Maybe the biggest difference between being an artist hired to work in film compared to doing it yourself or running your own company is the protective bubble between you and the jungle.
That bubble can be amazing when you’re working for the right people. You know that they’ve got your back if you fall, and you can go to bed without having to wonder if you’ll have work next month.
But that comfort can build apathy. Your success is based on looking good, which isn’t the same as being good, which gives excuses room to breathe. You’re slow, but the computer was crashing. The software sucks, why don’t they develop it better?
In all the big production houses that I’ve worked in, excuses escalated to whining, and whining was a bonding force between the artists.
When you’re working for yourself, or you’re looking to create work to get noticed, you can’t afford that. There can be no excuses, just a relentless march towards progress, towards delivering your projects - a creative journey that comes with so much built in friction, it will strip your flesh from your bones if you’re not careful.
This is why one of the most powerful traits that you can develop is non-acceptance of avoidable friction.
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Everything is fixable
Wisdom, in most traditions, involves making peace with what you cannot change. The Stoics built a philosophy around it. Therapists teach it. It’s one of the great survival mechanisms.
I’m all for that, but the act of creating something is the closest thing that we have to alchemy. You’re building something out of nothing. It’s all change. This is why I think that in filmmaking, you need to have the mindset that everything is fixable. Creative problems, technical problems, logistical problems - no excuses, no acceptance. Fix it.
Running a team, I see this acceptance every day, and fight against it. Whether it’s renaming a hundred files by hand, or using four menu clicks to reach a command you use fifty times a day because you never learned the shortcut. Maybe it’s working in a Resolve file that’s not quite fast enough for you to edit comfortably in. Each one is a paper cut, but in the moment you feel that none of them is worth stopping for. So you don’t stop. You just bleed a little, every day.
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The maths is brutal
Three minutes of avoidable friction per hour is 24 minutes in an eight-hour day. That’s two hours a week. That’s over 100 hours a year - gone to tasks that existed only because a problem went unsolved.
It’s not just a time cost though. Every time your machine freezes, your edit stutters, every time you have an emotional response to an available problem. It all pulls you back from reaching a flow state, and THAT has an immeasurable cost, because it’ll result in worse creative decisions, and your artwork will suffer massively.
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WORTH SITTING WITH
What situations have you had recently where you’ve accepted some slowness or inefficiency? What could you do to address it?
More than any specific technique - I want you to walk away with the aim to develop a different instinct. The moment you find yourself in a complaining mindset, frustrated at the software, the hardware, or even getting bored (boredom might indicate that you’re doing a repetitive task, and repetitive tasks are better suited to computers), don’t accept it. Find a better way. That’s why I’m here (you can always reach out via e-mail). That’s why we have the Discord server, where you can use the hive mind to help.
Every obstacle is the perfect opportunity to level up forever.
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