Why I Sat On A Finished Film For 8 Years

I made a film in Iceland in 2018.

Shot it on a Panasonic GH5, nearly all of it handheld. My mate Richard Harris took a Sony action camera underwater and filmed all the water sequences. I had the original DJI Mavic for the aerials, which I wrote off on the black sand beach, but that's another story.

The film has been sitting on my YouTube channel as a private link for eight years.

Not because it wasn't finished. Not because the edit wasn't right. It was done. It had been done for a long time. The reason it sat there is because I was scared of being judged.

Judged by what, exactly? I couldn't tell you. Judged by who? No idea. Just a vague, looming sense that if I put it out and someone didn't like it, that meant something about me. So I kept telling myself I'd go back and re-edit it. One day. When I had time. When it was ready.

It was always ready. I just wasn't.

The film wasn't made for anyone else

Here's the thing I finally clocked, eight years late: I never made this video for anybody else. I made it for me. It's a record of a trip that meant something to me. Every time I watch it, I remember the cold, the landscape, the people I was with, the version of myself that was there. That's the whole point. That was always the whole point.

And I should never have given a fuck what anybody thought of it in the first place.

The success criteria were wrong. I was holding a personal memory to the standard of a commercial deliverable. Of course it felt incomplete. I was measuring it against the wrong ruler.

Me with the GH5 in Iceland

Why filmmakers can't share their own work

I don't think this is just me. I think it's endemic.

Filmmakers, especially the ones doing personal work rather than commercial gigs, suffer immensely with sharing what they've made. The technical bar keeps rising. Every camera is sharper than the last. Every colourist on Instagram is doing something cleverer than you. The reference points get bigger and the imposter syndrome gets louder, and at some point you convince yourself that the work has to clear an invisible bar before it's allowed out.

It doesn't. The bar doesn't exist. It's something you invented to keep yourself safe.

Sitting on finished work doesn't make it better. It just makes it older. Eight years of "I'll get back to it" produced exactly zero additional edits, zero improvements, zero anything. The work I would have released in 2018 is the same work I'm releasing now. The only thing that changed is me. I finally got tired of being precious about it.

What the fear actually costs

Perfectionism is a thief. It doesn't protect you from judgment. It just delays the moment you have to face it, and charges you the years in between as rent.

Every piece of work you don't release is a piece of work that can't connect with anyone. Can't be useful to anyone. Can't even be a step on the way to the next thing, because you're still standing on the previous one, polishing it.

The Iceland film is a true record of where I was in 2018. Putting it behind a private link doesn't preserve it. It just hides it.

So it's going public. As-is. No re-edit. No tidy-up pass. The version I made in 2018, the way I made it, with all its rough edges.

If you've got something sitting in a folder somewhere that you've been telling yourself you'll finish one day, this is your sign. You're not going to finish it. It's already finished. You're just scared. Put it out.