2007-2008

I've been at SVS for 13 years, which makes it pretty hard to put my time here into perspective, but that's what I'm trying to do here. As far as I'm concerned, writing this is at least as much about self-reflection and closure for me as it is about convincing you that I deserve a diploma. So I've been reconstructing my muddled and uncertain memories, figuring out the timeline, so that I can look back at all 13 years as a whole as being a success, and at this thesis as a summary and representation of that success and a definition of who I am.

So here's the deal: I love filmmaking. It's what I've done with my life, what I intend to keep doing with my life, and it's what I'm good at. I'm interested in most aspects of it, but one that I've focused on in particular is character animation. I guess I'd say that character animation is acting for control freaks. I have trouble with the spontaneity and unpredictability of live acting – animation is about creating the illusion of spontaneity, very slowly and methodically, and all from scratch.

That's what defines me primarily, I think. Well, that and everything else.

2006-2007

I started going to SVS when I was 5, so although the contrast between when I started here and when I'm leaving is probably more than for most people, it's also less interesting. I was a little kid, everything was big and scary and unknown, blah blah blah. The first day I was here alone, without my mother, I spent the whole day just sitting out in the field waiting for her to come back, occasionally going inside to ask somebody what time it was. The first time I saw the sign saying “J.C. meets daily at 11:00 AM”, my first guess at what it meant was something like the Easter Bunny or Santa, a person named J.C. who dressed up in a costume so kids could meet them every day at 11. (Now I know better, it stands for Jedi Council.) The first time I was actually called into J.C., as a witness I think, no one told me I could leave after my complaint was dealt with, so I stayed and watched for over an hour until it was over, which was pretty boring. For a while my friends and I would try to get brought up, because we thought it would be really interesting to get sentenced, and have to stay out of a room. But since we were little and the things we did weren't very bad, they wouldn't give us any more than a warning. When we eventually did get a real sentence, it turned out to not be much fun after all.

I don't really feel like any of these silly anecdotes, in and of themselves, necessarily have much bearing on anything, but I'm not sure how I can summarize my mindset at the time other than listing some of my memories like this.

I'm not exactly sure how I got into filmmaking, as it was a very long time ago (although I know why I like it now). What I do remember (and/or figured out by watching the videos I made) is that when I was little, I had a giant (at least relative to me) clunky old VHS video camera, which I messed around with a lot, although I don't seem to have made anything with any sort of plot until I was around 6. I made lots of movies, which is to say that whenever I had the camera and a friend in the same room, I would turn on the camera, and we would just mess around and try to improvise stories until either the tape ran out or they had to leave. I also did a bunch of stuff with puppets, and some rudimentary animation, stop-motion and cutouts and stuff like that.

2005-2006

Average thesis length is 2.4 pages. By comparison, average Tyrannosaurus Rex length is about 40 feet.

When I was 8 or 9, I think, I started to hang out with big kids more than with other little kids. Looking back on it, a few of them were really terrible role models, I was just too naive to be badly influenced by them. Also around that time I got a smaller video camera, one which I was actually physically capable of lifting, and my movies got more ambitious, albeit not that much better.

When I was about 10, my favorite hat, which had pictures of blueberries on it, got too old, and I wanted a new hat that was at least as interesting. My father suggested getting one embroidered with the word “Weird”. I thought that was funny, so I agreed. Being the most immediately notable thing about me, I started using it as my logo for movies I made, and then I started using “WeirdHat” as my screenname on the Internet – and then I got the domain name weirdhat.com to put my website on. So it's pretty much my signature now.

Sometimes I worry that wearing the hat makes it seem like a label of me, and that it can come across as annoying and pretentious to label yourself as weird. I never thought of it as labeling me, it's labeling itself – and it's a self-fulfilling label, since the label is the only thing actually weird about the hat. One thing I'm considering is the possibility of changing it so that the hat itself says “WeirdHat”.

2002-2003

In 2002 I got a MiniDV video camera, the tiniest most portable one I could find. Overcompensating for the size of the old one, I guess. Then I learned that cameras generally have worse image quality the smaller they are. I'm still using that one, though, and at least my skill at using it has improved. I'm much less prolific now, but as a result of taking more time to think about what I'm doing and try to do it well, and I think I've got a pretty good sense of my own style and approach to filmmaking at this point.

I like complex, intricate plots, particularly mystery based ones. I like things that are confusing at first, but then turn out later to make perfect sense. Internal consistency is important to me – nothing has to make sense in the context of real life, but it should always make sense in the context of the story. I'm probably overly consistent in general, that's one of the reasons why I want to leave SVS now. One thing I've had a hard time learning by being here forever is how to deal with change.

I like stylized cinematography, I like movies that know exactly what they want to show you on every frame and show that, unlimited by the constraints of reality. I like art that takes full advantage of the medium it's made in, and I think film allows for combination of realism and stylization more than any other art form. You can show impossible things as if they were real, and real things in impossible ways.

2001-2002

I like making stories clear without the use of dialogue. I guess that's a function of my personality. I mean, I value being able to articulate myself verbally, but I value being able to articulate myself nonverbally at least as much, and I feel like I'm better at it.

I feel like movies and music are very reliant on each other, I usually find either one without the other a lot less interesting.

I rarely spend any money on filmmaking. I try to work with what I have, and I think I'm good at that, although I'm sure I would be somewhat better if I bought better equipment and editing software and such. I generally like to work alone if possible – I don't like having to rely on other people for anything I can deal with myself – although I have certainly done successful collaborative projects.

I have two movie projects I'm currently working on. One I'm co-directing with Tosh Spencer, it's about a guy who became immortal and then got tired of life, and finds that the only way to die is to go back in time and kill himself before he became immortal. It's called Evergreen, it should be between 20 and 30 minutes long. We filmed about half of it in September and October, and then all the leaves fell off the trees and we had to wait for it to get green outside again to continue filming. We're hoping to finish it by the end of the school year.

The other one is an animated webseries called Incongruitastic that I'm doing all on my own. I've made five one-minute episodes so far, over the course of the past two years. I have a lot more plans and ideas for it, but it's going very slowly because it doesn't have a deadline and everything else in my life does. The series is about four security guards who have to protect an array of dangerous and unpredictable lightswitches from nefarious folks who would try to harness their power.

2000-2001

Some things that might be relevant don’t necessarily feel really connected to any of the other relevant things…

I was a J.C. clerk for a term in 2006. I can't say that I did a great job, but... I at least did a job. It was a learning experience. It probably made me more cynical, although not that much, I definitely still have my naive idealism. I would have liked to do it again this year, if only to prove to myself that I could do it better now, but I didn't have the time.

Last year I was School Meeting Secretary. The main thing I learned from that, honestly, is that pretending you know what you're doing is often a pretty effective way to get things done. I mean that in the best possible sense.

I used to be really into computer programming, when I was little. These days I'm not so interested in the inner workings anymore – I mainly use computers for the purpose of filmmaking, and for the Internet to keep in touch with people, as a source of information to learn things from, and to publicize myself.

1997-1998

Anyway…

There were times when what I would do about getting bored at school was go and sit in the Internet Room and stare at the computer for hours. A couple of years ago I decided that was a waste of time – I have a computer at home, and I have friends I can interact with at school. Since then I've actually had kind of a hard time doing anything at school that I could be doing at home instead – watching movies, reading, writing, etc. – and I’ve been focusing a lot more on socializing, which I think I took for granted and didn't try hard enough at for a long time.

That’s one of the more obvious changes that has happened to me during my time here, I think, that I’ve become less introverted. That’s something that’s true of a lot of students here, in my opinion. And that’s one of the best things about SVS, the community and all the socializing that goes on.

I think last year, more than any other, I spent getting my act together – realizing I was nearing the end of my SVS career and taking stock of what I had and hadn't done yet, sorting out my priorities, starting to think about the future, figuring out who I am and what to do with myself. Preparing myself to be an effective adult in the larger community, one might say.

1996-1997

Okay, look. I've left some relevant things out of my thesis. Everyone does, that's inevitable, but I want to at least acknowledge it. There are lots of stupid things I've done that I'd be too embarrassed to write about, but that were important learning experiences for me. Conversely, there are lots of really cool and EFFECTIVE things I've done that would just take even longer to go into specifics about. And this is all just how I perceive myself, if I could look at myself objectively maybe I'd have a better sense of what's relevant and what isn't.

I mean, as far as I'm concerned, any experience that's influenced me and helped define who I am could be part of the argument for why I'm prepared to be an effective adult. Well, that's pretty much every thing that's ever happened to me. So how do I figure out what subset of that to write about? I still don't know. But I thank SVS and all the people in it, for all those things. Even things like putting toothpaste and sand in my ear. Good times.

So:

I think that I've had a good, worthwhile life so far, and that I'm a pretty interesting person, and that at this point I can continue to have a good and worthwhile life and be interesting when I go forth into the Real World! I've been trying to avoid using this phrase because it's in EVERY SINGLE THESIS EVER, but it's appropriate: I'm ready to move on.

Next year I'm going to NYU, to major in film. It took me a while to figure out, in the process of applying to various schools, that what I really want out of going to college is a change of pace – I was kind of scared of the possibility of living in the big city, but I'm really looking forward to it now.

1995-1996

I've been at SVS for 13 years. That's over 70% of my life so far. I grew up here, this is my home, and it's awesome. I'm comfortable here – but being too comfortable for too long gets boring and unproductive. I need to shake things up.

Actually, deciding to graduate has already started shaking things up for me a lot. I'm having a lot of fun with the challenge of having a deadline for everything, trying to make the most of my last year and fit in everything I need to do before I leave. So I am still having a great time here, and I intend to have a great time right up until I get kicked out on the last day of school, but I think next year would be much less fun if I stayed.

I obviously can't be sure what direction my life will take later – if I tried to guess, either I'd be wrong or my life would be boring, and people reading this in the future (including myself) would make fun of me for it – but what I want out of life is to make movies, one way or another, and I think I'm more than capable of finding ways to do that successfully under whatever circumstances life throws at me.

Bye Sudbury Valley School! I love you! See you later!

www.weirdhat.com