november 12 2026
well, here's to new beginnings. it is strange to think that it's been three years since i registered the website stupidoptical.com. i did so when i was in high school, not but a junior, and i had experienced the first "enlightenment" fathomable to my feeble little 16 year-old mind. after years upon years of making shitty animations in macromedia flash, and in a move that's changed my life in a few aspects, i let myself be exposed to the most potent drug i've ever known: film. cliche as this may sound, this is where i was really hooked. you have to understand that i was at a point in my life where i wanted to be an animator, but i didn't really want to work in the animation industry. i draw like shit, and i really have no interest in life drawing or anything of the sort, so the inklings of that idea were nil from the start. it wasn't until i was exposed to the works of stan brakhage and stanley kubrick that i had a "holy shit" moment. up until this point, i'd never really paid much attention to work that wasn't animated. i watched a lot of cartoons when i was younger, and i was drawn in by the works of joanna quinn, don hertzfeldt, jonni peppers, and an assortment of other creatives... really, i had, and still have, animation in my blood. i guess outside of being an idiom that's also kind of true.
this focus on one kind of medium stunted me a little creatively. imagine being the kind of guy who goes to a buffet and eats one thing and then dismisses the rest of the food because it looks like shit. after typing that i realize it was a terrible analogy. the point i'm trying to make here is that i don't think you really get anywhere by watching one kind of thing, and that gave me the kick in the pants to study films in high school. i watched as many as i could whenever i could. i also made a lot of films in high school. they were these short, stupid little flicks without much substance, but they were fun to make. i was hooked on the feeling of watching everything come together. after shooting a few pictures, something else dawned on me: couldn't i just draw this? i mean, i can already animate, so i'm halfway there... i don't have a good camera, and i don't really like working with actors. no disrespect to them. but i'm probably going to tell them to do some stupid and asinine things and they will scoff and blow cigarette smoke in my face. no likey. so i figured that i could just draw this stuff and make my own movies.
turns out that hand-animating films is really hard. like really, really hard. enter the false start stage of my teenage years. oh boy, where do i begin? if you've read this site in the past, you know what i'm talking about. script after script after script... for a while, i was a writing machine! but then these projects never went anywhere because it dawned on me that they not only lacked real substance, but also heart. my heart wasn't in these stories. that was a painful pill to swallow. you will never finish anything if your heart isn't in it. it has to be important to you. i don't think i agree with the notion that to make films, you need to live and breathe film, but you need to seriously evaluate if you have the will to sit down and draw frame after frame. i'm not saying this is bricklaying, but in a sense, it's kind of like bricklaying. one at a time, carefully...
i'm nearly 20 as of writing this... and i have finally vowed with my latest project to end this cycle. thankfully, this has been proving successful, and i have been, for the first time in my life, making serious headway on a project. i am excited to share it and am hoping it will travel a few festivals. it isn't a particularly serious flick. i think it's kind of funny. some of you will probably also think its funny and some of you will want to hit me over the head with a club after seeing it. but isn't that the beauty of film?