It’s a question I’ve been mulling over for a week or so. I’m currently working (I’ll leave that story there) and have been asking myself a lot of questions about my future.

I spent the last five (yes five) years studying to earn myself a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science. I first went and attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, for a year. After which I promptly returned home. I then enrolled in my local university, The University of the West Indies Mona (somewhere I wouldn’t recommend to anyone), and spent the next four years pushing and tearing myself to the finish line for a degree. I failed a lot but eventually made it. Some would call that perseverance but I look at it as a drawn out result that should’ve taken me a lot less.

After graduation I spent nine months on my couch at home looking for work and finally found it. Six months later I find myself, still at work, in front of my laptop typing this entry into my blog.

I guess I should really start from the beginning or at least a lot earlier than this. When I was in second or third grade (a lot of those years are a blur at this point) I was being picked up from school by my mother and I remember vividly the drive back home (which usually took anywhere between three and ten minutes to complete). She sat in the driver’s seat and started to talk in code about some new thing that’s entered the house. She started to talk about how it could type, had a screen and soon enough me and my older brother figured that it was a computer. We were going crazy and couldn’t get home quick enough.

The computer had a 20 Hz (yes… no K or G) processor and a turbo button which when pressed you heard the fan get dramatically louder and then the OSD on the tower would then show that it was going at 40 Hz. The computer came loaded with MS-DOS, what’s now referred to as the command prompt. I remember the stages of upgrading that the computer went over the years. We got a CD-Rom, a Modem then Windows 3.1, then Windows 95,etc.. The computer became my life. I started learning everything about it and always kept more and more in with the internet and how the world became more and more connected.

Well it was no surprise that at that young age I decided I wanted to be a video game designer/programmer. Up until a couple of years ago I’d say that very same thing to you if you asked me what I hoped to do with my life.

Then three and half years ago I started gmanreviews.com. I’ve always had a passion for film, but I guess the first time that I really felt affected by it in such a way that I wanted to express how I felt and start spreading the word about the movie was around five years ago when I first sat down to watch Reservoir Dogs. I know, I know. For the movie geek that I pretend to be I was a late bloomer and I definitely still have a lot of cinematic gaps that I need to work on and trudge through daily so as to educate myself on the industry that I want to comment on. But whenever I think back to the movie that sparked this love, even though I definitely could go a lot deeper into my history, I definitely see Tarantino’s break through film as the catalyst for what you see today.

However, with all that said I remember I was talking about me as a computer scientist and wanting to be a programmer, let’s jump back there. So for approximately fifteen years I’ve wanted to get into game design, but for the last five years of that period I’ve been consumed by the world of cinema. I’ve spent day and night reading through blogs and movie reviews to find the cream of the crop and the movies that I should see and should be ashamed to admit I haven’t. I guess that’s done something to me. I grew from being unable to tell that the hero always wins and the they fall in love and the bad guy gets what’s coming to him to the point where I’ve started to see the techniques in how a scene is shot and put together and in the last few weeks I’ve been asking myself constantly while watching movies, “How would I put that scene together?” This question has since blossomed into, “How would I make this movie?” Then eventually it’s finally come to, “If I were to make a movie, what kind of movie would I make?”

I’ve been entranced by the world of filmmaking and now I’m asking myself if I want to be a part of it fully. We all know that when you’re a child you change your profession every day of the week and by the time you’re ten you’ve pretty much gone through the phonebook. However, somehow I managed to be dedicated to one purpose all my life and now that I’m almost there I’m looking at another purpose and wondering what part of my brain I should listen to. Should I try and pursue this dream or should I keep working at the dream I’ve had for most of my life?

Once again I feel like I’ve derailed from my initial question of what kind of movie would I make? Honestly I don’t have an answer to that. I spend some free time writing scenes of movies I’d  like to make, haven’t worked up to full blown shorts or even feature length films, and they all change from day to day. One day I’ll write a western, the next a bank robbery, next a scene where two people are just talking gibberish to each other. I won’t pretend to say any of them are great, or even good, but I’ve been told that you can be your own worst critic so I’ll skip past that part of the conversation.

However I guess at the end of all this I just wanted to type all of these feelings I’ve been having for everyone to read – because isn’t that the point of a blog? – and to ask you guys; “What kind of movie would you make?”