Aliens are Coming...

In three weeks, I'm directing the shoot for my thesis film. That's nuts.

It feels like only yesterday I was just another dumbass freshman asking the BUTV guy what I should do to make movies. crazy thinking about how much I've actually been through since then, both academically and personally. I feel like a different person. Luckily, I've managed to get some good advice from some really cool people since then and have figured out a lot of stuff about making movies. I've derived knowledge from unexpected places and have learned so much about making characters, building worlds, and telling stories. I've managed to beat out competition and earn a couple directing gigs through my college, which is pretty cool, and I somehow spent my first time in Hollywood working for The Rock, so I guess I must be doing something right. 

So anyways, now I'm writing and directing my thesis film, a short about a sci-fi loving farmer who discovers an alien robot near his home and gets a little more than he hoped for about the nature of the universe. It's basically a nihilist version of ET (we millennials do love ourselves some nihilism). The main character expects this beautiful, wholesome experience with this alien and instead gets no answers and way more questions. It's an oldschool sci-fi ideology you see with great writers like HG Wells and HP Lovecraft (he's the guy who created Cthulu and the Necronomicon). The universe has no existential purpose and is probably way scarier and more bizarre than out feeble human brains can comprehend.

I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson once propose the thought of a creature that's DNA is only 1% more advanced than ours, the same as what separates us from chimpanzees. The smartest chimpanzees ever observed learn to draw pictures or play Pacman, something human children can do, and we find it adorable. What if an alien species was just 1% of DNA more advanced than us? Would quantum physics, the internet, and our great artistic achievements be childsplay to them? In the grand scheme of the universe, it seems very possible. That's bananas. Also the idea of dimensions above the third dimension, which our brains can't comprehend, but I'm not gonna bother trying to explain that. Anyways, not super related, but it's in the same ballpark of where the idea for my thesis comes from, that these aliens look down on us and disregard us because we're dumb humans who haven't figured out interdimensional travel yet.

So yeah, that's the inspiration for the movie. It's got some cool stuff going on that will hopefully be a notable feat for an indie student film, such as a life-like robot costume, some cool special effects, and a doggo. I'm gonna be putting up the kickstarter in a few days, so if anyone's actually reading this, please, for the love of god, donate. Movies are awesome, but the thing about awesome movies is that they cost money. We have to feed people, house them, transport them, get fancy equipment, rent a location, all that good stuff. If we reach the goal in time for the deadline, the movie will be dope. If we don't, we get no money and I make no movie, and that'll mean the loan I took out to come back to BU this semester will have been for nothing, and that would be sad.

I still can't get over the fact that this is gonna be my final semester of college, even of school in general. After this, I do some online bullshit (cause BU is expensive and scammed me out of financial aid) and get my degree. Then I've got the rest of my life. Still don't know what I'm doing about that, but to quote my boss from Studio71 in LA: "Jimmy, I feel like I could just throw you out into the world, just on your own, and, like, you would be okay."

I guess I've made it this far, I think I'll probably be fine.