I Live in a Constant State of Filmmaking

Walk through our house on any given day and you can probably figure out what we do for a living without asking. The family room is usually filled with camera equipment I either haven’t put away yet or I’m getting ready to use. Sometimes I honestly don’t know which. There are hard cases stacked against walls, a lens sitting somewhere a lens probably shouldn’t be sitting, microphones on the dining room table and tripods leaning against the bar. My office is filled with hard drives I need to clear off, label, organize or just stare at occasionally while thinking, “I really need to deal with those.”

Then UPS shows up.

UPS is at our house a lot.

Usually with some new piece of gear I absolutely needed. Or at least I needed it when I ordered it at 11:30 at night after watching a video explaining why my life would be considerably better if I owned it. Another lens. Another light. Another cable. Another little adapter that costs $79 despite looking like something that should be free inside a box of cereal.

The problem is putting all this stuff away takes time. And once you put it away, you have to take it all back out again. So I’ve developed a very reasonable system where I convince myself there’s no point in putting something away because we’re probably going to use it again in two weeks. Two weeks becomes a month and eventually the Pelican case next to the couch isn’t filmmaking equipment anymore. It’s furniture. It’s always been there. Don’t question it.

Our garage isn’t much better. C-stands, dolly track, wardrobe racks, light stands, sandbags, cases and assorted pieces of equipment that probably have a very specific purpose even if I can’t remember what that purpose is at the moment. You learn to navigate around it. Step over this. Squeeze past that. Don’t move that case because something expensive is probably inside it.

We live in a constant state of filmmaking.

At any given time we’re shooting a short, a feature, an interview, a commercial or getting ready for whatever comes next. And if we’re not actually filming something, we’re editing something we already filmed or talking about something we’re going to film. There’s pre-production happening on weekends, editing late at night and some random piece of equipment charging somewhere in the house pretty much 24 hours a day.

And this is the life my wife and I share. Filmmaking isn’t something we leave at work because work is everywhere. It’s in the family room. It’s on the dining room table. It’s in the garage. It’s taking up three outlets in the kitchen for reasons neither of us remembers.

You hear people talk about bringing their work home with them. We don’t bring our work home.

We just never got around to putting it away.