Taking the High Road

Seems so easy.

“Great job!  You totally deserved it.”

For the longest time, I was a really good sport.  I would be humbled to run against better, faster, obviously more athletic guys in races.  I would watch in awe as other pianists played with such techinical precision, jealous that I couldn’t do the same.

But as I’ve found, there are things that I can’t have good sportsmanship about.  Things that make me feel like I’m having an ulcer (which is what it feels like at this moment).

As those who have some inkling on the going-ons of my life, I entered the ICBC 180 short film contest back in January after lots of thought about the concept of the film I wanted to make.  It would’ve been so easy to make a video that showed people dying or getting hit by cars and just say, “If you do this, you’re gonna die, just like Jimmy did.”  So after long thinking, I came up with the story for Last Text, where the main character, in the confines of his room, begins to get more and more concerned about his friend after his friend fails to text him back.  The twist at the end is that his friend, who should’ve taken 15, 30 minutes at the most to drive people home from a party hadn’t been checking his phone because he was driving.

Everyone is safe.  The lesson here: don’t let your last text be your last words.

My boyfriend suggested that perhaps we have Plato, our main character, drive around looking for his friend, only to crash into him or something, but I thought that was too melodramatic.  And that’s exactly how I thought when I watched film after film uploaded on the ICBC contest — why does someone have to die to get a message across?  What about positive messages?

So I submitted it, thinking that with the unique names for our characters, the non-melodramatic story, that we would have a good shot at winning.  After submitting the film, other films seemed to get much more views and praise.  At this point, the divide between contest entrant and film critic started to become an issue.  As a fellow submitter, the unspoken etiquette is to be supportive of everyone.  On the other hand, I felt that after watching some films, I didn’t think they were that good.  And I believed I was being fairly objective about it too.  It’s not like I didn’t like ALL the films submitted — there were really outstanding ones that I thought would definitely win (A Memory Still and [W]reckless in particular).

Eventually, I had to stop checking up on my video and reading comments because they made me angry — angry because I genuinely believed I had a good, different way of conveying a message to young drivers but no one seemed to notice and the ones that did only criticized it.  When I got the email that Last Text had been shortlisted to 10 films in the distracted driving category, I was so thrilled.  I felt like the panel who picked these films were able to see the merit in my film.  It was validation for me, which, frankly, I don’t get very often.

Now, I will admit there were some high quality films in that category, and that making the next cut would be difficult, which, as it turned out, our film didn’t make the cut.  But oh well.  Other better films would probably win.  I had no doubt about that.

Last night was the ceremony and the announcement of the winners, and the official list was posted on the ICBC website.  I was under the impression that the next cut was down to the top 3 videos frrom each category when in fact it was actually 6.  When I found this out, along with seeing the titles of other films which I thought for sure wouldn’t make it to the next cut, I was floored.

I wasn’t even in the top 6.

Yeah, boo hoo.  I’m a bad sport, I have no sportsmanship, and I’m a sore loser.  Yes, those things are obvious.

But going back to being a good sport, I wouldn’t have minded if I lost to someone better, someone with a better film.  And the two winners in the category definitely had better, better-made films.  Congrats to them.  I’m actually happy (and not surprised) they won.

But to find out from that some of the other top 6 films, some of which I didn’t think were very good to begin with, when they made the cut… well, you can imagine how that might feel like.

It’s hard to take the high road, to say “Congratulations” when you honestly feel that after all the effort, all the thinking to do something different than others, the overall product was better than other people’s.  That’s not to say that my film is Oscar-winning by any means, but relatively speaking.

If  hadn’t become clear already, I don’t enjoy losing, for the most part, and obviously I won’t stay angry at this forever.  I don’t know if this is something I should get to used to feeling or if it’s something I need to change about myself, but if that’s the case, does that mean I can’t have opinions?

In any case, I’ll stop thinking about this and making myself look like a whiney douche.

As much as it still stirs up something in me, congrats to the winners.