My name is David. I was born in Puerto Rico, and raised in Texas. I went to art school at RISD. I worked in advertising. I lived in Paris. I worked in anime. I went to grad school at UCLA.

Right now, my life takes place mainly in Santa Monica, where I work for MTV New Media and live about a mile from the beach(I now live in West Hollywood, which is lovely except that my landlady is a bit of a tyrant).

The most exciting parts of this life are exactly the ones I won’t write about on my site. This is my repository for what would have been “show and tell” two decades ago: drawings, photos, found scraps, URL’s, and “writing.” I’m not sure what need this show and tell fulfills, but there it is.

As of April, 2009, I think I’ve got a clearer picture of why I have/want/am trying to maintain a blog. My personal aspirations and my career have (for the first time in an adult life of attempting it) meshed in a way that is pretty great. My day job isn’t a day job. All the projects I’m working on are projects I care about. I’ve got a film-like multimedia project that I created cooking at work, which means I get paid to spend at least part of my time doing what I find most creatively fulfilling. When I’m not working on “my own” MTV project, I’m working on $5 Cover with Craig Brewer, or reviving Liquid Television, or doing any number of exciting things that I can’t tell you about.

I’ve gone from having dozens of side projects to having one: This is Fi, a documentary that I’m proud to have instigated and to be a part of. Hopefully, Sundance or Tribeca or a private investor or the California state lottery will come along an make making the doc a little easier. Regardless, I’ve gone from being a guy who pursues a million projects semi-simultaneously hoping that one will take with somebody in the film/new media establishment, to being a guy who can focus most of his attention on making a much smaller pool of projects as good as I know how to make them.

The little bit of work-y energy that remains is going here. Why? I like thinking about what I do. I think this is a very, very exciting time to be a filmmaker. A lot of bets are off in a lot of places and it’s a great time to be scrappy and independent and willing to experiment. If I’d entered the entertainment industry ten years ago, I would have a fraction of the opportunities open to me that I have open to me now. I’ve been a part of a number of think tanks, at Fox TV Studios, at the AFI Digital content lab, with Nokia… and the conversations at all of them remind me of (what I remember of) the earliest stabs at figuring out what exactly this motion picture medium is. I like the idea that I’m part of what will be for my grandkids the Nanook of the North of 2009 or the Battleship Potemkin. So, this site is 75% my own personal thinktank (thinktub?) and 25% cool shit I find on the internet or IRL.

If you find this at all interesting or informative or (even better) if you are into what I’m doing, let me know. If you can help me make the things I’m interested in, I welcome your help. If you want to watch the things I make – thank you.

This is outdated:

David Harris is a Producer at MTV New Media, developing original multi-platform programming and applications for brands across MTV Networks. He is currently working on Jackassworld, the MTV/EA nonlinear documentary “Players” (a 2007 AFI digital content lab project), and original sites and experiences around skateboarding, animation, dating, and improvised comedy. Prior to working at MTV, Harris was a member of the Fox Television Studios think tank, specializing in digital content. His MFA thesis in UCLA’s Film, Television and Digital Media program, “How Do I Say This?”, won “Best Student Site” in the 2007 SXSW Web Awards, and was funded by a grant from mtvU and Cisco Systems. Harris’s personal work focuses on distributed video narrative: he is currently developing a thriller to be released in multiple formats and versions and using digital production tools to enable an undocumented immigrant to create an autobiographical documentary about his life.

And, I’m not sure if it makes me sound more or less exciting than I actually am, which is very.

Why are you here? I don’t know. But, thanks for coming.