How I Became Interested In Film:

As a child I desperately wanted to be a writer. I read obsessively and wrote many short stories, and my teachers sent me to all kinds of camps, conferences, and TAG (Talented and Gifted) programs to develop my skills.
My sophmore year of high school I decided writing wasn't for me and started to develop my film skills instead. Junior and senior year I was completely devoted to the film program at my high school. For three months we were without a media department teacher when our old teacher went crazy and left his position. This particular term I was signed up to take the advanced media class.
Advanced media was the kind of class all the troublemakers took, because it was usually pretty easy to get an A. Plus, film is not about following rules, it is usually about breaking them. Needless to say, without a teacher, our class got a little out of control. Essentially they had put 20 or 30 of these kids into a room, handed them some expensive equipment, and let them do whatever they wanted.
Off our media lab was a room full of junk. In the months between teachers, I spent every class period alone in this room, sorting through the piles of crap and clearing it out slowly, day by day. Nobody really paid much attention to me or knew what I was doing, so no one ever questioned this process, even when I was carting huge boxes of wigs and torn up newspapers around the school. I found new homes for all of these things in the room, or I threw them away.
I spent every free period in this room working on it. I covered over the three windows, organized a sound booth in one corner, and laid a green floor. I divided the two sections of the room with a wooden backdrop and I fixed and replaced the lighting that ran along the ceiling so we wouldn't have to use flourescent lightbulbs.
(The thing that surprises me about this process is that no one ever questioned me the entire time I was doing it. This is the Beaverton School District and here I am sectioning off an entire room for my own personal use, and no one stopped me. If you've ever seen the movie Speak, there is this part where she creates a little study inside a closet in her school. Well, that is essentially what I did. Most of the kids in the media department knew this was my studio and not to mess with it.)
When I was all finished, I used the room to green-screen movies. I taught myself this process in my free time playing around in Final Cut. Now, I believe they still use the studio for the same purpose. Our new instructor was totally down with the studio and let me spend entire class periods in there on my own, working on the "senior project" (which was really just whatever thing I felt like doing that day).
That year was the year I decided I definitely wanted to be in the film industry, and when I applied to the Art Institute. Since then I have often wondered what would have been different had I spent my time investing in other fields. Take biology for example. Because of the fact that the media teachers basically let me do whatever I wanted, I was in the lab every chance I got, which meant I dropped a few classes I didn't think I needed to get more free time to spend working on movies. My senior year I signed up for AP Biology, and I dropped it.
That leads me to my next point, but it is a whole different train of thought, so I will write about it tomorrow.

In the meantime... the good parts of today:
-working on my comic book (yikes! the deadlines are fast-approaching)
-hanging out with ethnos at (happy birthday troy!!) the sanders' party
-helping my sister get ready for her first day of high school (which is tomorrow)