Over at The Atlantic website, February is ‘Graphic Novel Month’ and they’ve put together a short curriculum of four books chosen by popular vote. First up is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I read this today in one sitting which says something about how much I enjoyed it. You can read my short review and how I think filmmakers would benefit from it over in my reading room.

I’ll be using this as a reference as I dive into the three remaining classics for the month:

If you decide to pursue the same curriculum, you can follow the group discussion all month-long on Twitter with the corresponding hashtags:

1. February 6-12: Discuss Understanding Comics using hashtag #1b140_1
2. February 13-19: Discuss The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale using hashtag #1b140_2
3. February 20-26: Discuss V for Vendetta using hashtag #1b140_3
4. February 27-March 4: Discuss Sandman Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes using hashtag #1b140_4

There’s an online marketplace called Skillshare where you can find classes to take in your city or post one of your own you’d like to teach.

Their template allows you to quickly create a class and build an audience of potential students. You’re able to follow other teachers and your students are able to leave you feedback.

You can learn more in this short promo of theirs:

I’ve posted three short workshops I feel qualified to teach. We’ll have to wait to see what the response is but it was a great exercise to organize my ‘marketable skills’ and advertise them like this.

You can check out my teaching & classes profile here.

I’m assuming many of you reading this also have skills you can leverage to organize and teach a class of your own. I recommend you do so, as it’s a great way to reenergize your craft, give something back to your community and earn some extra cash to invest in your creative ambitions.

Drop me a line if you do organize a class on Skillshare – I’d like to follow your progress.

The Forecast

The Ghost Trees

White Hat

Compass

The Glass Box

’80 Ford Caprice

My Man

The White Leaves

Oedipus

Jacobson

Some friends of mine said this was a foolish and pointless goal and could not understood the merit of it. Maybe you’re thinking the same thing. Ultimately, we chase goals because they resonate and it’s sometimes better to simply feed these odd cravings instead of rationalizing the dream away.

So, instead of explaining why I did it, I’d like to talk about the lessons I gained and what I hope to incorporate into my career and daily work.

Your well is endless:

Our capacity for work and potential output is significantly greater than we think. Right when you think the well is dry you come up with something else. I had no idea of the sheer number of raw images and experiments I had in my head.

If you produce this quickly, with little time for reflection, your work will be of mixed quality. But it’s far easier to strengthen those raw ideas when you have them on paper as ‘prototypes’ of their future selves instead of waiting for something to be close to perfect in your tiny head. Only when things are physical can you refine and curate the best of your ideas.

For more about the need to constantly create in the face our fears, you can read my previous post on this topic.

You’re already ready:

Prior to the challenge, I had wanted to take poetry seriously for some time – and the word ‘seriously’ for me usually translates to reading a book or taking a class on the subject before actually doing something. In the past it’s been easy for me to create prerequisites to physical action, a clever way of justifying procrastination.

But by bypassing any kind of ‘curriculum’, I accomplished significantly more on my own than I could have under someone else’s guidance. I was inspired by other poets, visitors to this blog and my own mistakes – these were my mentors.

A Creative Anchor:

Not only does working this way mean you increase your output, put you also become more fluid in your medium. After a while the daily work become a part of your daily rhythm and you start to feel wrong without it. It becomes a kind of meditation, a morning jog, a holistic force that sets the tone for the day, that reminds you that today matters, so use it.

You must consume the world:

Seeing and experiencing the world through the filter of the medium you’re working in is very exciting. My morning walks in Amsterdam became like scavenger hunts, where I’d search for an image, a detail that could inspire that day’s work. The city and my thoughts became a precious thing that I was constantly trying to put into words.

I am now more convinced that as creators we must consume the world around us and respond to it, in the voice and medium of our choosing, on a daily basis.

But it doesn’t have to be all work. Play with your process when your stuff gets stale and you get tired. You can change up things by experimenting with different tools. For example, I tried writing out poems on paper cups, with tape recorders and apps (like OmmWriter).

But what about the work that actually matters?

Could a daily habit of producing something, rain or shine, improve our careers?

These past few weeks I’ve been wondering about how to apply this kind of challenge to my career as a filmmaker. Can I invent a 30-day challenge that is directly related to my work?

Possibly, but I get anxious just thinking about it.

As creative individuals we believe our jobs and ‘real work’ reflect who we are. The fear is that if you fail in these areas what does it say about our abilities and creativity?

Do we make it so hard to succeed because we make it so impossible to fail?

But what if we lower the bar? What if we not only embrace failure but expect it?

What would happen?

Honestly, the quality of my poems never mattered to me, it was always about quantity, about doing the work and going to sleep. But by obsessing on quantity, and censoring my ego and internal editor, I believe a side effect was that I produced some things of quality.

The challenge combined with blogging created a kind of sandbox where I could fuck around with no real intent or ‘master plan’ – yet I was extremely productive and surprised myself with the results. Odd.

Does our insistence for making ‘one of a kind’ work right out of the gate prevent us from eventually making one of a kind work one day?

Final outcomes we can be proud of are the result of constant experimentation and wrong turns as we find our way down a foreign road. And sometimes you have to lock your ego and editor in the trunk just to make some real progress as you make this odd journey.

I still need to give some more thought on how to specifically apply this kind of experimentation on my career. In the meantime if you decide to pursue a similar challenge this year, please leave me a note in the comments or email me – I’d really like to follow along on your journey, regardless of your personal or professional goal.

Also, I encourage you to journal these daily artifacts you create – via twitter, tumblr, wordpress, etc. – opening yourself to the feedback and inspiration of others; allowing some transparency to your bungles and successes. I promise you that kind of transparency is not as embarrassing as it seems. It’ll give you some accountability to finish your challenge and be a great reminder not to take yourself too seriously.

P.S. You can view some of my favorite poems from the challenge here.

Grit, perseverance, and how to get better:

1. The Future of Self-Improvement, Grit Is More Important Than Talent, Part I & Part 2:  (Jocelyn Glei via The 99 Percent)

If we want to cultivate expertise, or “genius,” or whatever you want to call it, we need to be able to step outside of ourselves, observe how we are operating, reflect on what could be better, theorize how we could change it, and then test out a solution. The problem is: This is very, very hard for most people.

2. ‘Hustle‘ (Matt Nowack via ihumanable)

The best way to learn anything is to do it, to struggle through, to forge on, to fight and gnash teeth and curse at. There is no knowledge as highly regarded as that which you have to work for.

3. ‘Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performers Better?’ (Atul Gawande via The New Yorker)

You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. This is tricky. Human beings resist exposure and critique; our brains are well defended. So coaches use a variety of approaches – showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.

Eliminate choices and make decisions:

4. ‘Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?’ (John Tierney via The New York Times):

Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options.

Good work is easier than you think:

5. ‘Everything Is a Remix‘ (Kirby Ferguson) Amazing to realize the patterns in art and film and begin thinking in terms of ‘recipes’ and how everything is a remix of something else.

Creativity isn’t magic: it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials. And the soil from which we grow our creations is something we scorn and misunderstand even though it gives us so much — and that’s… copying.

6. ‘How To Steal Like An Artist‘ (Austin Kleon) Down to earth guide on how to start ‘stealing’ or borrowing from others as a starting point for what you’re working on.

Art is all about the slow accumulation over time.

7. ‘The 50 Things Every Creative Should Know‘ (Jamie Wieck) Not applicable across all creative fields but there’s definitely some points you can save for reference. You can use this as a template to come up with your own ‘essential 50′.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO FAIL, FAIL WELL: Being ambitious means you have to take on things you think you can’t do. Failures are unfortunate, but they are sometimes necessary.

8. ‘How underdogs can win‘ (Malcolm Gladwell via The New Yorker): Written a while back something I keep referring to and that’s fits nicely on this list. While grit is an essential part of success, so is street smarts; sizing up your reality and figuring out how to leverage what you have despite your weaknesses. What ‘rules’ or conventional wisdom in your field can you break to your advantage?

It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

Build yourself a garage & tinker:

9. ‘Lab Notes: My Closed-Loop Research System‘ (Cal Newport via Study Hacks): How to mix daily work, with ‘little bets‘, and make sure you’re working towards mastery and discovery.

10. ‘How Weekend Projects Can Free Your Inner Rock Star‘ (Kevin Purdy via Lifehacker): Pursue new projects with time constraints to achieve outside of your expertise and experience.

11. ‘Try something new for 30 days’ (Matt Cutts via TED.com): Last spring I tried writing poetry for 100 days straight and had phenomenal results. Something I’ll probably repeat this year for a different activity. Here’s a short guide to devising your own month-long challenges for 2012.

• Completed my ‘100 poems in a 100 days‘ project. This was a great teacher of the value of ‘just doing it’ and how our potential creative output is actually a lot greater than we think. And of course there were other insights along the way.
• Blogged about my Binger Lab experience with Shelter. Those posts became a separate kind of laboratory where I could tinker with ideas I had for the script and how to direct the film.
• Helped out as a Kickstarter Consultant with funding campaigns for two short films (‘Lunch Date‘, ‘Plato’s Reality Machine‘).  This taught me a great deal about how one can raise funds and might be useful for 2012 if I decide to kickstarter a project of my own.
• Got back into taking pictures and drawing on a more regular basis. Even rented a studio for a few weeks to paint.
• Abandoned Facebook and shifted over to Tumblr as my main social media site. A few months ago I found Facebook to be a distracting burden instead of a creative tool, so now I’m using Tumblr as a scrapyard of ideas, both taken from others and original ones, to use later. This shift has forced me to stay in touch with friends more directly, by email and phone.
• Used MyLanguageExchange.com to start chatting with natives in Egyptian Arabic. This has been quite a workout, as we’re not speaking within the confines of a lesson or class, but rather talking freeform about anything and everything. But I’ve made more progress in the last three months than I have in the last five years; and I’ve reached a higher fluency than ever before. With all the recent events in Egypt we’ve had plenty to talk about.
• Started treating regular fitness like an adventure, experimented with working outdoors and different tools like iPhone apps, running, kettlebells, etc. For the past few months I’ve been using a great little app called BodyFate. It lets you train with the equipment you have handy, and the workout comes at you in an unpredictable manner as if you’re working with a shuffled deck of exercises. My training now is goalless, it’s just about putting in the time on a regular basis and eating sensibly. Ironically, because I’ve ditched the ‘workout plans’ and fitness gurus, I’m in better shape now than ever before.
• Bought a Kindle and started reading more often and everywhere. While a digital book can never replace a physical one, the pros do outweigh the cons. I’m able to travel with my entire library and revisit my books and highlights very quickly. It’s also easier for me to draw connections between the different books I’ve read on a particular subject or across disciplines.
• Last but not least, I got to witness my younger brother get married. It was a beautiful, humbling experience and reminded me of what truly is important in this life.

The irony is that none of these accomplishments came out of a set of resolutions I wrote for myself at the beginning of 2011 – they were simply the result of me following my curiosity and needs as the year went by. Maybe ‘going with the flow’, and simply embracing your questions and interests, pursuing the things you want to be doing more of, is a more useful tool for realizing a resolution than the resolution itself?

I’m excited to see what I achieve with this same, goalless approach for 2012, as I get closer to my 35th birthday.

I’ll be visiting Beirut to explore the Romani and Armenian communities more.

And to Halabja in Northern Iraq.

I’ve been messing around with different cameras & sound recorders the past few weeks to find a lean and dependable combo for taking photographs, videos and interviews – hopefully I’ll be able to share some of my findings with you on this blog.

Wish me luck -

You are the gray cloud,
that reminds me we were once one.
We were this cease-fire,
these kids in the backseat.

But no!
You were always the driver’s seat,
the saddle kidnapping me.
And they will know us by our footprints,
see the signs of our struggle in the mud.
They will say he fought for her,
and she for him,
until they fought one another,
like the right against the left.

First, I have to wholeheartedly recommend this opportunity if you have five months to devote solely to your project, away from your home and everyday life. Having a steady stream of advisors take a look at where you’re at as a director and help push you along into foreign territory is a very unique experience that leaves its mark.

Probably the best way to appreciate my growth at the Binger is to say a bit about where I left off at my previous directors lab. Sundance was an opportunity to start exploring the language of my film through actual practice with a cast and crew. There were specific moments of the script where I felt ‘blind’ – both visually and emotionally as to what was happening in the moment between characters.

These areas were the scenes we chose to shoot. Working with a cinematographer and a number of advisers I started to flesh out these images. Because I had dedicated actors working with me for three weeks, I got to know them and hear their feedback on the script and the characters they played. They encouraged me to look deeper into each of the major characters, flesh out their backstories and motivations and to go beyond the convenience of a predetermined plot I had chosen for them to play out. To reach for ‘the truth’ of what they would actually do if they were real people and not merely characters in my film.

This work was critical. I left with a strong degree of confidence in myself and in the possibility I would one day make this difficult film. That summer fueled the next set of script revisions and I choose to attend the Binger Writers lab as a kind of haven to do these changes in.

Six months later, I had completed two rewrites. But despite having a more polished script, I felt by the end of that lab something fundamental was still missing. Something, or someone, had been left behind in the story’s development. And I had doubts I could I actually find this, whatever it was, by more rewriting.

I entered the Binger Directors Lab immediately afterwards, burnt out and on a kind of writer’s plateau. While I was able to come up with elaborate goals for myself in my application, the reality was I had no real idea what I wanted out of the lab. I just had this gnawing feeling that something was very wrong, and that maybe Amsterdam was the place to deal with it.

I knew I needed to take a break from being a writer and a wordsmith. I needed to be a director again, like at Sundance. I needed to see if collaborating with others, plus relying on emotions and images, could highlight what was wrong.

If you’ve followed my experience these past few months then you know I’ve centered most of my work around one character, Stefan, who I discovered early on could potentially be the heart of my story. All the scenes I choose to rehearse and/or shoot involved him, in an attempt to find out more about his nature. To identify his needs and motivations, and the emotional baggage he carries.

I’m thankful I took the time to shape my lab notes and feelings into these blog posts, rereading them post-lab I find them to be a rich reference for myself if I get lost again in my journey.

And for those few that have followed along, thank you for your patience in reading these long-winded meditations. I hope they’ve benefited you in some way, maybe at the very least encouraged you to pursue a similar kind of journaling with your own creative pursuits. If you do end up blogging like this, in whatever pursuit that is, I hope you’ll email me so that I can follow along.

I’ve been humbled by the dedicated staff at the Binger, by the advisors they so expertly hand-picked and brought to us in Amsterdam. And of course I’m honored to have met such talented fellow filmmakers whose films I’m sure I’ll be seeing very soon.

So . . . I guess what I’m trying to say is if you apply to the Binger and get accepted, and can afford to get away from the ‘real world’ for a little bit, then I recommend you do so by all means.

I would like to try summarize three major lessons I’ve learned before I close this chapter of my life. And maybe you can refer to these musings if you one day find yourself in such a long scriptwriting workshop environment:

1.

It is easy to ‘over-dissect’ a film project. In order to talk about a script, its strengths and weaknesses, we need to strip it down to its most elemental pieces. We talk about a character, a scene, a line of dialogue, etc., each of these being very fragile threads when treated separately.

We give feedback on these elements of a script couched in our preconceptions and tastes of what is right and what is wrong, and assume that our gut reaction to someone else’s work must be right.

But in order to give useful feedback, we must first appreciate the intended metric by which the story and its maker are asking us judge it by.

For a wild example to prove my point, we can’t compare Toy Story to Hunger. Even though they both are very strong films, they offer very different emotional journeys and are distant relatives of one another. The metric that tells me Toy Story is a masterpiece will probably tell me Hunger is garbage and vice versa.

This is obvious. Yet somehow I can’t help but feel that we sometimes forget to first identify this metric with films in development. Films that are still embryonic scripts and that can easily be strong-armed by the wrong kind of feedback into the wrong kind of film.

Ultimately, whatever advice you receive, even if there’s a consensus, it is your project, your invention, the beast that only you could have made, and you probably understand it better than anyone else. It is always easier to put your faith in the advice of an articulate, gray-haired adviser, but remember, your primordial advisers – your own heart and mind – are wise as well.

What you are doing is strange, it is risky and no one can guarantee it will work.

A film ultimately works by its ability to generate an emotional response within the audience. That intended response is your metric.

Even though you sometimes can’t justify your choices, and play the game of intellectualizing your preferences, there is always strength in the response that you’ve made a choice simply because ‘it feels right’.

Trying to prove the logic of your cinematic choices merely with words is the same kind of folly as thinking your screenplay’s words carry the same weight as your final film.

There are some things that words can’t say.

Your script is a map of where we are going and how you will take us there. It tells us what we will see and feel, and where will we land. And of course who we will meet along the way.

It is easy for us to nitpick the map you’ve created, to find short-cuts to the paths you’ve drawn out, to suggest that you scratch this line of dialogue out or add that scene. But if someone doesn’t seem to really care about this intended destination, about the emotional response you are trying to engineer, chances are he or she really doesn’t care about your film.

What is their metric? And what is yours?

2.

This brings me to the second lesson: a script is a dead thing. It is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster right before the electricity goes zapping through it. There are so many players that come in and add life to that strange beast: the crew and the cast and their ideas. And even then, it is up to the audience to fill it up with their own emotions and imagination.

Remember that your script and the words you use to describe it are not the same thing as your intended film. This lab has reminded me of all the other layers and tensions that a film is made up of – performances, images, colors, sound, etc.

In the last few months since the Binger has ended I’ve tried to revise my script with my new realizations, but simultaneously created a separate ‘document’, a directors notebook on my computer where I can jot down notes, embed videos, photographs and relevant sound ambiances. It is a scene by scene breakdown of how I plan on interpreting the script and making the ‘word into flesh’.

For example if I hear a useful idea on a DVD director’s commentary, something about rehearsing a specific kind of scene, I’ll steal that for myself, making a note as to where in my own film that idea could be useful. The same goes for production design, sound design and cinematography ideas.

Because of this I’ve become less reliant on the script to ‘say everything’, I’ve reined it back in to just being a blueprint, a map, and not the entire emotional experience that I am planning for the audience.

I’ve also started a tumblr page, where I post a great deal of raw material from others that I feel is somehow connected to the filmic experience I have in mind. This in turn has inspired my writing.

3.

Finally, one must redefine ‘failure’ in such an environment. If you enter a shooting lab with the mindset that you will leave with a promo of what your film will be or proof of how much of an unrecognized genius you actually are, then you will have settled for the easier path and set of choices you’ve probably already explored in your shooting career.

I think its far more useful to use these scenes in a shooting lab as places were you can earnestly fuck-up and plunge into new terrain. Into places where you can ask yourself a question and try to answer it in more than way.

It is after all a ‘lab’, in the mad scientist, Edison making 10,000 mistakes before getting it right sense of the word. The scenes you leave with will most probably be a small artifact of your journey, your exploration into the particular drama you’ve assigned for yourself. They will say little about your strengths or weaknesses, and more about your time in a strange land. A visual document of where you’ve been and where you still need to go as you prepare for your film.

To extend this idea further, if there’s one regret I have it’s not having someone record me while I was shooting my scenes. A funny idea I know, but I think that tape would have been very helpful as a metric of how well or not I communicated with my cast and crew. I think it is precisely this ‘scene’, this drama, of what you do behind the camera and in preparation for a lab scene, that will be most valuable to you.

Remember, if your going to do something new, try something foreign, then I guarantee you will fail. You will look foolish and some of us might even snicker behind your back. But it doesn’t matter, because these opportunities to safely fail and learn rarely present themselves in the real world. Ultimately, in a lab, as in life, the only thing you risk by not failing is your own success.

—-

SUMMARIES:

In case you’ve missed something and want to take a look back at my journey, here it is:

• week 1: ‘Introductions’ w/ Gyula Gazdag
• week 2 & 3: ‘Directing Actors Wksp’ w/ Judith Weston
• week 4: ‘Script-out loud’
• week 5: ‘Working the Scene’ Wksp w/ Kerry Fox & Ian Sellar
• week 6: ‘Finding your Voice’ Wksp w/ Arne Bro & Lotte Mik-Meyer
• week 8: ‘Shooting Lab #1′ w/ Gyula Gazdag
• week 11: Cannes Film Festival summary
• week 13: ‘Directing Actors Wksp’ w/ Mark Travis
• week 14 & 15: ‘Shooting Lab #2′ w/ Ian Sellar & Molly Stensgaard