New Brand Marketing

Every advertising / branding exec has at one time or another, dabbled in the visual arts. Whether its graphic design, photography or film making, it’s essential to know the tools by which we get our message across. For me, it was script writing.

For a decade now, these film scripts remain conceptual, their energies potential, stored in my harddrive, seen only by me, nearly forgotten. It was like my other abandoned hobbies, such as parasailing and coin collecting (I used to buy gold online). Today, I unpack them from deep inside the baul and dust and display them for your arousal: I wrote them with the originary intention that other people could/would/should make them.

Looking at it now, it is surprising to see the first few clunky stirrings of interests on subjects that are now more apparent/pointed in my contemporary work: mainly, there are preoccupations with linearity in nonlinearity; procedure and repetition; plagiarism and erasure; the engagement of the individual with space/location; the collision/collusion of the public with the private; the disruption of macrohistory via emphasis on microhistories; the last two being basically the heart of the aesthetic/politic of the documentary film. It is in this spirit that I propose that these film scripts be also read as ars poetica documents on documentary films, or maybe in fact itself a script for a documentary film on my failure at becoming a filmmaker.

The oldest of the film scripts were written when I was eighteen years old, the most recent when I was twenty-three. I wrote them with the intention that they be made cheap and quick and easy on media that was starting to become readily available at that time – miniDVs on EP, pirated Adobe Premiere Pro on Pentium 4s, cheap DVD players and burners, internet cafe-grade YouTube uploads – shot yesterday, cut today, shown tomorrow, the last point being the most important: movies should be shown in places where the most people will get to see them, i.e., why make a movie that only a small number of people will see?, i.e., I had no intention on doing the local indie film circuit. The only solution to my mind at the time – and still the only solution to my mind today – is internet broadcasting. Only back then, the internet was slow, and my computer was slower, and ultimately, I was slowest. Why make a movie only a small number of people will see? I saw no point to making movies, so I abandoned it.

But that was five years ago, and you are not me.