Well, I feel like we’ll look back on 2020 and it will be a blob of memories that all kind of run together, but it will be a year that will stick in our minds forever, for better or for worse.
At the risk of being a little too positive, my mantra for 2020 was to turn obstacles into opportunities. Wait don’t go. I know it’s not always easy to do, and I have so many privileges that other people don’t have that make this easier for me to say and do. And it’s not always applicable in every situation. ‘You can’t be like “oh I just cut off my finger with a sandwich knife, how can I turn this into an opportunity?” But I tried my best to look at creative challenges as opportunities to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise.
Abouna, my current film project, is on hold for obvious reasons. And there were other non-COVID related challenges. So I tried my best to do three things in 2020 to be somewhat productive.
- Practice and improve various filmmaking skills. I have spent so much of 2020 with the camera in my hand, or working on lighting, or audio, or writing storyboards, or editing footage. This is not a boast by any means, it’s actually more of a confession. It’s just what I did because there was way less to do otherwise.
- Use newly developed skills to improve my teaching. Like most faculty, I made a lot of videos in 2020 for online learning. And this is where I really tried to turn the obstacle of online learning into an opportunity to teach differently. In addition to live meetings, office hours, and online content, I made 94 videos for my three different courses, including a puppet show for Qualitative Research Methods! Here’s a sample.
- Try to learn from (and be inspired by) media I love. This is an excuse to watch TV. But there’s something to learn from any show or movie–storytelling strategies, editing tricks, camera maneuvers. Recently, I especially enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit.
If I have one piece of advice that I feel qualified to give: having a creative hobby (something beyond media consumption) has made downtime so much more palatable. There is always something to learn or something to practice, and it’s usually fun. So if you’re looking at something to do in 2021 that you will not regret, maybe diving more deeply into a creative hobby is in the cards.
My Vimeo Page