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The Pinhead Institute Promo | Discover Pinhead. 2013. 

runtime: 3:52

The Pinhead Institute is a local organization in Telluride, CO with an international reach. They literally ask a qualified student what they're interested in from NASA to Solar Energy, Army drone construction, ecology and or political science, and then contacts the best scientists in the world and asks if they'd like an intern. Pinhead then sends them there on Pinhead's dime for two months in the summer. 

They asked to make a video with me a few years ago because they just wanted to show "the wonder these kids get access to". Wonder is a feeling and I was able to really latch onto that as we thought about this for the next few months. 

I really enjoyed it. All summer we gathered footage from many different events. After a couple months my little script came together through sheer pressure of the deadline. I was unsure exactly what to do, but I had to do something, and after months of talking about it, experiencing it, the words very naturally came together. 

As I think about it now, a few years later, I still love this piece and I wonder what it was that allowed me to feel such magic and follow my instinct. With any story, what's hard to do is find the thing you're going to latch onto, what your ethos will be through the project. Because of that I've spent a lot of time trying to force some emotional feel to products or other organizations...nothing has been as organic as this. 

What I finally realized after a while was that I just genuinely gave a damn about this organization as i'd grown up seeing what it can do for kids. For a couple of my friends it did literally make their dreams come true through summer internships and so I actually felt like that was their power, that's what they were doing. 

When you finally get to that point with an understanding of your "product" or story, then I think it can really come together. My final lesson learned from that realization is that you need to know what you want and who you are (in life) and what you are fascinated by. Follow and believe in that fascination, don't force yourself to do "other things", have belief that you care about this thing and other people will care about other things. After that, don't feel self-conscious turning down work you're simply not interested in, because you will be disappointed with what it doesn't become because of how much you're not into it.

I did honestly believe that professionals being professionals learnt the craft so well that they can fake it when they're getting paid; that the real skill is making something you don't care about. That might sound neurotic, and maybe it is, because I'm still not sure where I got that impression from. But I then thought I needed to be able to do work that I didn't like to get paid, and move onto the next thing. But there's no next thing if all your time is spent on projects you don't want to do and everything becomes quite daunting. It was so much harder than I thought.

This Pinhead project was one of the first things I did with a larger organization, and it came off really well. I hated the projects I was working on afterwards because I was saying yes to everything, and didn't really know how to go about projects in a fast way. 

So, if you really do care about something, you could probably make a nice film.