I am one of those people who can get up in front of a crowd and shake my ass during a lively rendition of any good karaoke song (or a bad one for that matter cuz it's all about giving the people a show). And yet the thought of speaking in front of a crowd terrifies me like you wouldn't believe. When I was a senior in high school, we were given an assignment to research our family names, come up with a crest that represented us and present it to the class. It accounted for almost 60% of our grade but I begged my teacher (who didn't like me AT ALL) to let me do something else rather than a presentation and she finally let me do a written final instead.
Oddly, I had no trouble directing in front of a group of people during film school, a path that I began during my sophomore year of high school. First, I fell in love with writing scripts (which was probably to be expected since I already loved to write), then I was drafted by a classmate to appear as an extra with one line in his film project. I bombed like you wouldn't believe and was soon replaced by someone with the ability to utter a single line in front of twenty people. The week after that I began directing my first short film project and took to directing very naturally, almost as if that was my comfort zone. And that was weird since I was calling out orders to a crew of twelve students in locations that often included several other people as extras. That was the only time I didn't have a problem speaking up in front of a group and it was also one of the greatest times of my life because I was discovering a new passion in film making.
I'm a believer in the universe having some weird way of sending you where you need to be and fate definitely intervened when it came to my falling in love with film. I wasn't even supposed to take a film class in high school, I had intended to study culinary arts, but the woman who was signing us up for classes marked film down as my first choice and I ended up getting into that program. I've always been thankful to the two teachers I had in that class because they taught me so much, and not just about film. I remember we had one guest speaker come through class often and talk about his experiences working in the local film industry, he was their most successful graduate of the program. My classmates and I hung on his every word and used to talk about what it would be like to work in the local film industry someday ourselves. I made it a bit farther than that, no doubt helped by the fact that I went to college in California, and as my career has advanced I've told my former teachers that if they ever needed anything I would be more than happy to help them out. I did not realize that would include being a guest speaker for their current class. And obviously I could have said no but I know what it's like to be a kid in that class, wondering if you can actually do something you love for a living and seeing proof that your skills will take you as far as you wanna go. So I said I would come speak to their class and tell 'em what it's like to work in the film industry for a living. And I am terrified. So we will see if any words come out once I get up there.
