Twenty One Inc's blog

Wise Words: Scott Adams

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.  Art is knowing which one to keep."  - Scott Adams

I love this quote-- and live by this philosophy.  To be truly creative, we must risk, and to risk, we must get over fear of failure.  In teaching improvisation, I spend a lot of time addressing fear of failure and changing people's perspective on risk.  I think this is imperative to success in life and art. 

And certainly in filmmaking as well.

One of the things I love most about previsualization is that it encourages creative exploration while mitigating risk.  If you have a crazy idea-- try it!  See where it takes you and allow the process to evolve the material.  That's really hard to do during production, but should be encouraged during preproduction.  We need to strive for better content-- stronger stories, fresher visuals, more meaningful expression.  To find art (and commercial success), we need to try, to risk, to make mistakes.  But we don't need to break the bank to do it...

Spotlight On: HFF's InsightOut 2010

Traveling to Germany at any time is a great treat—going there to participate in the HFF “Konrad Wolf” Film & Television Academy’s InsightOut conference is terrific!  This intimate, hands-on conference is held in the beautiful film school building in Babelsberg, Potsdam, not far from Berlin. 

 

I was invited there as a trainer to speak on the subject of (guess what) previsualization.  The talk was very well received, and hopefully, we have some new converts out there.  ;0)  And I love Europe, so the whole affair was wonderful.

 

The conference format is very interesting—two days of lectures and case studies followed by two days of hands-on workshops and then a final day of lectures and discussions.  The evenings typically are also planned with a variety of events.  At about 70 participants, you have the time and opportunity to get to know a variety of people well over the course of the week.  I found the conversations and various points of view very stimulating—keep an eye on this one: http://www.insightout-training.net/home.html  You can also see some photos from the event on their Facebook Page.

Since I decided to hang out for a couple of days after my lecture, I had the great fortune of taking a stereoscopic stop motion animation workshop from Brian Van’t Hul (LAIKA) and Joe Lewis (General Lift).  Super fun!!  Stop motion animation is a secret love of mine.  Doing it in stereo was cool, but really, just playing around with the stickfa figures was the best.  Here’s a peek at what the setup looked like (quite simple and doable at home, actually):

I was so inspired, I found a stop motion animation app for my iPhone (iMotion) and made little animations on my tray table on the flight back to Vancouver.  Made for a great conversation-starter with my seat-partner!

Previsualization “Sparks” Interest at Vancouver Animation Festival

 

At the SPARK Animation Festival in September 2009, held in Vancouver, BC, previsualization made a bit of a splash.  In the four-day conference covering varied subjects such as character design, the cinematography of Up, and animation studio pipelines, two sessions were dedicated to previs.  Chris Edwards, CEO of The Third Floor, and Jericca Cleland, CEO/CCO of Twenty One Inc, laid a foundation for conference attendees with their joint presentation on the definition, history, and trajectory of previs. 

 
The following day, Justin Denton of Halon and Jason Hopkins of Propaganda Games joined them for a previs panel moderated by EA Chief Visual Officer Henry LaBounta.  Edwards, Denton, and Cleland all spoke about the uses and advantages of previs in film, commercials, and game cinematics.  Hopkins described Propaganda’s use of it to mock up game play and work through game feature and interface design. 

The presentations made a clear and compelling case for adopting the previs process in some form and the audience was interested and highly engaged.  Led by LaBounta in a casual but probing question-and-answer format, attendees peppered the speakers with a broad range of questions from the usual ones about time frames and budgets to the increasingly more dominant one—why isn’t everybody using previs?  And that, say Cleland, Denton, Edwards, and Hopkins, is exactly why they believe that previsualization truly is the shape of things to come.

(Photos courtesy of ACM Vancouver Siggraph.  From left to right: Henry LaBounta, Chris Edwards, Jericca Cleland, Justin Denton, and Jason Hopkins)

Perspective: Fear of Failure

I think a lot about fear of failure and its affect on the creative process and on life in general.  While I have lots to say on the topic, I am inspired by this transcript of J.K. Rowling's commencement address at Harvard last June.  Perhaps you have already seen this, but the entire address is well worth reading.  Here is an excerpt on the benefits of failure that I found most wonderful (text copyright J.K. Rowling June 2009, photo from Harvard Magazine):

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes."

Well said.