Tyler Gibb - Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

I’ve just been going through spindle after spindle of DVD-Rs testing things out for the Refrain DVD and I’ve got to tell you - I’ve got a pretty sizable coaster collection at this point.

Have you bought a blank DVD-R these days? What’s going on with this industry? I’m calling you out Fuji! I don’t like to point fingers but c’mon! And don’t look so smug Memorex. You either Virbatum… I may have switched over brands but I’m not unpacking my bags.

Where is the love? Where has the craftsmanship gone? Is hardcopy media so far gone now that these manufacturers just don’t care anymore? I remember when DVD-Rs where made by men. Handcrafted by artisans of a bygone era… I remember when you had to go out and mine the bauxite yourself, haul it to the aluminum refinery, polish the disks by hand… Those were the days. You knew what you were getting. A 1x write speed and desktop burner the size of a car battery.

For shame…

It’s been a long day. But don’t worry! I’ll make sure the Refrain DVDs are encoded by hand. I’ll do it myself with a magnifying glass and a needle.

Welcome to the party VOD.

In the wake of Refrain’s premiere at the Festival des Films du Monde I’ve been busy putting together a DVD of the movie. I will also be making the movie available by video on demand (VOD).

Not sure when it will be officially launched yet but I just wanted to let those of you who email me wondering about it know that you will get a chance to see the film eventually.

More soon!

The question is always what’s next?

I bet the minute those guys who faked the moon landing got back someone asked them “so, what’s next?”

And it’s a valid question. It’s nice to glance over your shoulder every once in a while and see how far you’ve come but mostly that kind of retrospection is best left to your subconscious and the writer of your obituary. The question of what’s next? is really the forward thinking way to go.

For most career oriented humans I would imagine what’s next? is a pretty straightforward setup. Like climbing a mountain, what’s next is whatever’s going to get you closer to the top. But to those of us cursed with the creative drive it’s a little less like climbing a mountain and a little more like trying to chase a squirrel across a lawn. The path is a little less obvious.

What I’m trying to say is there may come a time when you feel you’ve chased every whim you’ve ever had and that maybe you need more of a calculated course. You need to move things up a little, not just side to side. You need to escalate.

I recently decided to postpone shooting a new feature project. A new no-budget, balls-out, flying by the seat of my pants feature. I was almost set to go but there was something weighing on my mind. It was the question of what’s next? The easy answer was: This new feature project, that’s what! But that’s only window dressing. The real question of what’s next? goes beyond that. It asks: What would I be bringing to this project that I haven’t done before? What would make this project a bigger success than anything I’ve done previously?

Escalation. You’ve got to have it.

It sounds a bit megalomaniacal, I know, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I’m just saying, if you don’t up the challenge every time then all you’re really doing is working on an assembly line. So I’m reassessing. Re-figuring.

And that doesn’t mean I won’t chase the occasional squirrel just to keep my senses sharp. But there’s a mountain top out there with my name on it.

God, I wish I worked on an assembly line.

My dwelling is more often than not right beneath the flight path of the nearest international airport. Quel surprise. And for about one week or so every year - at about this time - the sun’s traverse across the sky lines up perfectly with the flight path above my home. It’s an astrological event of the suburban scale.

What this means to me, being that I work from home, is that roughly every twenty minutes or so, for a week, a jet thunders overhead and momentarily eclipses the sun. Now I’m only in this momentary shadow for a split second but it’s enough to terrify anyone with half my imagination and sense of self-importance. You’d think I’d get used to it. But no, every single time I hear those descending engines hurling toward me and then suddenly the sun is blotted out I think: This is it!

Of course it’s gone as quickly as it came but I’m always left with the lingering reminder of mortality (it’s a pretty long week). And the form this lingering reminder of mortality usual takes is the question: Would I be satisfied with the body of work I’d be leaving behind if a jet plane really did come crashing down and evaporate me in a fiery inferno?

Usually the answer is no. Not yet.

Then I go back to work.

There’s a drawback to being prolific. And to blogging late at night when you really should just shut up and go to sleep before you say something that sounds like a backdoor compliment. As if this form of public self-aggrandizement wasn’t bad enough to begin with…

Where was I?

Being prolific. Doing too much. Covering too many bases. Each new project alienating the last audience you worked so hard to build up. Going from fart jokes to anime - but not even real anime - then from that to a live action tear-jerking drama… How are people supposed to trust you?

And not just the viewers, or listeners, or readers; the people you want to work with. Doing a recent interview for Refrain when the question of “what’s next?” came up, I came to the sudden realization that I will undoubtedly write more scripts than I will ever be able to producer myself in my lifetime. I already have enough stockpiled to last me a decade if I continue to go at it alone. So I need to offload these things. Enough pussy-footing around it, I need to be exploited. Used. But here’s the thing: I’m not entirely sure that the people who could use someone like me (people with means and ends) trust me.

No one trusts a guy selling a bit of everything. No, you want something done well you go to a specialist. One guy, who’s got one thing, one idea that he’s going to champion until his dying breath. And if it turns out to be a dud that doesn’t matter because you just move on - it was his dying breath not yours. You’ve got a dozen completed feature film scripts sitting in a drawer waiting to be shot? Psh! How good could they all be!

That’s exactly what I would say. Maybe I should be more open-minded. But this business seems to be far too full of opportunistic hunters. Scavengers. Charlatans. It’s hard to distinguish yourself from them in the minds of others.

The tragedy of stalking along in the fringe wastes of show business is that gradually you start to understand and sympathize with practices you generally came up despising such as nepotism, cronyism. It’s all about trust isn’t it?

Ha! I’m screwed.