My Journey to Film Making: Part 1

My Journey to Film Making: Part 1

My name is Jake Hawley. I am a cinematographer, an editor, and a visionary. This is the story of how I became the career driven man I am today.

(But first a quick disclaimer. It’s 12:30 in the morning, and I’m not that great of a writer during regular work hours. Bare with me, I will get better at this as I go :P)

I started making videos when I was 17 or 18 years old. When I was attending church, (RIP my youth), my youth pastor would always make 30–40 second videos of all the events and trips we had. On one of these trips he asked me to help him get footage on my iPod touch. When he played the video the next week at church, and I saw my footage being played to an audience, (or congregation, depending who you ask), I got a chill in my spine that I still get today when I show off my work. That day I found what was to be my newest hobby and soon to be my career path.

With my iPod being my first ever camera, I made videos of everything I could. I made videos of my friends dicking around in grocery carts, dancing down the street, and I had a series for the Friday night youth group get togethers called “The Misadventures of Drop-In”, an unedited, one take set of videos of teenagers being teenagers. Feel free to try and find that on YouTube, and Jonas if you’re reading this I’m begging you to not post it on Facebook if you do find them. It took me about a year before I finally bought myself a MacBook Pro and started editing videos on iMovie. For those of you who don’t know, iMovie is like the Junior Kindergarten of editing software, where you can have fun but dont expect anyone to take you seriously.

Now that I can add titles and cut out parts of my videos I don’t want, I had the world in my hands. My friends and I would take trips to Toronto and I would make unnecessarily long videos over top of my favourite christian pop songs. I found myself getting those chills up my spine again when I would finally tell my friends “Hey I finished that video from when you came to visit me in Kingston!” (The following link is posted shamelessly).

Fast-forward about 1 year. I’ve graduated high school, and even though I did a cooking based focus program in my senior year, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. So I went to St Lawrence College for my victory lap in a dual credit marketing program. Marketing was cool, it was great to learn how media and advertising forces its way into our everyday lives. A few months into the program, we get told about an upcoming video contest called “The Greg Awards”, specific to St Lawrence college and its students. We were told that we would be separated into groups, and each group would have to come up with a 5 minute video, explaining our program and what it teaches. Then, each video would be entered into “The Greg Awards” and one of us would win basic bragging rights because that’s all they had to offer us.

Before I continue I would like to mention that I’ve never really put much serious effort into school work. I don’t know if it was because I always had my head in the clouds, if school and I just didn’t click, or if I’m straight up too lazy. But hey, I’m writing this and I’m currently at 556 words. Go me.

When I found out about this assignment/contest though, I was ready to take it seriously. As far as I was concerned, I was the only one in the group who had any sort of video experience, and I was ready for my moment to shine. I was ready to be the guy to know, and to just sit back with my sunglasses on let the people swarm to me. Being that I was the only one in my 3 person group to have editing experience, I was stuck on the laptop for the parts where I wasn’t acting in the video. (Never again.)

For about a month we worked on this project, trying to make a cool video but all we did was rip off the video that was the previous years winner. I wasn’t surprised when the teachers had announced that my groups video had been selected to enter into “The Greg Awards”, but looking back I realized that our video was the shiniest piece of shit in the pile, and this was nothing to be proud of.

Fast forward to awards night. I was wearing my best blazer, a fedora hat and my best jeans because I didn’t know how to dress myself. We watch videos all night of other peoples work, and they’re all quality pieces of work. Finally the nominees for my classes category comes up. Apparently some other students in some other program were worse than us at making videos, because our polished turd had won. The three of us got on stage and realized we had not designated a person for our acceptance speech. I kind of feel bad, but me and the other male group member stared at our female partner until she gave in, and winged a speech in our honor.

That was the night that I decided I needed to take film making more seriously, and to consider it a career option if I enjoyed it enough. Enjoy this next shameless video share.

Until next time,

Jake Hawley