I have a three day weekend this week... So as usual I planned a luxurious weekend full of working. Working working Working!

At 3 am Friday morning we all went down to Caltech for a big party to celebrate crashing the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn. Getting out of bed at that hour was BRUTAL, but once I drove down through the silent streets and made it to party central, I was awake and ready to do some serious Saturn crashing. And crashing I was, as I was not on the mission team in any sense of the word, despite having been in copy on all of the Cassini radar team emails for the past year.

After we let Cassini slip the surly bonds of space and touch the face of Saturn, I slept for a few hours and headed to work. I was supposed to be catching up on 8 hours of backlogged bureaucratic crap that I have to do to clear my plate for writing a proposal this weekend, but I got distracted, as usual, by the Moon mission that I am planning. Next week I get to have a trade study on my Moon mission, and I'm trying to gather as much information as possible about every aspect of it ahead of the study. One of the critical things that I have to do is to craft the "story" of the mission in such a way that it can sell to people who are not scientists. Then I can pitch the mission to people and convince them to give me their support.

Today I was supposed to go back to work to once again attack the 8-hour pile bureaucratic crap... but I got distracted again. They were having an open house at the New York Film Academy, where I have been eyeing a 12-week night-time filmmaking course. I figured I'd stop by for an hour. Four hours later... I was still there. They had a tour of the school, followed by a lecture, followed by miniature break-out courses, followed by a lunch. One of the courses that I went to was on "The art of pitching". They taught us how to take our enormously complicated stories and winnow them down to one-liners so that we could pitch them to executives and get them to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into our projects...

...turns out that even when I am at film school open houses, I am still working on my Moon mission!

I had lunch with a bunch of the professors afterwards and told them about my quest, and my sincere belief that film and the space industry are a match made in heaven. They all enthusiastically agreed, and revealed that they all wanted to be astronauts as kids, and that they still dreamed about going into space. Now I'm going to give them all a tour of NASA, and I'm probably going to take the plunge and sign up for the film school. It will completely dominate my life from January to March, but by the end I will learn how to write a screenplay, direct, frame shots, and edit... for not one, but *four* of my own short films! Wow! :O

I can tell that these classes are kind of nuts... very demanding and rigorous... but when you are paying your own tuition, that's the kind of attitude you value. You have to attend class four days a week from 7-10 pm and then actually film your projects on the weekends. Since most of my current craziest activities end at the end of September, that means I will have three months to "relax" before it begins. [Relaxing includes flying to France to give a TED talk about colonizing Mars to a crowd of 1200 people. :O ]

It struck me that almost all of the people on my tour of the film school were from abroad. Apparently students come from some 70 countries to the institute to learn the art of filmmaking. If those people will travel from across the world at great personal and financial sacrifice to come here to learn film, would it kill me to drive 20 minutes from my house in the city next door for the same education?

Time to go to the gym, and then settle down for 8 hours of bureaucracy.... unless I get distracted by a party that's happening tonight. #partytilyoudrop #governmentbureaucracy #moonshots #LosAngelesLiving

Film classes sound really cool! Also it seems like a real hassle to have to explain your mission to people who aren't scientists, although I do understand why it works that way. I'm just the tiniest bit surprised that you have to do that yourself, and there isn't like... a science translator to act as the intermediary for these things, haha.
» randomjunk on 2017-09-20 03:43:41

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