Everything Strange and New is a feature-length indie film from 2009.
The title a little ironic. The New York Times even called it "cruelly double-edged." The film depicts a single character's banal and monotonous life. Slowly, however, this is punctured by little surprises and changes that begin to twist and unravel that banality. Somehow the film manages to be both "strange and new" and the exact opposite of that at the same time.
I opened with this because I kind of feel like that's a good description of where I'm at right now. Everything is the same, but it's also... not.
I've been making films and animations forever. I think I've been making them since around maybe... 8 years old? Anyway, I'm still making them. Except now, I just graduated from college with a degree in Film. I've spent the last 4 years really examining time-based narrative storytelling and what it means and what exactly it is that I do and have been doing. (I made this piece just weeks after graduating, where I explored that odd "everything strange and new" feeling without even really realizing it. I hadn't even seen Everything Strange and New yet so I was only able to categorize my piece this way retroactively.)
Now, immediately after graduating, I was planning on just taking a break. Not making anything new for a moment, and also even just taking a few weeks off and not working. Except then I got some pretty awesome opportunities, such as working on an indie feature film being shot in San Francisco. I couldn't turn that down of course, so I spent a chunk of my Summer helping bring this feature to life. And it's been pretty awesome. I'm definitely energized to keep working on my own work, and I've met a lot of awesome people I hope to be able to work with again. And I hope to get to work on some more awesome projects like this one too!
I could still use a break... but I just don't have time to take one. I have too many things I want to make! I'll have time for a break later. Probably.
Now I've got a website, which is a whole new thing for me to try and pay attention to and update. I'm excited to have this place to keep all my work together and even be able to go beyond that and talk about my projects and share updates on future stuff and also just write posts like this. That's part of this "strange and new" section of my life, where I get to mix new elements like this with... whatever the heck else it is that I've been doing and might eventually be doing.
That's all I'm going to talk about at the moment. I've got a whole little rant about what stuff I'm currently working on, and my thoughts on those projects, but I'll talk about that later. In the meantime, I need to get some sleep, because the 12.5 hour days of film production have been draining.
Best,
-Alex Zajicek