On accepting the flaws and seeing the positives in your early work

At some point during my second year at the Icelandic Film School I started seeing the gap in quality between the work that I was doing and the work of the best cameramen out there more and more clearly. It wasn’t a good feeling. I was doing some nice stuff, but it was inconsistent and rarely, if ever, to the standard I wanted to achieve.

Writer Ira Glass once said that "all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. … But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you."

This was a frustrating period for me that lasted a couple of years after film school. I could see my work improve and evolve, but it was still far from being good enough in my own opinion.

I still don’t think I’ve reached my goal, and maybe I never will, but I’ve learned not to feel bad about that - to take some joy from constantly improving and learning. Once I reached the point of being able to deliver work I could be proud of, that became much easier.

If you are in the period of feeling like your work isn’t good enough, I guess the only way forward is to film a lot of stuff. Get a camera (doesn’t have to be an expensive one) and go out and shoot whatever you can think of. Watch other peoples work online to get ideas and inspiration. Find people in your area that share you interest and make something with them.

The reason I’ve been thinking about this is that I have added some of the older work that I left out when I launched the website. These are a few of my student films, or projects I did right after graduating. One of the worst things about knowing the flaws of your work is that all you can see are the flaws, and you don’t see the good parts anymore. It’s taken me a while to reach the point where I can watch them, enjoy the those good parts and not let the flaws ruin my experience.

My camerawork in some of them may be a little uneven - they are student films after all. Still, all of them have something I am proud of and I think it’s important to share your work. What’s the point of making a film if you don’t let people watch it?