His journal was incredibly inspiring and captivating, taking me through his life starting work on Prince of Persia as a hot young game developer and screenwriter with massive confidence and all the way to starting work on PoP 2, after having been humbled by almost not even finishing PoP and then having it struggle for a year in the market despite rave reviews. There are many auto-biographies and regular biogs out there where you get the idea that the person was a machine of perseverance and couldn’t be held back by anything in the world. In many cases here, Jordan is his own worst enemy through his sprawling areas of interest and his lack of focus on the task at hand, but he gets through it in the end.

Sounds familiar to me, except the last bit. The one thing that really seems to permeate my life’s history is an inability to leave things unfinished. Finishing my stageplay (well, the first few drafts, at least) was a huge step for me, but it’s time to do something about the rest of my life.

I’m going to start writing in this here web journal about what I do and what I avoid doing. It’s a semi-full disclosure approach that I hope will help me to keep myself accountable. I will not lie about my progress, I will not lie about my reasons for not making progress. It’s frightening, but that’s exactly what I might need.

When I was a kid, the most effective way to make me clean my room was for mum to say “If you haven’t cleaned your room in an hour, I’m doing it for you!” and if you think that positively wonderful, you haven’t had your room cleaned by anyone like my mum. During one of her “rampages”, my trash can would quickly fill up, and all my little secrets laid bare. Fear is a powerful motivating factor, especially when strengthened by the gratification of a job well done by the end.

I need to frighten myself, it’s as simple as that.
Magnus! If you don’t do anything today, you’ll have to write about it on your blog tonight!

*shudders*

A project for university, in the module “Deconstructing Narrative”, in which we were tasked to create a short film which used a non-linear (or, more accurately; alternatively linear) structure. After some discussions within the group, I stuck myself on the idea of the letter and how you’ll read it as something in the present, but it’ll actually represents the actions and thoughts of the past. No one knows what could happen from the moment you drop your letter in that box until the moment the postman drops it off at its destination. What used to be your future is now your past, and it may be a much happier past than you envisaged, or it may be much, much darker.

It’s obviously not a perfect film. I would have loved for the main actor to be dressed a little less modernly, as she is quite an old-fashioned girl.
Ideally, we would have filmed the two interior scenes at different days so we could prepare and play off the footage of one phone conversation to the one acting in the other, that way they would have syncronised a lot better.
Issues with the camera led to us using 4:3 rather than widescreen. As it turns out, it works relatively well, but I would have liked it to have that full wide format, because we would have had more space for each shot.

However… I’ve been stuck at Torture for a while now. Torture and Procrastination. I play games and read things and I find no REAL enjoyment in any of it. I’ll have a chuckle, but then I go “Okay, time to work” and I can’t seem to stop playing or watching, and I rather keep doing what I was, only there’s no enjoyment now, because I’m conscious of the fact that I’m not doing my work.

So why can’t I snap out of it?

More and more, my motivation for staying at my Film and Photography course at Napier is becoming the fact that I’ve accrued a huge debt from this course and it would all be kind of useless if I end it now. Should money be the motivation for anything, though? If I feel that I would be more happy doing something that was less production-based and more performance-based, should I not follow that instinct? But then, is it not my instinct to go with film studies that got me into this mess in the first place? I’m closing in on 30 years, which is anything from a third to half of my entire lifespan, and I still don’t know where my life is headed. I can’t afford another dead end, can I? What if I suck at acting, too?

What if I’m HEADED for a dead end? What if changing now would lead me in a direction more suitable to me? What if it would just lead me into a different dead end? What if there was a fork in the road much further back that didn’t go on to a dead end?

Okay, I suppose in life there are no real dead ends. At worst, they’re cul-de-sacs… They don’t stop you in your tracks, but they lose you a lot of time. I don’t want to keep losing mine.