Turning dating rejection into a creative idea.
What are your experiences of dating? Good? Bad? Somewhere in the middle? At the time of writing this post I'm a few weeks away from my 48th birthday, which I can scarcely believe. I really didn't think I would be writing about being on the dating scene at this stage of my life! "But here we are", as I'm ever fond of saying when living through the unexpected twists and turns of life.
However, I do know why I'm still single aged nearly 50. I'm quite fussy for a start. I'm pretty certain I'm an undiagnosed autistic as well, that brings in it's own tsunami of challenges, I may well write about this in a later blog at some stage. Also, I probably have over estimated my own attractiveness whether that's physical or non physical traits. I suppose the best way I can put it, is that I'm single through choice, not through lack of choice. It's the age old problem, the women I like don't like me, and the women who like me, I don't like them. It's pretty evident in life that the most desirable in society are picked off pretty quick. Darwinian selection at it's finest.
Anyway enough of the self pity! You're here for some creative insights, right? Let's get to it then.
I ended up going on a date with a lady with whom I really clicked with via text and phone calls. Sadly, when we met, the physical chemistry just wasn't there for me. Fast forward a few months, I went on another date, again this time with a lady where I felt the chemistry was seemingly good in the run up to a face to face date. When we actually did meet, unlike a lot of other dates, this time I felt a real physical attraction as well. The date went really well, I was buzzing afterwards. Unfortunately, I got a text about a day later, and reading between the lines, she was trying to let me down gently. Another day, another failure in this game of attraction.
In both scenarios, I was really quite heavily invested both emotionally and mentally, so for both dates to not work out, it left me feeling drained and hardly in the mood to carry on. Then I had an idea. The text that I mentioned earlier, even though it was in effect a text of rejection, the way it was written, really left it open for creative purposes.
Rather than the let powerful raw emotions of rejection, self doubt, anger and bitterness stew, I thought "why don't I harness these feelings and channel them into a video?" I had an idea about using my Neewer TL60 tube light, it would be the perfect lighting source for this type of content. It has a TV flickering mode, and I thought this would be great to simulate a late night in front of the TV. I think it's only a 60W light, yet at 100% brightness, it provided more than enough light for the Fuji XH2s paired with the Fuji 33mm f1.4. I used 6.2K open gate and F-LOG2. The video colours straight out of this camera are stupendous, not much of a colour grade is needed to make the footage shine. The super 35mm sensor on the Fuji XH2s has incredible readout speeds, so filming with this camera can be a joy if set up correctly.
Another idea I had was to change the "rejection" text into spoken word using a female AI voice generator, and the results were quite good I thought. I added captions in certain parts of the video to emphasise parts of the text.
Overall, I was quite happy with the finished product. Set up correctly, the Fuji XH2s can produce some incredible video, F-LOG2 is a beautiful log codec, the colours are just fantastic. Call it cathartic, call it more video editing practice, I don't care. It was a good use of a bad situation and at least I didn't let those negative emotions go to waste. Rejection was pure rocket fuel for this creative project.