My generation grew up with black and white movies, and went through eras of westerns, gangsters, slapstick comedy and the like that defined the movie industry for years to come.
I was privileged to view films that were revolutionary, like Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc. that changed the entire landscape of visual entertainment and ushered in sci-fi on a whole new level.
Many of the things once cartoonish, became human dramas, and vice versa.
All of these movies were fuel for my imagination, and influenced much of my writing and drawing in my early years.
I would have liked to have made movies myself, you know, the big dream of writing and directing and producing your own vision. It is a complicated business that you have to start young at and work your way through, and I am sure it is not as easy as it sounds. I find even putting a story in writing a very hard undertaking. But I am loathe to say hard work, as it is not. I love doing it and I get mad when fellow writers and artists insist on claiming it to be toil. I can tell you what toil really is – doing what you hate, day in and day out just to pay the rent and feed the cat. Disappearing into my imagination for hours at a time is not toil. It is escape.
What makes creative pursuits hard is putting them out into the world. They are your children, they are you.
If I could show my stories on the big screen this would be the culmination of all the art, writing and photography I could possibly make. There could be awesome scenery and beautiful places that words cannot adequately describe. Pages of emotion can be displayed on an actors face in only seconds. I think this fantastic. It gives me chills.
We usher in a new era of movies; animation and CGI (computer generated images) that are so lovely that I find myself holding my breath watching them. I was first introduced to modern animation with Howls Moving Castle, which left me spellbound. How To Train Your Dragon is mesmerizing. Both have stories to tell, not just dazzling animation.
In my mind, every story I write is a movie in my head and I am at once, all the characters, the plot, the scenery. It is the grandest of escapes, my only escape from the drudgery of the reality of my actual life.
There are movie reels and then there is my escape highlight reel in my head.