Now, I am doing two activities: finishing Rodriguez book (I am a slow reader since English is not my first language), and jotting down ideas for my first script, which I decided will be about toys and kids growing up. While I wanted to do it as an animation in the first place, I realized I would be tackling two problems at once: making a film, and making an animation. Since I am a big fan of partial analysis (I am a right brainer trapped in a left brainer body.), and since I realized I may not need to animate the toys (I had this wacky idea about realizing the whole script with lighting, camera movements and voice over), I will try to make the first cut with my MiniDV and edit it.

One thing that I learned from life, and that I have been constantly told from my mentor, that the secret of success lies in doing. While there are lots of books I can read about filmmaking, and lots of classes, workshops and tutorials I can learn from, I just want to use the intuitive right-brained child inside of me and just do, at least the first few ones. I have learned that I can read so much, but not many things make sense if I don’t come from my own personal experience.

It took me a while to gather my courage to decide to start my long life passion: making films. I was born in a poor country with very limited resources in my disposal. I found my art talents at the age of five, when I realized I could draw, color, play music without any education. Other than that, I was a regular person: I went to school where I lost 15 precious childhood and teenage years, I then went to college and got my BSc in computer science, then came to America to get my Masters, also in computer science.

All through my journey, I always had the recurring dream of making movies, but I had also the nasty voices in my head, telling me it’s too late (I am almost 30), I would never make it (I have no art or film education), I wasted my life on another education, bla bla bla…

Then a series of interesting events happened, after which I realized that I had to do this: I read the Alchemist, several times, and I realized that I can decide now to be happy with my current job, which pays me well, and never dive into this crazy dream of mine. I may live for the rest of my life grateful with everything I am achieving, but always dissatisfied with myself that I was too afraid to do the thing I always dreamed about. I also realized, from this book, that I can always go back to doing computer science again if I fail in making movies. The next event was a short movie that I stumbled upon: Mantis Parable, which was made by a one man crew, and was a great experience for him. The last one was a book, Rebel without a crew, that describes Robert Rodriguez’ journey to make his first film, El Mariachi. What all these three entities have in common, is the fact that all these journeys were made by regular people, just like you and me, people with no special powers or extraordinary talents. People who just wanted to do something for the love of it, not for success, fame, prestige or recognition. In fact, Rodriguez said that he wanted to make a movie so that he enjoys a private failure, learn from the process, do as many mistakes as he can and be ready for a real movie later. There are endless stories of people who wanted to do something for the love of it, and ended up accidently so wealthy and successful, because they were not looking for the fruit, they were just enjoying the journey.

… and that’s what I am going to do: I am going to start shooting short movies, learn from the process, shoot longer movies, learn more, and enjoy private failure after failure. I have not enjoyed failing for a while now, and you know there must be something wrong when everything you do is successful. No failure. Nothing to learn from. The company I work for, like every great empire, does not tolerate failures (although it has a long history of them). My company wants me to be professional, not innovative. Anyways, enough talking about it, since I am really grateful for my job there that will allow me to finance my dream.

While the real motivation for this journey is to follow my own dream, another strong motivation is to be free! I want to look into my manager’s eyes someday and let him know that I will not take shit no more, and I will not let anyone control what I do with my life, how I spend my time and, most importantly, how I feel!

This journal summarizes the journey of a 30 years old ordinary guy who decided to follow his dream.