Dream Projects

I am at a loss for words.
Yesterday I saw the trailer for the film Boyhood. A feature length movie featuring a continuous cast across 12 years.
It's a really interesting concept behind how to make a movie. Every project is a race against the clock after all. Increasing that amount of time is a stroke of genius. I'm sure I'm not the only one who dreamed of being involved in a project like that. The only problem is that it takes would take years upon years to build faith with enough people to get them to dedicate their time too.

But that's just it. It's a dream project and by its nature it's impractical. But here we have a director, Richard Linlater, who defied the practicality. Anybody can make a series over the course of 12 years, because the funding is easy to get as long as you produce something periodically. For instance, there's a series of documentaries called the Up series which started in 1964. Each episode has a space of seven years in between it and it is still ongoing. It is similarly ambitious but at least the creators are getting some returns in between each episode they release.

One of the things I have come to realise is that this industry is not about cannots. You have to push yourself to the limit, even if that limit is placed from years of tradition from the industry. Nobody remembers the film that was standard for the time. I know from experience that it's easier to talk about movies with a major point of difference than it is to speak about ones that have no difference.

Now is the time to make entrepreneurial films and pieces of art. With crowd-sourced funding we are able to live our dreams and make dream projects reality. If the crowd funding falls through then we can just fund it on the bare bones of whatever you can find, as Linlater did. This is our generation's hallmark. Let's own it.