolve over the years to be what it is now) really touched Emma’s eyes and emotions and how much she wanted that on her film. The style she was looking for was one that just comes out naturally on my work.
After the first 5 minutes I knew very clearly that I wanted to be in that project because I felt the confidence and trust the director had towards me. And that made me believe I was gonna do my best work ever.
I forgot to mention I was in Zurich at that moment. A few days later, I was in Colorado… diving deep into the script, story and characters with Emma.
Is amazing how the people you meet along the way on your creative journey can come to the rescue in so many ways. I wanna repeat this because so many times through this journey we loose all hope and faith, we wonder if we are good enough, if our work is good enough… we go into thinking, perhaps I should try something else… something that numbs me from all my insecurities and dark thoughts, something where I don’t have to hustle with such intensity to get very little in return… something that can take me away from the constant and poisonous measures of success on instagram.
Working the way we did with my friends and collaborators was almost like therapy, like recovering from a really bad injury and it reunited me with the passion I have for creating, something I kept missing over the past years.
