My official Steemit introduction as a happy, homeless, time-lapse film-making blogger in search of truth and beauty

Hello Steemit friends. I have been posting here for a month now and am very grateful for all the upvotes I consistently receive. Collectively you have changed the way in which I am looking at my future and for that I am most grateful. However, I have not fully introduced myself yet and would like for those of you following me to know a little more of how I came to be the person I am today.

• Introduction
  Am not big on labels but just for you I will give it a try: Currently I’m a homeless, barefoot, sun-gazing, fire-sticking, time-lapse film-making philosopher blogger in search of truth and beauty.

I travel with my french partner and our 17 month old baby.

And by homeless, I mean that the world is our home now and we don’t stay anywhere for more than six months. Across all my social media platforms I have around 2500 followers. But after 3 years of constructing well written, visually appealing posts and receiving very little in return for my efforts, I am so very excited to have finally discovered my true home here on Steemit, the future of social media.

• My early days

Officially I am the 3rd son of Chicago born multi-millionaire Harry Stonehill, the first man to grow tobacco in the Philippines, back in the 1950s. Unofficially I am his 4th son, but that’s a whole other story. I was born at a time in his life when things weren’t going so good. He had been deported from the Philippines (basically for refusing to work with the US government in assisting them with their desired control over this country) and I grew up watching him lose his 35 year court case against the US government. And with 4 wives, 10 kids and a vast collection of lawyers to support, the money was running out fast. In a way I am grateful for this because I learned something important watching his money related pains. I am pretty sure that it is a direct consequence of this that my happiness is now completely unrelated to how much money I have and I choose to focus my attention on that which gives me consistent pleasure: my creativity.

I grew up in England and at the age of 7 was sent to a very strict boarding school - the kind of school where they beat you if you misbehave or perform badly. Thankfully I quickly discovered something off-syllabus that I enjoyed more than anything. Magic.

I learned as much as I could and started performing professional shows in my early teens. I won the comedy award at the UK Young Magician of the Year competition when I was 13 and surfed that wave for a while before tiring of it. Then I discovered film-making. My dad bought me an SVHS camera and I was hooked immediately. A culmination of all the arts, film-making is to me the most beautiful game of all.

• The life-time passion begins

I studied film at University and was offered employment in the film industry before I even graduated. During my first three years I was personal assistant to a UK film director. In this time I worked with a young Gerard Butler (This is Sparta!) on one of his first films, One More Kiss...

...and later went on to work on Guy Richie's 'Snatch' as personal assistant to the composer. I worked on many movies & commercials and I gained experience in all the different roles that go into making films. I assisted directors, producers, cameramen, sound men, editors, composers, script developers & distributors. I loved learning about this beautiful art-form.

However, then something unexpected happened and everything changed. My father died penniless in my late twenties and I was starting to tire of my Hollywood dream, so looking for a change, I turned my attention to the UK porn industry where suddenly I was my own boss & the overall standards were much lower. Here I could shine. And for 10 years that’s exactly what I did. I basically had a load of fun producing films for Playboy and other major XXX companies.

I won a UK porn award in 2007 for my most famous series: Dr. Screw.
PlayboyTV still air it every Christmas. I did other kinds of jobs in this period too, weddings, corporates... whatever I could get my hands on. I also started writing 'the truth' about the UK porn industry under the alias James Bennet: http://blokely.com/life-geek/confessions-of-a-porn-director-award-winner-030112/

• How did I get from there to here?

My time in the porn industry took its toll and in my mid 30s I ended up in a rehab clinic in South Africa where for the first time in my life I stopped working on making money and started working on myself. I was only sober for 18 moths in total but learned enough in this time to set a ball rolling that would lead me down a path of total awakening. My London life had been slowly killing me and my pursuit of ‘success’ had brought me little in the way of genuine happiness.

It wasn’t long before my requests to the Universe were met through a rather long and crazy story involving a room full of weed plants which put me in a situation where I had little choice but to sell what I could of my possessions, stash the rest in mother’s out-house and set out into the world with my life on my back. Yes, I had watched Into The Wild (and was captivated by the idea) but unlike Alex Supertramp I was equipped with a solar panel & a 3G iPhone with many apps on the edible plants of the region!

For 3 years now I have been travelling as a digital nomad, looking for awesome time-lapse shots & films that are actually going to help people, rather than just entertain or excite them! I met my partner on a bus in Thailand 2 years ago and happened to have my camera rolling at the perfect moment… leading me seamlessly to the production of my most popular time-lapse film to date:

• Where has my journey taken me?

After deciding to follow my passion for HDR motion control time-lapse, I started out on the Camino de Santiago, a walk across the Pyrenees from the South of France into Spain and along the northern coast.

It wasn’t easy barefoot and laden down with all my time-lapse equipment, but I did at least make it to Pamplona and was eventually invited to live in Barcelona for a month.

Then I moved to Thailand just in time for that fateful bus-ride between Chang-Mai & Pai.

We decided to spend the pregnancy & birth period in our more familiar soundings of England and the South of France (where Sabrina comes from).

This is where we lived the longest, the small village of Vinca in the shadow of Mt Canigou. I shot a bunch more time-lapse there and helped out (as much as I could) in the creation of a perfect baby.

Esteban went to his first UK music festival at the age of 5 months and by the time he was 6 months he had already been to France, Spain, UK & Switzerland.

When he was 8 months old we moved from Europe to Indonesia and have been here ever since in Bali, the island of the Gods. A stunning place indeed.

Here you can see my family and I at the summit of Mount Batur, the 2nd largest volcano in Bali. I have also travelled a little of China, Hong Kong & Singapore since arriving in Asia.

Since I left the UK 3 years ago I have been documenting my journey though my time-lapse & video diary films on YouTube.

In this film (episode 1) you can see how I was able to break free from the Matrix.

Most recently I launched a new series in which I look at the many simple solutions to our growing number of problems on this planet:

And I am currently offering a free Natural Vision Correction course here on Steemit:

https://steemit.com/health/@samstonehill/correct-your-near-or-far-sighted-vision-the-natural-way-free-of-charge-join-this-exciting-film-project-and-let-us-promote

• What have I learned from this journey?

I have learned that there is something much more important than making money. The pursuit of joy must be first & foremost in a person’s life if they are to take full advantage of their creativity and find their true purpose here in this physical time-space reality. Then we are in a much stronger position to manifest anything we desire.

I have also learned much about how best to maintain the health of our bodies and most importantly I have learned that we are one people living on one planet and we must look after it as such. The borders and different cultures that divide us need divide us no more. When we unite with the common goal of creating a beautiful future for this planet, we become one again. As a traveller I am a stranger wherever I go, yet the world always opens it’s arms to me and teaches me lessons along the way.

• Why is film-making so important to me?

After 30 years of making films, I know now that I am here on this planet to help people through my films. Even if it is just a few minutes of marvelling at the beauty of nature in one of my many time-lapse films. This is a recent film I shot on the Gili Islands, off the coast of Lombok, a combination of drone footage, time-lapse shots, video diary & poetry.

The more traveling teaches me, the more I have to share with you.

I believe that each and every one of us is born creative and that we all have the power to live that dream we once believed possible, before we grew up and our experiences taught us otherwise. See my Moving Time-lapse Mantra here:

• How I learned about Steemit

On the road you end up meeting many interesting people. I was lucky to recently meet a man who has been surviving on Bitcoin for over two years. He assured me that I no longer needed to be living at the mercy of the corrupt Federal Reserve & banking system and excitedly explained to me that Steemit had created a platform upon which future platforms would be modelled, the re-birth of social media had arrived. And I am most grateful for what he taught me. Prior to meeting him I was completely ignorant on this subject, despite not having had a bank account for over 3 years.

• My plans for Steemit

Here on Steemit I feel as if I have found a site where I can share great content with interested & interesting people. And let’s be fair, I would like something in return for my efforts. I used to post my films on YouTube hoping this would support my journey and with each film I would create an article which I would post out for free on Facebook in an attempt to boost the hit count. Yet after just one month here, I am earning more in one post on Steemit than I did in an entire year of YouTube ad revenue from my numerous films. There is a digital revolution about to take place on this planet because when the mass population realise they can earn just from upvoting something, without having any content at all, I do believe that absolutely everyone is going to want a piece of this rather exciting cherry pie.

Hope to interact with as many of you as possible here.

Thanks for reading/watching.

And remember, never take life too seriously coz it's only an amusement ride ;)