No Place for A for Effort

My 2020 capped off with an amazing opportunity to tell a national story with the full trust from a client, ample time to grapple with the uncertainties of the project due to COVID-19, as well as a healthy budget. I had seen it as my chance to showcase what I could truly do, having done projects for them in the past that was satisfactory, but not fully so as I never had full quality control of the media to be featured. This time round, virtually the entire production is shot or procured by me.

I put in a lot of effort and thought into this work, but when it was time to showcase it, I was disappointed. The video is still good, and the project was well-received. But I would give myself a grade of B-, as I felt my skills as a Documentary Storyteller were still lacking. In a world where a client is paying good money for your work, anything but an A+ should be considered a failure.

In situations like this, my natural response is to test and fix. This rough patch is not foreign to me. I felt the exact same way when I completed my first documentary, The Conservation Conversation, in 2016. My response then was to test my doubts and overcome my mistakes through more work. This resulted in my second documentary, Trespass: Stories from Singapore’s Thieves Market in 2018, where I improved on my fundamentals and the reactions from the people featured imbued me with the confidence to continue on my journey as a Documentary Storyteller.

Fortunately this time round, I’ve gathered a few more talented friends, and they have agreed to help me through this forensic deep dive into what went wrong with this project. By dissecting the specifics, we can then address them individually across multiple independent projects to really level myself up so that I can be ready for whatever new opportunities lie ahead. I am excited by this because I am curious as to how these series of short documentaries will turn out when I am dedicating each not simply to the story but to a technique. This may be the phase of film schooling that I never received, but am now creating for myself.

And I use the word schooling because I am eager to do this not in isolation, but with experienced, like-minded individuals. Through their expertises and generosity, and my dedication to be better - the works will speak for themselves.