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Issue No.1 – The Return For years, I've shared finished things. Songs. Films. Photographs. What I haven't shared nearly as often are the stories behind them. The song that almost wasn't recorded. The scene that refused to work. The camera that changed the way I shoot. The photograph that happened because I decided to walk one block farther than usual. The strange phone call. The lucky break. The disaster. The lesson learned three years too late. I've always believed that creativity happens long before the audience sees the finished result. It happens in the studio, in the editing room, at the writing desk, on a late-night walk through the city, or while staring at a screen, wondering why something isn't working. That's where this newsletter comes in. BELOW - Part of my home studio, which looks like a bomb went off.  Years ago, I started writing occasional notes about music, filmmaking, photography, and whatever else was happening in my creative life. Then life got busy. Projects piled up. The newsletters became less frequent. Eventually, they stopped altogether. But the work never stopped. I've continued writing music. I've continued making films. I've continued carrying cameras around Washington, DC. I've continued collecting stories. Quite a few of them, actually. So I've decided to bring Studio Life back. Not as a marketing newsletter. Not as a stream of announcements. More as an open studio door. Once a month, I'll share what I'm working on, what I'm learning, what has gone wrong, what has gone right, and some of the stories that have accumulated over the years. Some will be about music. Some about filmmaking. Some about photography. Some about creativity in general. And some will simply be stories that seem worth telling. Coming up in future issues: • The day I met Donna Summer  WHY STORIES MATTER I worry much more about my characters and what happens to them in my films than I do about anything else. It's not that I don't also worry endlessly about a whole lot of other things! Movies require that you make about 10,000 decisions even before you're finished shooting. Then comes editing. And that's another whole thing unto itself! But the more films I make, the more I find myself becoming the defender of my characters and who they are in the story I wrote, and I start to protect them, and I keep my friends and advisors from talking me into shifting my focus away from the characters to technical matters. More than once during production, I was told the film should be about something else. I kept saying the same thing: "No. This story is about this guy."  I like movies with people in them. Flesh-and-blood human beings with problems. I want to find out what they're going to do about their problems. I understand that feeling. Every project starts with a vision. Then reality arrives. We needed to shoot secretly in the underground Metro stations for my last film, and there was just too much security to pull that off. So we postponed shooting for a week. I've made a bunch of short films. Hard to say how many because some are more professional than others. Some were just experiments. Some I made when I was 12 years old! One that I just posted not long ago on my YouTube channel, ARLIN GODWIN PICTURES & SOUND, was shot when I was a kid in 1977. It's called YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE. I made a more serious short in 2022 called VIOLENT TRUE BELIEVER, which won an acting award for J.C. Hoffman, who starred, and then in the winter of 2025, made my most recent short STOP TAKING PICTURES, which has now screened all over the world. Literally. Rome. Chicago. Florence. Vietnam. New York. Los Angeles. Hollywood. It played at the famous Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd. So I've been busy for a long time now, dealing with festivals and making sure the theaters have the proper files to show the film. But stories are what I really care about. I'm currently finishing the 62nd draft of a feature script called INGRID DAARK. After several years of work, I'm finally getting close to talking with actors and planning a real production. More on that in a future issue. After all that writing, years spent on this one project while also going off and shooting short films on the side...I've come to realize that the kind of filmmaking that audiences are drawn to lives in the story's intent rather than technical perfection. And trust me, I have a very strong perfectionistic streak in my personality, but at some point, you have to finish a movie and move on to a different project. A raw, poorly lit scene that captures genuine human grief or joy will always outperform a beautifully framed, high-definition shot that feels emotionally hollow. I try my best to get the best of both. But audiences will forgive shaky footage, minor audio flaws, or low budgets if they care about the characters. They rarely forgive a boring story, no matter how sharp the 8K resolution is. You could call it--connection over perfection!
I'm planning to send you guys some script pages from INGRID DAARK. There's new music being composed and recorded. And I'm always carrying a camera around, snapping whatever catches my eye. That's enough from me for now. If you're reading this, thank you for being here. The studio is open again. I'll see you in the next issue. Keep making things! Just hit Reply. I read every message. |
