almostfearless.com

Posted: 24 May 2011 10:49 AM PDT

Last year, right after Cole was born, my husband and I had a long talk about priorities. You see he went to art school for animation like a million years ago, and that landed him some nice jobs, but never doing the kind of work he got into the biz to create. He was a commercial artist, making animated banner ads for diaper companies and heartburn medication. It paid the bills, but to say he was creatively fulfilled, um, not so much.

So we made a pact. We would only work on creative projects that we liked and we’d make our living doing it.

And it’s kind of worked. We raised $10K for gear to film a documentary (from the readers of this website, even!), we’ve paid for our travels and we saved a little on the side.

So what have we been doing? Running around shooting footage for the documentary (we’re now on our fourth continent), writing ebooks that we’re inspired to write, I’ve been writing this website with some help from him on video, we’ve both been taking a lot more pictures and doing a small bit of consulting for projects that we like and I’ve been writing for some travel publications.

We’ve been working out butts off. We’re doing our second to last interview here in Barcelona, then going to do our final interview in Rwanda, then holing up (probably literally) somewhere for a few months to edit the film.

It’s the biggest project we’ve ever done as a couple. We’ve fought constantly about it. I’ve fired him as editor like 20 times. Once, during an interview, I barely suppressed the urge to scream, “ARE YOU F-ING KIDDING ME” when he mentioned that two hours in, he had neglected to record sound.

Of course, I’m not easy to work with either. I’m constantly making plans — like flying out to Thailand — and forgetting to ask the intended interviewee if they even wanted to be interviewed (it was a friend of ours and thankfully they said yes — and it was one of the best interviews to date). I have very clear, yet completely non-communicated ideas about how things should be shot, what footage we need to get and even about the style and settings used to shoot it. Unlike me, my husband doesn’t threaten to fire me from the project (he’s much nicer than I am), but I have caught him muttering, “Oh really, that would have been good to know.”

Welcome to our creative lives. I think shooting a documentary is so big, such a huge stretch for us, coupled with constant travel, a new baby and running our creative business (this website and our other endeavors) that it’s beyond just challenging, it’s too much for us to handle.

We laugh about this, sometimes. About our absurdly optimistic view of ourselves. About how we sat in an apartment in Bend, OR and said, “Let’s make a documentary” like that was something people just did, with an infant, while teaching themselves how to use professional grade video equipment and software like After Effects and Final Cut Pro. “Oh no problem! We’ll just make an hour long film.” Heck, when we started this, we said we’d do 90 minutes. Bwahahaha.

It’s one of the things that I love about us as a couple: we’re totally on crack. We will just try something. Then we’ll try to kill each other. Then we’ll laugh and he’ll make fun of me, and I’ll say, “Hey, I don’t like to be teased” and then I’ll accidentally put salt in his coffee.

It’s May now, we head into editing this summer and by August we’ll be done. A year spent on this little film, and then it’s over. As much as I have hated the grind of it — the long hours working, the bickering, the steep learning curve, the frustrations of constantly dealing with storage issues and render times and hardware that won’t work — I feel the end of this project looming and the large vacuum that exists beyond it.

Seriously, now what?

I can tell you what we’re NOT doing! Another documentary. Ever, ever, ever. Um, ever. Well unless this one does really well and we get a contract to do another. Or the idea is just that good. But otherwise, no way jose! No. That’s the somewhat final word too!

So whatever happens, the film festivals we’re applying to are all in 2012. There’s a big gap between the finish of the project and the project seeing the light of day. So now we’re talking about almost a full year before we have to make the call on “shall we torture ourselves yet again by trying to complete a wildly difficult creative project while spending 24 hours a day together?” Until then, we need a new adventure.

And this is where my penchant for internet buzz words comes in: crowd-sourcing. Our version of it involves asking a bunch of people online for their ideas and then picking the craziest one. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

Adventure Ideas

Buy, refurbish and learn how to sail on our own sailboat

Spend a year in wine country, training to be a sommelier and write a book about it (in other words, drink a lot)

Live in Monogolia in a Ger (a type of Yurt) — updating this website from satellite phone once a week — and get really, really good at doing nothing

Get pregnant with baby #2 and continue traveling, documenting my morning sickness and strange food aversions from around the globe

Retire in Chiang Mai for a year, where we stuff ourselves silly on delicious northern thai food and hang out with other bloggers

Start a web travel show featuring Drew, where we get to make him do every stupid stunt we can think of (I’ve got a few lined up already!)

Or….

This is where you come in. If you had one year to do something crazy, it can be ANYTHING, but it has to be big, what would it be? Help us figure out what the heck we’re doing with our lives!

(Bonus points to anyone who gets the Adventure Time reference

– our 15 mo makes us watch it 3x a day)

Pic: Tomooka