People smile and laugh, and they think "We've done it!"
But you never get it back again. You assembled a family and you shared a purpose and you ate chocolate bars at 3am and you had in-jokes about the producer and now it's done, finished up, gone.
Because this family never comes together the same way again. The actors move on and the make-up girl dumps the director and everyone goes back to their homes where they eat lots of fruit and you help pack the lighting kit into the van just as the sun rises through the ice cold fog; and you realize it's truly over.
You make the film and it acts like an old photograph, providing a memory of a time when you were happy and had a purpose. But you never get it back again.
You can do a sequel or a reunion show or invite everyone to a party but not all of them will show, not all of them really care. Some actors think they're bigger than it and some crew members get sick and retire. That moment in time that you felt so strongly at 2am in some gone September when you waited outside the studio with the broken camera and crazy crew survives only as some warm spark in some barely reachable part of your brain.
Most of life we're in coffeehouses talking about it, and it's meaningless. When we're finally out there, shooting a film and working with mad passionate souls, it's everything. Delve into it and feel everything because before you know it, it's gone and distant and that snapshot of life reveals itself to be temporary and as fictional as the story you're creating.
The newspapers are about drunken celebrities and political cheapshots. They always were but now it's even worse. I've been realising more and more recently that they've got nothing to offer me. I've grown out of wanting news with a political or nationalistic slant. I just want the news.
We get that online. We subscribe to the feeds that tell the truth. Ideas can't get squashed anymore. Every point of view is represented on YouTube. And you can argue like crazy on Facebook until you get to the bottom of an issue.
Big corporations want to hold on to the empire but it's crumbling. We don't need reporters talking down to us anymore, we can find bloggers who resonate with us.
Of course there is still quality journalism out there, but now we can pinpoint it and subscribe to it.
It's fashionable to ridicule Facebook and Twitter but the truth is, they're making us democratic for the first time ever. Sure, sometimes during court cases or national scandals things get blocked and closed, but we're still learning. There'll always be voices of those with vested interests looking to silence our freedom, we just have to be on the lookout for it. Luckily the world is so interconnected that it's getting harder to be an oppressor.
The internet is playing a big part in freeing countries from dictatorships and giving the oppressed a voice. You think Occupy Wall Street is nonsense? At least now you can tune out. Or if you're curious you can delve further into it.
The film studios and record labels have always controlled how much the artists earn. Napster changed music and the film industry is hanging on to 3D for dear life.
As artists, thinkers, and audiences, we have different choices now. It's unlikely we'll make as much money in the future but it's unlikely that any film star or director really needs 20 million dollars.
We need to embrace all this technology. My friends bully me about being addicted to the internet and my phone, but they don't get it. We don't have to watch The X Factor and read about drunken celebs. The world has opened up and if we're interested enough, there's so much to learn and participate in.
