Some times the crazy ideas are the best ones

I thought I was ready for school for school this semester. I was bored at home tired of working minimum wage jobs and manuel labor for under the table cash.

last semester I went hardcore. maximum credits. job on a show at ic tv. multiple clubs. I was spread thin. and what happend was everything i did sufferd the cost of not getting enough attention.

This semester I thought i was going to take it easy on my self take less courses and doing less clubs, but  c'est la vie some how I am even more spread thin then ever before. over whelmed with stress I became extremely introspective wondering about what I want to do in the industry and trying to figure my self out. It was in one of these moments of self meditation when I got a crazy Idea.

What did I come to Ithaca for? I came to make movies. to learn how to make movies. I never considered my self an artist. But recently i came tot he realization I am. my free time is spent creating. weather it be  writing short, storys script, music, jokes for my standup ( I am an amateur stand up comedian). but mostly I am insane im not ashamed to admitted it and every great artist is insane in one way or another. I am not trying to say I am a great artist, but that i do possess the qualities of one.

When my professor Arturo Sinclair told me he dropped out of college to make movies at age 15 i was  impressed to say the least. it was such a simple answer to a question that seemed so complicated. how do you mange to do in life exactly what you want to do. you just do it.

I've done it before in life. when I was a freshman in highschool I wanted to fly to chicago to visit my best friend and go to lollapoolza. I had no money. my parents said if i would pay for it i could do it. (proably assuming i could never get the money.) to solve my problem i designed a Teeshirt I could sell at my school. to make a long story short I sold over 100 shirts and grossed over a thousand dollars and funded my trip.

this summer i was strapped for cash again but i could not get hired at any job in town. so i made a job. i started my own window washing service and made 4 times the money i could have at a regular minimum wage job in a quarter of the time.

The point I am trying to make is sometimes in life when you want something you just have to go take it. you can't sit around waiting for opportunity to find you.

now if you have read all of that you are proably wondering what my crazy Idea is. and it is simple I want to make a film a real film I can be proud of.

this is just a rough Idea and I am begging for input and advice.

If you look at the Ithaca website for the price of tuition and fees you see this chart

Tuition and fees	$35,278
Board	5,980
Room	6,874
Health insurance	575
Total	$48,707

48,707 dollars a year is more money then I have ever seen in one place
If you are like me which i suspect there are quite a few you are not on scholarship or only partial scholar ship your parents help you pay some of the cost you use the money you make over the summer to help pay tuition while keeping some so you can buy things you want and need and you take out some student loans a massing a daunting debt especially with the uncertainty of of the future this can be terrifying.

well what if after the spring semester when you have a massed junior or senior standing and become way more polished in the skills it takes to make a movie you take a gap year and put those skills to use.

in this gap year plan to spend $10,000 put into the project of making a movie its a fraction of the money you would spend a year when at college and at the end of it all you would be part of something amazing. an original film that you co-produced had direct influence over.

If I can get 7 more people on board with this idea thats 80,000 dollars we could invest into this project.
with that money we could rent equipment pay for meager room and board, pay actors, and pay for permits for what ever we need too.

we could create a great low budget film and it would be ours.

on the side we could also use the equipment were renting to document the entire process so by the end of the gap year we have our own film and the footage to make a documentary about they entire project.

The type of people I would be looking for to join me on this crazy project are as follows
- A Head cinematographer
- A Head sound designer
- A Director
-  2 editor
- A lighting expert
- a costume/prop designer

of course i would also expect of these core people to be multi talented and can fill in to any other positions needed

we would need a script a great script that can be shot easily that does not demand to much capital.

It seems crazy. but at the same time it seems very possible. and at he end of it all we know we went for it. and will probably learn more then we every thought possible about this industry and our selves.

this is just a skeleton of an idea and i need help from YOU to fill the skeleton with meat and organs and blood and life.

if you are interested in this please contact me my phone number is  609-610-4445 and my email is Austin.Scharfstein@gmail.com

help me make this crazy idea into a crazy story.

Scriptwriting?

Last night, I went to bed around 9 PM.

Today, I woke up at approximately 3 PM.

18 hours of sleep, and I think I'm finally starting to feel healthy again.

I'd like to thank the makers of NyQuil for this; you simultaneously helped me feel better and shot any hopes I had of catching up on work today in the face, and that's not an easy thing to do.

I should know better than to take the stuff the night before I need to get things done by this point in life, but for the relief it provided short term, I can't complain much.  Nevertheless, the sleep it knocked me into actually brought a fuzzy dream that I think might've just influenced my path in TVR, and is taking me in the direction of a scriptwriting minor.  At first, I thought it was absurd; so I dreamed that I wrote a really amazing script and loved it, big deal.  It isn't like it was a prophetic vision of lottery numbers or anything (I wish), right? 

That was my mindset, until I realized I needed to sit down and write a script for a class and would have no other time during the weekend to do it.  So, I scrawled out a rough draft, and, what do you know, it wasn't half bad.  And...I enjoyed writing it?!  Hm.  Interesting.

I shared it with another member of my class for some feedback since I'd missed the day of the assignment in my class, and he really liked it.  He mentioned several points that I could fix up or work on, but was otherwise quite impressed at my "shitty first draft" (shout out to the Developing Story Narratives class and that reading, it's good to know everyone has a rough time in the beginning).

Now, as I'm brushing it up and still enjoying doing it, I'm considering adopting a scriptwriting minor as of next semester.  I used to like doing creative writing back in high school, even submitting to and being the editor in chief of our literary magazine for two years.  I've always thought that within TVR I wanted to go towards things like field production or doing animation, but I think another avenue just opened up.  This is definitely something I'm considering pursuing, because it's never going to hurt to be a bit more well-rounded in the field, and I could someday benefit hugely from knowing both how to produce and edit in the field or a studio as well as how to write for TV.

I'm curious if being in Fiction Field will impact my desire to do scriptwriting at all.  I hope that there are opportunities within this course to create some sort of epic script and storyline, because it'd be good to test the waters before diving in head-first to another commitment in Park.  Also, I think I'd want to sharpen up my writing academically, because it just took me three tries to spell "commitment" correctly.

I guess you've got to start somewhere.