Lights, Camera … Life
With the artistic brilliance of its handler, a movie camera can produce innumerous emotions, define characters’ dispositions and transform the quality of a film. Four primary elements affect the picture produced in a camera: light, color filters, lens size, and the lens stop. Differing any of these elements changes the experience of the story.
Brighter lighting, for example, can create a positive, high-energy mood, like in a radiant heaven scene or a sunny day in the park. By contrast, darker lighting can create a more villainous tone like in many comic book hero action movies where almost the entire film takes place in darkness (e.g., Batman films).
Similarly, colors and their infinite variations communicate its own language and evoke an endless stream of emotions. Lenses vary in a wide range from 9 millimeters to over 600 millimeters. Shifting to a wide-angle lens alters the viewer’s interpretation of the shot.
Our lives are living, breathing movies. We determine what genre and style of movie to create. Understanding how your internal camera works can lead to greater awareness of your innate movie-making abilities.
The primary camera elements affecting your life pictures include beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and predominant thought patterns—all governed by your overall level of consciousness. The collective whole of these filters and their derivatives produce your experience of reality.
Changing one of the above filters can alter your experience. For example, if you believe you are a poor writer, you won’t spend time writing, and if you do, your writing is probably drab. What if you suddenly believed you had the potential to be great? Will your writing immediately improve? Unlikely, but it is possible. But now you’ll be more likely to read a few books on writing, take writing courses and practice your craft. Before long, your belief will manifest into a physical reality.
(Parents: Do you see how important it is to instill a belief in your kids that they are capable of achieving what they set their minds on? However contrived this may sound, a lesser belief limits your child’s worldview. If our “movie-making” abilities aren’t cultivated early on, we often struggle later in life.)
Your life picture is not static. As a constantly changing work of art, each moment presents an opportunity to further sculpt your experience. Rotating your internal lens (of how you perceive yourself and the world) by one-degree can radically shift the course of your life movie.
If you don’t shape your adventure, your adventure shapes you.
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