Dusty B

Hi there!

While riding the bummer of the latest job rejection letter, I decided that maybe joining a new community would pick me up a little. I had found the podcast here at Killer Reviews a few months back and really enjoyed it, to the point of shoving out some of the regular shows I listen to in order to catch up on some of the past shows. I had never checked out the forums or blogs on the site until just recently and saw that it seemed like a very fun place to hang out, free of the annoyances I've found among other sites. I hope I can contribute to the site in my own way.

With that, I figured I'd tell a little about myself as a way to introduce myself here on the site and say hello, and as a way to state where I am right now in life so I can look back and see how far I went, or how far I fell, I suppose.

I've been obsessed with movies ever since I was a child, spending my spare hours in video stores studying the fronts and backs of every genre title I could find. As I grew, that obsession just became more and more a dominant force in my life. Everything I did was for movies and every spare dime I had went towards buying them. My goal that whole time has been to someday make movies.

The old saying is that film school is a waste of money and you should just go out and make a movie. Well, I went to film school anyways. Was it a waste of time and money?

Yes. And no.

I spent about seven years after high school trying but never coming near a production or even a camera. I was only killing myself slowly with general labor jobs and barely getting by. So I decided to commit financial suicide and go to school on nothing but school loans. The school itself didn't teach me a whole lot more than what you can get by just studying films and special features on your own time. But it did enable me with the resources to actually make films, something I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. I also got to know and work with some great people there that helped to develop film crews that we can rely on. And, ideally, the credentials I earned there with my degree and the experiences I earned working under various internships should have helped me land some steady job editing industrial or commercial stuff.

But the world went to shit while I was in school. Before I started school, I did my research into what type of jobs I could get upon graduating. At the time, there was plenty of listings for jobs such as cutting stuff like internal company videos and lighting for web-series, even here in Portland, so I thought things would work out. While I was in school, the recession hit and it's only seemed to get worse so when I graduated, those jobs had pretty much dried up.

At the same time, my wife was diagnosed with cancer in her lungs which, at this time, radiation therapy and chemotherapy have proven to be useless. The one fortuitous thing that's happened is that after I was laid off from my warehouse job, I was able to draw unemployment so I could take care of my wife and our two year old son much easier than I would have been able to without it, even if I'm still having no luck trying to get even the most low-level general labor job right now.

That's pretty much where I am now, leaving out a whole bunch of other extraneous stuff. I'm trying to get some kind of job so we can save up to move somewhere where I can find real work. I'm also hoping to try to raise funds in order to get a movie made sometime in 2012 but who knows how that'll go.

I promise my other blogs won't be such a bummer (I hope it doesn't come across as whiny, if so just slap me). I just felt like stating how things are for me right now and if I have any luck in following my goals, I'll post updates, but really I enjoy posting about my OCD with movies so that's mainly what you'll see here. I have a blog over at dvdfiend.blogspot.com but nobody really goes there so I'm hoping to start posting under here. I feel like the structure of the blogs here on the site help to create a community and it's nice feeling like you're contributing to somewhere you enjoy rather posting something in the ass-end of nowhere online.

Anyway, sorry for rambling too much. I figured maybe giving some background on my story might help as I try to fit in here on the boards and the like. Thanks for reading and I look forward to getting to know everybody!