Why I Made “Say Something Wonderful Surprise!”

I recently made this film to help cope with my anger management issue:

Last weekend I visited my family in San Diego to hang out with my 15 and 17 year old brothers. The youngest one is into film while the other is into music. I’m fortunate to have creative family members because that (this) weekend I wanted to film something for my YouTube channel.

I haven’t posted anything for about a week. But I didn’t want to film just anything, I wanted it to be good.

The first concept I had was to start off being sad and then actually crying. The background would change as my face would tear up while looking miserably downcast. This is how I actually felt at the time (I’m a negative person). Then, the camera would shift and a smile would begin to creep up on my face as I looked up to see… the Disnelyand sign!

The next sequence of shots would be of me having a ton of fun on Disneyland rides. I was going to call it: “The Happiest Place on Earth.” However, we didn’t film it because we realized that Disneyland is very expensive, almost three hour drive away, and their was something missing in the overall concept. I swayed back and forth until I made the decision that we needed to push the idea for a later date.

This got me into a very depressed mood.

Why I Made “Say Something Wonderful Surprise” 

In the late morning of Saturday my brother pissed me off. I wanted to scream in his ear and say, “WHAT IS A MATTER WITH YOU!” He recently made me purchase a $150 hard drive for their computer when he realized he made a mistake, in fact two: i) he forgot the receipt & ii) he got a backup disk rather than an external hard drive.

“Stay home. YOU MAKE ME SO UPSET AND F***ing ANGRY. I need to calm down before I KILL you. I’ll go to Best Buy and take care of this. “

While driving to the Best Buy I thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if I wasn’t so negative & instead more positive to my brothers. They made an honest mistake, everything will be fine.” Then, I realized that this could be a video: go around and tell others to say wonderful things about others.

I felt and still feel like our society doesn’t give our close friends / family the proper affirmations they deserve in life. Affirmations and compliments can make someone’s crappy day into a great one. Especially, as a manic depressant myself, affirmations make me very happy.

I wanted to make people make other people feel good, which in turn would make me feel good. Selfish? Yes.

I drove to the nearest Staples and bought three cardboard pieces. I sped back home! Then, had my little brothers charge their camera as my other sister started to write:

“Say Something Wonderful To {the arrow}”

BOOM!

It was a sudden idea and regardless if a ton of people watch it or not, I will say that I had a blast doing this project. It wasn’t easy as it did take us two days to shoot the film: i) I wanted to make sure we had enough people, ii) there was sound wave issues with a few good ones, iii) random strangers blocked the camera, iv) and just remembering to turn on the camera (this one hurt a lot).

It was a learning experience! A good one.

Ha. I feel this is one of those boring articles. Ha. Anyway, I hope the video makes you smile. Have a beautiful week!

Talk soon.

Thanks for reading.

 

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