When I was a wee young lad, full of whimsy, wonder and naivety, I received quite possibly the greatest Christmas present a boy in the early 2010s could receive: a beautifully metallic, oddly slippery iPod Touch. Oh, the holy grail of all presents! It was definitely the catalyst of some brainrotting activity, but that did not matter to the mind of a child who had just learned what Angry Birds was. With the rudimentary iPhone, I had access to the world: video games, a camera and text messages. Most importantly to my sister and me, though, we had a little app called iMovie. The backyard became a stage for great, glorious, miscellaneous adventure, as we paired cheesy wipe cuts with whatever song was topping the Billboard Hot 100. We made film after film, music video after music video, as if we were Christopher Nolan cooking up “Interstellar.” And we did this all day, every day, until suddenly it seemed like being corny and original was shameful. The iPod was replaced with an iPhone, iMovie with Instagram and creativity with the need to conform.
Truth be told, that iPod has not been touched in years, and “Fireflies” by Owl City is definitely still queued up on iTunes, waiting to be played. I’ve spent ample time thinking about her though, and her glorious voyage throughout my childhood. So, over the past year, I went digging through the drawers of my house, pulling out ancient camcorders and splicing together movies of all varieties: documentaries of my friends, vlogs of American adventure. I felt as creative as I ever have, and I also found the key to being authentic in this era of computer-generated, monotonous slop.
The filmmaking process is very similar to drawing — something I also find many people give up as they grow into their adolescence. You take a lot of shots, draw a lot of pictures. Most of them are awful, but you tried, and so they are something wonderful and beautiful to look back on. To make a movie means to physically go out and try, and trying is something we are missing as a generation.
The other day in a class I was definitely paying attention in, a peer made a comment preaching, “AI was made to do the boring stuff; now it’s just doing the fun stuff.” This profound one-liner really had me thinking, which was novel because I really wasn’t doing that beforehand. Since artificial intelligence (AI) came onto the scene not too long ago, it seems society has begun to cut out “the fun stuff” for the simple want of convenience. We forget as humans that the reason we derive fun from activities and ventures is because of the work we put into them. The first film you’re going to make is probably going to be rudimentary and rough around the corners, but it certainly will be fun. AI is the antithesis of authenticity, and filmmaking is as human as a medium can be.
It is imperative that people continue to fail and fall, because it is even more imperative that we, as humans, know how to get up. If at 12 years old I judged my home films to such a degree that I quit doing them all completely, I would have robbed myself of simple sheer joy. We cannot have AI steal very accessible joy from us because we are lazy, or because we simply fail to care.
When we fail to care, we fail to live. There is something about old video recording devices, like camcorders and digicams, that seem to bring out the genuine side of any person they are put in front of. Feeling the nostalgic juvenile wonder when presented with a vlog camera, my friends will always blossom open like the spring flowers after winter. Making movies with my peers means we can deepen our bonds, and I would take that over the isolation of AI any day.
So go pick up a camera and make yourself a film. Learn to fall in love with trying, failing and being creative all over again. If nothing else, you get some great bloopers out of it.