Not long after the early-spring 2022 public television premiere of my documentary Parkway of Broken Dreams, I decided to share the top lessons I learned while making that film (my debut feature), both as a kind reminder to myself for future projects and as a possibly helpful tool for others who may be on the path to producing or directing their own first film (nonfiction or otherwise). I drafted a loose script, and during a productive week in April when I also shot footage for a few other YouTube videos, I put my thoughts to video.
So why am I just now posting the finished video containing those filmmaking lessons in January 2023? Beats the heck out of me. I swear, it feels like it took me longer to edit this 18-minute video than it did to get to a 2-hour rough cut of Parkway in the first place. So maybe one more takeaway is that I am a slow editor.
The reality is that it just wasn’t a high priority, and I was so burned out from the making and then marketing of Parkway that I didn’t want to think about anything related to documentaries–or really filmmaking in general–for a long time. I started writing and playing music again, returned to a somewhat regular fitness routine, and got weirdly heavy into crossword puzzles.
But by late fall of last year, I started to turn my attention back to film-related projects, polishing scripts, fleshing out story ideas, and most urgently, doing early production work on a potential new project with the impetus provided by a mid-December funding application deadline. So while I was back to working in Premiere every day hastily editing a 15-minute fundraising sample for said new project, I got back in the swing of things and returned to some unfinished editing business, and well, here we are, a month later, with this new YouTube video.
Although the video covers eight “lessons,” there are really multiple learnings addressed within each short chapter, but even those barely scratch the surface of all the lessons I learned making my first feature-length doc. But I think I’ll save any others for a deeper dive in the areas where I feel like my experience can really speak universally to others in a similar boat–or just that I find interesting enough to share. Even if it takes me another nine months to crank out another video.