Hello, welcome to Sock Talk
with JNab and the Sundance Kid.
We're going to explore the frontiers of
technology, art and the human experience.
Hello, welcome to Sock
Talk, episode number 10.
John, we made it to double digits.
Good lord, double digits.
Yeah, so, well, that's good.
That's nine more than the first one.
And this week we are going by a topic of
why does your art suck?
Oh, that's a little personal.
Yes.
So I mean that in the royal you, the
opposite of the royal me
or inverse, but whatever.
John, why does your art suck?
My art sucks for lots
and lots of reasons.
Yeah.
I guess predominantly it's because I
don't really do art anymore.
And art that you don't do sucks worse
than any art you could do.
How about you, Jamie?
Why does your art suck?
One, I don't get to do it
as much as I would like to.
For the same reasons.
It's a skill.
It's like anything.
It's like craft.
It's a muscle.
Depending on what you're creating, if you
stop doing it, you will atrophy, I think.
And that's one of the biggest reasons I
don't sit down and commit the hours.
I also can't decide what kind of artist I
want to be, which doesn't help.
I like, one of my unfortunate things is I
like too many things.
That's one of my downfalls.
So I used to be really bad for starting
projects and never finishing them again.
Now I just don't start projects and I
figure I can fix that problem.
It's a sad thing, but
I totally relate to it.
The first couple of decades of my life,
the first three
decades of my life, my mother
was always saying to me, just pick one.
Just pick one and do that for a while and
then you can change your mind.
Because I like to
sculpt and paint and draw.
I liked theater and music and all kinds
of things on the artistic side.
And I couldn't decide.
And if I were giving advice to my own
kids, if I had any, I'd
say, don't just choose one.
Don't try to find the perfect one.
Do them all.
Switch back and forth and the ones that
call out here are the ones you should do.
Yeah.
And I say something, atrophies, but if
you're doing various
different forms of expression,
let's say, or crafts, you might not get
as highly specialized
within that craft, but
there is an overall
creative muscle, so to speak.
I agree.
Yeah.
I agree.
I think it's sort of a developed
fearlessness or something.
The ability to put out the stuff that
you're thinking or
imagining without deciding that
it has to immediately be erased or binned
or something like that.
Yeah.
I, for sure.
I still have that fear all the time.
Anything we make, even this podcast, I
have the fear of the
standard things that everyone
feels.
So that's, okay, we're going to try and
list things and make
something useful and practical.
One of the first things might be that
fear that gets in a lot of people's ways.
I felt this especially more in the
beginning and especially
now because, say, if you're
a digital artist, if you're starting out
in something like 3D
modeling or 3D animation,
which I know quite a bit about, you will
probably have your
favorite artists and you'll
go online to something like Behance and
they'll have a front page
of this amazing pieces of
art and craft that you just, there's no
way you can compete against that.
And it's almost a bit down heartening
seeing, but seeing all of
that work and then comparing
against your own.
But you have to remember, those are quite
often what you're
seeing there is people over
the 10,000 hours, they're
probably 20 years into it.
And this is one of their most recent
pieces that they've
spent a lot of time on.
And that can get in the way because it
gives you that fear
that you're not going to be
good in comparison.
But most of us know who are
there higher at that level.
I'm not saying I'm their higher level.
We still want to see
everyone else starting out.
Most communities are good, I would say.
So, all right, what am I saying?
Don't be afraid of putting out your work.
And it doesn't need to be, well, I would
say, yeah, put it out anywhere.
Get over that fear.
The only way you get over a
fear is by confronting it.
I agree.
And you're going to be uncomfortable and
you're always going to have an
uncomfortable feeling
and you're always going to doubt yourself
and question yourself, which is fine.
That's normal.
There's nothing wrong with it.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's lots of interesting conflations
that happen between
reality and imagination when
you're dealing with people's artwork.
And it's easy to think that if somebody
doesn't like your art, it
means they don't like you.
And if your art isn't pleasing to
everybody who comments on
it, then you've done something
wrong.
And that's not the case at all.
Art is incredibly subjective and some
people love one thing
that other people hate and
so on and so forth.
It's really hard to get to the point
where you can just say, you know what?
I made it and I'm okay with it.
And it doesn't have to be, I made it and
I love it or I made it
and it's the best piece
I ever made.
And now I will go on and make another
piece that will be the
best piece I ever made.
It's just, I made it and now it's done.
Like if this piece is done and I'm going
to set it over there
and now I'm going to make
other pieces and when they're done, I'll
set them in other places.
It's a very hard attitude to get to, but
I think it's really a
big part of what defines
a professional artist or a professional
creator as opposed to an
amateur, the ability to finish
up and walk away.
One hundred percent.
Finish things.
That's a good piece of advice I hear lots
of people say all the time.
Because you're never going to be fully
satisfied, which is good and normal.
That's what drives you to
continue on and get better.
Right.
And in fact, if you don't draw the line
under something and say,
even if this isn't finished,
I'm finished with it.
If you don't do that, then you can't get
better because you haven't
finished something so that
you can learn from it.
Yeah.
There's a famous
phrase, art is never finished.
It's abandoned.
Yes.
Yeah.
When I was an animator back in the stone
age, we used to say no
project is ever done.
It's just do.
Yes.
There you go.
That's the attitude.
100%.
What would you if you.
So let's say you go back in time and you
can speak to your younger self.
You've just given a good bit of advice.
What other areas would you
would you give advice on?
Oh, boy.
I as a kid, as a little kid, I used to
read the comic strips
with my dad most every day
that he was in town.
And I loved the comic strips.
I just loved them.
Peanuts, Hagar, the Horrible, all kinds
of comic strips like that.
And I so wanted to draw them.
I wanted to draw them.
I didn't know where the
stories would come from.
But after a while, I
figured out I could do that too.
And if I could go back and talk to that
little kid, I'd just
say, yeah, keep doing that.
Just keep doing that.
If you turn it into something or if you
don't, you love it and keep doing it.
There was a point in
my life when I stopped.
I started drawing.
We should probably talk about this myth
of the 10,000 hours,
which is a really common
myth.
I started drawing
when I was really little.
My parents both worked and I'd end up in
my mother's office
during the parts of the year
when we were in the
city and not at the farm.
I'd end up in my mother's office for
hours every afternoon
waiting for it to be time
to go home.
That's where I started drinking coffee.
You can see how it stunted my growth.
And every day, the amusement I had was
that I was given a stack
of lined paper and a couple
of Bic pens, ballpoint pens.
So I just drew.
I drew all day long before I could write,
before I could do anything else.
And people said to me all through my
childhood and teens, wow,
you're a really great artist.
And I always thought,
no, I'm not an artist.
I don't have the
creativity to be an artist.
But I'm an illustrator.
I can illustrate
anything you want illustrated.
I guess if I could go back to that little
kid, I would say
persist at it, keep doing
it and find the storytelling that you
think you can't do and be
that creative person you
think you aren't.
I don't know what I'd be doing now, but
I'm pretty sure we
would never have met in the
context in which we did.
If I could.
I had a similar experience.
I can remember drawing a lot.
Various different things.
I remember being
given bad advice early on.
Well, maybe not.
But one of the early things I used to get
given to me is tracing
paper and I trace over
things and it's just just keep doing that
and then you'll learn.
It never works.
So one of the things I would say for me,
if I was going to go
back, learn actually the
foundational theory.
Yes.
You can put in a lot of hours and do
anything, but there are
people who've figured things
out over time who are willing to teach
you and give you shortcuts.
You don't need to sit and just hope that
by magic happen chance
that you figure all these
these tools and techniques out on your
own when people are
very willing to teach you
them and tell you them.
And there are great books.
There's great YouTube video series.
There's university with some great, with
some good lectures and here and there.
That's what I would say.
I would be afraid of, I don't know why,
but I'd be afraid of doing that.
I totally get it.
I went through the same thing when I was
in my tweens friend.
I trusted, gave me some tracing paper and
said, trace all the
artists you like and you'll
learn.
So within about a year, my father gave me
a copy of Grey's
Anatomy, not the TV show,
the anatomy book, which is ill named by
the man who wrote it,
not the man who drew it.
And I learned so much from going through
that and really trying to
study how the human body
was.
After that, I stopped drawing almost
everything else for years
and just drew people really
bad at backgrounds, but
really detailed human anatomy.
Yeah.
There maybe there's
something else I hear.
People say, figure out what you will stay
away from what we're not good at.
And sometimes I can
hold us back quite a bit.
And being honest with yourself and
identifying those areas is
a good method of growing.
Not just with art, just
anywhere in your life.
If you're terrified to do any form of
public speaking, that's a
shining light telling you
that you need to train a little bit more
in that area because
it, yeah, those, those
fears are quite often telling you
something where there's
value to be had by pursuing.
I agree.
And even if it's just as simple as, as
being more comfortable in
the world, there's something
scares you learn more about it.
I don't know if it's because of childhood
experiences with firearms or if it's just
because of a lifelong obsession with
Batman, but I grew up
hating handguns, just hating
them.
So the first chance I got, I joined a gun
club so I could learn all about them, how
to take them apart, how they worked, how
to make ammunition,
how to get really good at
handling them.
And then also in the course
of all that, how to fire them.
But I became certainly nowhere near an
expert, but I became very
comfortable around handguns
and I no longer hated them.
I still hate how people use them.
I wish they didn't exist, but since they
do, at least I feel a bit
safer now if one suddenly
appears.
Well, you'd be surprised
right now behind the score.
Nicky, come in.
It's happened to me three times.
Oh boy.
Twice people have pointed handguns at me.
One time I was there when
someone pointed it at someone else.
Okay.
Perception is with art,
very, very important element.
Not just for you creating something to
show to people by the
end of whatever it is.
And you're going to try and use tools and
methods to make
people perceive it in some
way to try and make them feel something.
But whilst you're making something, your
own perception can get in your own way.
So one of the early tips people will
give, especially with
digital drawings, is very
easy, is once you've got a drawing or a
graphic design or
something, is to flip it.
And in just that process of flipping it,
you'll see something
that, like how on earth did
I not notice that thing was unaligned?
And it's just that
dog-caulking-of-the-head thing to just
view it from a different angle.
Yeah, that's excellent.
Since you bring that up, I should
probably mention that I
just told this story without
any reference to historical documents.
So I could be completely wrong.
What I talked about was my current
perception based on the
perception I had at the time.
Yeah.
Part of the creative process, I'll use
film, for example, just
because I'm familiar with
that and we're making one
right now, so it's in my head.
Whenever you're creating
something, you know everything.
Whatever there is to know about this
story, if there is
anything to know about it, you're
the one who knows everything about it.
And you're going to be, at first, writing
it, then shooting it,
then editing it, making
it for an audience who doesn't know.
So we value a lot of
fresh eyes in the industry.
We call them fresh eyes.
People who are not attached in any way,
don't know any lore,
don't know any background,
don't know anything about the characters.
And then as a part of the creative
process is handing it to
someone with fresh eyes to
get their genuine immediate input because
it's very, very valuable.
We do it in the script writing stage.
Once you've got your first pass, fire off
to a bunch of
different people, get feedback.
Then once you've shot it and got your
first cut, well, even
before then you work with
your actors, get their perception of the
characters and letting go
of, especially in that art
form, letting go of control is what being
a good filmmaker is
all about because you've
got to, for the most, unless you're doing
absolutely everything
on your own, which is
rare, you're going to be
giving it to other people.
You've got to let it be as
much there as it is yours.
And so as a director, sure, you're going
to direct them in some
directions, but you're
going to open it up to let that other
person find things that
you can't and bring it in
together kind of a hive mind sense of
making something
larger as a creative output.
And yeah, once you've got your edit,
you're going to pass it on
to other people with fresh
eyes because it might not make sense.
It might have made perfect sense to you
that in the third act,
that gun has that guns now
or not child's hand, but you forgot to
write it in, in the first scene.
And without that, the audience is going
to go, where did that come from?
What's going on there?
That doesn't make sense.
It made sense to you because you've, you
knew that was there,
but you forgot to tell the
audience.
So you have to get Mr. Chekov to
introduce you in the first scene.
I think 100%.
Exactly.
Why chose the gun.
Nicely done.
Yeah.
I think all of, all of creativity, if
you're intending to share
it beyond your own experience
is a story that you're going to be
sharing with someone.
Hopefully they're going to be able to
tell the story themselves
or the piece that you've
created will tell them a story.
And I think that perspective that you
were just speaking from,
the fact that you're giving
it to them, the
audience, they have fresh eyes.
So you need to have fresh eyes earlier to
know how they read it.
I really liked that very much.
I remember when I was teaching animation,
again, maybe not the Stone Age, maybe the
Bronze Age, the, in one of the first
classes I ever taught, I
said to the students, now
when you share your storyboards with the
class and with me, you
have to be able to tell the
story just with what you've got on paper.
So don't describe it.
Don't use any words at all.
Don't make any sounds.
Don't point at anything.
You have to be able to hand it to someone
and they'll understand it.
And then I did a demonstration for the
class and quickly
sketched up a storyboard.
I think it was two parallel storyboards.
They might still be in my online
portfolio somewhere.
One of human characters, emoting heavily,
one really close to
the camera, one further
away.
And then the same thing done again with
Moses, like in the
distance and Homer up close to
show the very different, how much you can
exaggerate posture and
facial expression when
it's cartoons.
And the first thing I did was to start
explaining that to the class.
And a couple of the students said,
shouldn't it be able to
tell us what it's telling us
without you using any words?
And like, oh, wow.
Okay, thanks.
Thanks.
Yep.
I was hired in an obscure Navy reference.
I was hoist by my own petard.
Yep.
Yep.
That's, that's a very, very good tool.
Forcing people to not use other methods.
We had something similar where one of our
last writing groups, we
were to one, one group
went away and everything that would come
back from them would be
very, very dialogue heavy
to the point where
everything was in a dialogue.
And then when I got it back, I just said,
write it again with
no dialogue, absolutely
zero dialogue.
Tell this whole story just through action
and to force them to
start thinking about,
okay, right.
How, how do I do that?
How do you, how do you tell even, yeah.
How do you communicate what someone is
feeling just visually?
Well, that's cinema.
That's the whole point.
So think about how everything, the me's
on scene, the colors,
the emotions, the actions,
what are they doing?
Absolutely everything to communicate
rather than like we're
doing right now in a podcast,
which is the inverse
where it's only dialogue.
Or if you could look at, if you're
watching right now, I'm
not at all animated and it's
not very cinematic, but
yeah, it's a fun tool.
I accidentally became better.
I don't know if I became better.
I don't think I was never
good to writing dialogue.
And I've, I've been, I'm lucky that, so
one of my skills is
visual effects, which is a
blessing and a curse because there's that
phrase fix it in post.
Have you've heard of it?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
So when you're, when you, when you have
some of those skills and
things aren't going your
way, you, you, at the back of your mind,
you're just like, I
could just change this
later.
Do I need to, it's a bad idea because it
costs, it takes a lot of
time and energy to do it.
But with one of my films, I, I, I wasn't
happy with the majority of the dialogue.
I cut out probably 70% of it in my film.
Wow.
Just because it was, it
was bad writing on my part.
It wasn't anything to
do with anyone else.
I take full responsibility for it.
But then I wouldn't say I fixed it.
I was talking about why your art sucks.
I hate, I hate everything about
everything I do, but I
didn't make it at least better.
I can at least you, you still got to give
yourself the pats on
the back every now and
then as well.
You can't just beat
yourself up completely.
Which I do quite a lot.
I mostly just beat myself up.
But I forced myself to, again, not
forced, but I became much
better visually at communicating
things.
So in that film, within the first minute,
I communicate a lot of
information just through,
just through the imagery and editing
rather than any dialogue
at all, which is better
in most cases, I think.
I agree completely.
I was just trying to remember the names
of a couple of folks
who've given me advice directly
or indirectly over the years.
And I started looking at my phone and
realized that's just
the wrong way to do this.
We are not looking things up.
We'll fix that in post, if there's
references to put here.
But there's a great American writer.
There was a great American writer who
died about 10 years ago.
He wrote the books that Justified is
based on the TV series
Justified or the sequel Justified
City Primeval.
He wrote the novel Get Shorty.
Leonard, Elmore Leonard.
Sorry, it took me a little while.
Elmore Leonard wrote advertising copy for
A Living and then
started writing westerns
and eventually managed to become the best
dialogue writer in
American popular fiction.
Largely recognized as that.
The first dozen or so films Hollywood
made based on his films,
based on his novels, they
rewrote the script entirely.
And it wasn't until somebody realized,
no, we've got to
preserve his dialogue as much
as we can, that the film
suddenly became award winning.
His dialogue is exceptional.
He advances the story with almost no
description of what's going
on in the room except people
reacting to it.
But that's so freaking rare.
Most other writers will tell you to do
exactly the opposite.
Set a scene.
Set the scene so well that the person is
there and then let it happen.
Don't overdo the writing, right?
Was it Stephen King who
said don't use any adverbs?
Pass.
Okay, I think that might
have been Stephen King.
Hey audience, let us know.
If you don't mind, mom, I know you're
busy being dead and all,
but don't know who else
is listening or watching.
Are you in the room right now?
Yes.
So, yeah, in terms of writing, there's
lots and lots of great advice out there.
Some of it saying be heavy in dialogue if
you are as good as Elmore Leonard.
Otherwise try to do
everything you can without it.
Certainly in film or
in visual storytelling.
I agree with you completely.
If you can tell the story without a
single word, that's probably best.
I don't know if you've ever seen Will
Eisner's book on graphic storytelling.
He's the guy some people say did the
first graphic novel.
The one who invented the
spirit back just post-World War II.
American comic writer, if you don't know
his work, I strongly
suggest you check out the
graphic novel A Contract with God.
It's exceptional.
But anything by Will
Eisner is exceptional.
So he wrote a textbook basically on how
to tell visual stories.
And he's one of the kings of it.
I had the good chance to meet him and
chat with him briefly
in his latter years when
I was still trying to
be a comic book artist.
I also had the chance to take a weekend
course from Joe Kubert,
who was another great visual
storyteller.
He invented that test out.
You see a lot in comics now, especially
being a fan of manga.
You see it there.
Where you have a single scene, a single
background, foreground, everything, but
split across several
panels and you can see the characters
moving through the scene.
That was Kubert who invented that.
Just absolutely beautiful.
Scott McCloud, who did a couple of really
great alternative comics or alt-comics as
they were called in the 80s and 90s, and
then wrote two of the
best textbooks and visual
storytelling ever.
Understanding comics and I think the
sequel is making comics.
Those are all great things for people to
look up if they want to
know more about visual
storytelling.
Because yeah, if you do it right, you
don't need sound effects.
You don't need special effects.
Nothing needs to be fixed in post.
It saves a lot of money and time when
you're making a film,
like you were saying, if you
don't have to fix it in post.
It also forces you to think a lot more
about what you're going to
do, what your storytelling
choices are beforehand.
We've said it before in this podcast,
both of us, the prep
time you spend before you
touch any hardware or software, that's in
direct relation to
how good the outcome is.
100%.
If you're just diving in
without any sort of prerequisite.
If you just turn out with all the cameras
in the room with no
script, that's just documentary
at that point.
It's very different.
But that's one of the reasons that
people's artwork sucks, is
because we've got all these
amazing toys now that let us make art.
Whether it's music or whether it's 3D
images, 2D images, whatever
it happens to be, modified
photos, anything that makes it too easy
to do without
reflection means that a lot of
people are making a lot of work without
thinking about it beforehand.
That means they're not taking advantage
of that prior
knowledge that you mentioned a
little while ago.
100%.
I am guilty as charged.
I remember very early on getting into 3D
modeling and whatnot.
I would spend so many times trying to
find add-ons, tools,
textures, this, that.
Things will try and make it easier for
me, rather than just
focusing, not even focusing
on my foundational skills, just focusing
on what the hell do you want to make.
Why are you gathering all these tools and
techniques and material texture packs and
all of this?
I'm going, "Oh, that'll be great.
I'll keep all this together."
Then spending more time than actually
making stuff, which is stupid.
You don't need.
That's something we say when we're doing,
when we're teaching
filmmaking and video production
and things as well.
It doesn't matter how
good your camera is.
If you give an iPhone to some of the
greatest filmmakers in
the world, they will make a
great film.
Full stop.
Absolutely.
Don't let your tools get in the way
because you need to know
what you're doing in the
first place, which is more important.
What do you want to say?
What is this act that you're doing?
What do you need to
communicate to other people?
Right.
Don't let your tools get in the way.
It's a really important phrase.
I'm sorry.
I sort of interrupted you there.
No, no.
I just want to jump on
that before we go on.
It's important because it
works in two directions.
Your tools can get in the way because
they're too limited.
Yeah.
And so you convince yourself that they're
not good enough, or
they can get in the way
because they're too freaking good.
And so you convince yourself you've got
to use them to their extremes.
You know the filmmaker, Darren Aronofsky.
I think I've got his name right.
I'm a big time movie maker now, director,
producer, et cetera.
His first film was made and shot on a
Super 8, as I understand it.
It's all he had.
He raised the money he could.
All he could use was this very, very
shaky handheld camera.
So he made a film in which the shakiness
of the camera would
assist the storytelling.
It's about a guy who's falling into
paranoia and doesn't know if this
conspiracy he's uncovered
is just paranoia or is real.
So the fact that the camera is shaky all
the time just is brilliant.
Now, when I saw it, when it was first
released, people left
the theater complaining.
"It's making me nauseous."
And it was.
Yeah.
But he used it deliberately as a
storytelling technique.
100%.
Yeah.
Your own limitations can
sometimes be tools as well.
Something recently, I noticed myself on a
Zoom call and I was
doodling for the first
time in a long time.
And I was just looking at it.
I was like, "Hey, it's interesting.
It's not great by any means."
But I look at it and
I go, "It's something.
There's something there."
And that's just with no tools.
When we're talking about,
"Yeah, what are you going to do?"
That's something it's like, "Who the hell
am I to be giving
anyone advice on this in
the first place?"
A lecturer at a university whose job is
to give people advice.
That's a good point.
Thanks, John.
But I still look at myself as got a long,
long way to go with most things.
Everything I make can be a lot better.
Good.
Please keep feeling that way.
Yeah.
When I direct best is when I don't have
to worry about everything else.
I've done a lot of indie filmmaking
because I've had to.
I wanted to make films so
bad with these grand stories.
I just had to do everything.
I had to figure out everything.
I had to figure out how to do the
effects, how to film, how to edit.
So I'm very skilled in all of the fields
of filmmaking because I had to.
I had nobody else around me.
And then over time as I have developed
communities and other
creatives around me, one that's
the ownership thing
we're talking about before.
One is giving up ownership and letting
other people do what
they're best at or just even
accept they're going to
do that so you can focus.
And when I'm at my best in directing is
when I'm literally just
focusing on, "What are
we doing in this scene?
What's the feeling?"
And you really have to put yourself in
that space and bring
everyone else with you, especially
the actors because you got to forget all
the tools and cameras and crew around us.
We need to go into
this space and become it.
And what that space means, I mean what
you're seeing on the
final film, a great film, the
actors are there 100%.
Okay, sure, there might be something in
the back of their head.
They're thinking a lot of the things, but
it needs to be as authentic as it can be.
And the director's job is to quite often
help people get there and
communicate to everyone.
And you've got to be there yourself
because as a director,
you've got to feel if it wasn't.
And if it wasn't there, it's your job to
make sure to get it
there because you're the one
that everyone stops after this cut,
everyone looks to you and
they're like, "Did we get
it?
And what is it?"
That's the question.
Some people just, when you start out, I'd
usually just be, "Yeah,
that shot looked pretty."
That's not what we're looking for.
It doesn't even matter if it went out of
focus at some point.
What you should be caring about more was
what did you feel it?
Was the energy what you
were trying to communicate?
What was that there?
And that's, and I'm still bad for it
because you can get
caught up, especially on a busy
set, you can get caught up and you're
rushing and things are
going in there and it's a very
hard thing to stay in the
space that you need to be in.
Yeah, I can only imagine.
I've directed some TV commercials and
bits of animation here and there.
I've never directed a film.
Aspired to it, but never saw it as
something I could take on successfully.
But I can only imagine how very, very
challenging it must be to
maintain all those different
perspectives at once.
Running the set, checking the work of all
of the individuals, doing all of the very
separate tasks, making sure all of that
is going and keeping
track of a story that really
only exists in your head and seeing how
it meshes up with the
story all of these different
professionals are telling.
I am greatly appreciative
and admiring of your skills.
Well, it could be better.
The skills, but the-
Just take the compliment.
I'll take it.
All right.
One pound of backhoe.
No, but yeah, it's so
easy to get taken out of it.
And I was laughing, thinking, what you're
saying, it's so exhausting.
It's weirdly exhausting because you're
dealing with a thousand
things the whole time.
Your brain is on overdrive the whole way
through if you're doing it well.
I remember the last film that we did, me
and Nicki co-directed.
Everyone on lunch, like lunch would come,
everyone's in, like
speaking to each other,
enjoying the thing.
Me, Nicki, or another
room just zoned out.
Give me no more noise.
My brain needs to have nothing right now
because the whole time
when you're on it, you're just
switched on completely,
keeping track of everything.
There's other industries and people who
do this way more than
a blooming filmmaker.
But yeah, there's
different ways of doing it.
You listen to different directors.
They've all got their own
different perspective on it.
Oh, gosh, what filmmaker was I hearing
that said, one of the
things that they do specifically
to get actors to deliver something better
is do it again, but stop acting.
Just say the words.
Like, what do you mean?
No, I'm acting.
No, no, no, no.
Just say the words.
That's all you need to do.
Say the words to try and
get it as real as possible.
I think that was Fincher's films
potentially because
that's the real world.
Nobody, quite often people are boring in
the way they communicate.
It doesn't always have to be.
We talked before here with some of our
guests about the uncanny
valley and that's a constant
danger when you're using human actors to
tell a human story is
the least little bit
of a dis-synchrony or a-synchrony between
what they're doing and
what the audience anticipates
them doing.
Either is enchanting or breaks the
illusion completely.
And yeah, it's really cool.
That's one of the things I love about it
is that tightrope that
the story is walking the
whole time.
How do you do things that are
unpredictable in a way that keeps the
audience engaged and
builds their anticipation instead of
snapping them out of it?
It's marvelous.
Yeah.
All right.
I had a question lined up for you, John.
What is the, what are you most proud of
artistically that you've ever made?
Holy smokes.
Wow.
That's a big question.
Probably something
you've not thought about.
Yeah.
Anything I say as an answer here, I may
disagree with upon further reflection.
Of course.
Artistically, you mean across the arts.
Yeah.
And anything you've created
that you're most proud of?
Wow.
I've done some things I'm quite proud of,
some comic art, some
illustrations, a couple
of paintings, some poetry.
Oh man.
I think probably from a purely artistic
standpoint, and I don't mean, "Arr, I
shy, quite autistic,"
but you know, like something that was
generated for the
purpose of telling a story.
I wrote a novel, a children's novel based
on Norwegian folk
tales that my father used
to tell us when we were kids.
He told them for years and then I took
over telling them to my younger siblings.
And I carried them in my heart.
When I was a school teacher, I used to
tell them to my students.
And I finally decided about 15, 20 years
ago that I had to get those down.
Yeah, 20 years ago or more now, but I had
to get those down and
do something with them.
So I wrote the first novel entirely, "Tip
of the Hat to Nano
Rimo," the national novel
writing, write a novel in a month thing
that has changed quite a
bit in the last few years,
but got me through writing that novel.
So yeah, it's a full novel.
I wrote it, roughed it out in a month,
finished it, edited it all
in later stages, and then
illustrated it.
So every chapter has one illustration and
I painted the cover.
And I am extremely proud of that.
It sat in the hands of an agent in New
York who was getting ready to
retire for a year when he was
deciding whether or not he would
represent it and try to get me published.
And after a year, he wrote back to me and
said, "I really like the character and I
really like the way you tell the story,
but I'm not in love with it."
He turned it down.
And that broke my heart and I didn't do
anything with it for years after that.
If anyone listening or if either of you
in the room happened to know a literary
agent who would be willing
to look at a children's story,
I would dearly love
to get that published.
Since I wrote the first one, I have
blocked out the four
other novels in the series.
The protagonist starts off at age four
and there's a new novel every four years.
Well, there's fear, John.
Why have you not already done it?
Send it out.
I just can't do it.
I can't do it.
It comes back to something that I think
we've talked about before,
which is my absolute certainty
that if I don't take the chance of
failing, it will not have failed.
Yeah.
Yeah, which is a horrible lesson I
learned as a little kid and some things
still cling to to this day.
I mean, not in most things in my life.
I wouldn't have done 90% of what I've
done in my life, but that story is very
personal and it still
feels that way to me.
Sure.
I'd rather not have the heartbreak of
having it turned down again.
Well, there's self-publishing these days.
That's what people have been telling me
for more than a decade.
And I actually went so far as to do the
full layout of the book so that I could
self-publish before
deciding I didn't want to.
Fair enough.
I don't know.
Probably the wrong choice.
How many stories like that
are there around the world?
How many masterpieces maybe have existed?
The Spanish painter who's going mad, the
Chronos, eating his baby.
I forget the name of the painter, but he
was going mad in his later years.
You know the painting I'm talking about,
Chronos, eating a baby,
coming out of the shadows.
Basically, he painted on as well.
And it got covered up and no one noticed
it for years until they found it again.
He had just made these absolute...
What would be the word?
I don't know how to...
That's just my badly articulate "I am"
right now of a way of communicating.
But the haunting is one word, maybe.
Haunting, but they draw
you in these paintings.
And yeah, it was just...
No one ever knew them until
they found them on the wall.
He just did them on his own.
We'll put up a picture of it now in this
little corner there.
Good idea.
You will have seen it.
No doubt. If you want,
you can put up a little...
It's a famous one of Chronos, but he's a
weathered old man with
just finished eating a baby.
Yeah, I think I'm
recognizing the imagery.
Please put up a facepalm logo next to it,
or a little emoji of facepalm.
Yeah, I should know the
name. I'm so bad with names.
Yeah, there's two guys
who are bad with names.
That should be the
new name of our podcast.
Podcast, yeah. What was that name again?
That should be a bit... Yeah.
It's so bad as well
because I feel like...
I don't know. I feel like I'm getting
less articulate over time.
And...
It's a muscle, Jamie.
You have to practice it.
Yeah, that's it. That's it. I
noticed our first sock talk,
and I was flowing a bit better.
It's your mid-semester, and I've been
lecturing a lot, communicating a lot.
And now after summer, the
muscles come down a bit.
It only makes sense. Maybe.
It only makes sense.
We'll say that. It's not
all the alcohol I drink.
Yeah, good idea, especially since it's
Whiskey Week here in Aberdeen.
Yes, yes.
We've... Okay, we fit quite a few
hopefully useful tips for some people.
I guess this podcast is mainly addressed
to people who are starting out
because anyone who's good at their craft
will probably bear them, me at least.
So you don't need advice from me.
But people who are very
much just starting out.
It's bits and pieces
of advice for you guys.
I'm going to step in there during your...
Please do.
Because I disagree
strongly with what you just said.
Here's the fact that you were
self-disparaging
again, which you do a lot.
And it's fine. If that's what
you want to do, you go ahead.
But I will call you out
on it from time to time.
Sure.
I tell my students that the greatest
thing ever invented by humans,
the greatest deliberate invention by
humans is the scientific method.
Because the scientific method is where
you put your ego aside
and you find the smartest and most
knowledgeable people you can
and ask them to tell
you what you did wrong.
And that's how we advance knowledge,
is by trying to disprove what we believe,
getting as many smart and
knowledgeable people as possible
to try to disprove what we believe.
Undefined terms, not just,
"Nyanya, we don't like you."
Right? It has to be undefined terms.
And if you can disprove it,
then we know to abandon it.
And if you can't disprove it, then we
know that we can build on top of it,
at least for a while.
I believe that this applies
in creative measures as well,
and that everyone, no
matter their experience,
and no matter their skills, and no matter
what they've produced so far,
including beautiful pieces and wonderful,
inspiring, fear-evoking pieces,
everyone learns from reviewing the same
basic information again and again.
Because we tend to forget it.
We're humans and we're flawed,
and we need a whole bunch of peers
reminding us all the
time of our best practices.
Yeah.
So those of you who are much better at
this stuff than me or
Jamie, you're welcome.
Okay. That made me think of one of the
things that gets in my way the most is...
How do I articulate this?
Almost a dishonesty.
Where...
Because the act of being creative, you've
got to tap into this raw...
element within you.
And I know this is
imprecise and abstract,
but I'm going on a feeling here.
At least for when...
Directing is maybe where I feel it most.
You've got to tap down
into this raw creative space
and not let yourself get in your own way.
You've probably felt it before with...
That's kind of flow
state a little bit as well.
You'll feel... You'll felt it
when you're writing sometimes.
You don't know where it's coming from,
but it's coming from somewhere.
And then the second something else comes
into your brain, boom, it's gone.
And I mean, this is what
people used to call the divine,
and people would relate this to being
closer to God or whatever.
Various different
forms of referring to it.
People have articulated this
much better than me, but...
You can get there, and the only person
who's not going to let
you get there is yourself.
There is going to be other people that
will tell you things
and criticize and do that.
But you're the one listening to them.
You're the one who's listening to them
and taking those things on.
And there's a freedom that
comes from learning to let go,
which is very, very hard to do.
I've seen some people slip
too far on that letting go.
You still need to keep yourself attached
to reality a little bit.
But yeah, what do you think?
I agree with you completely.
I think it's an interesting
process, that deep creativity.
People would say in the
Lilac age, they would say,
"He was writing like a
man possessed," right?
Or "Working like a man possessed."
So sometimes it's the divine that's
touching you, and
sometimes it's something else.
It's the monkey on your back, or the
sakhibas on your shoulder.
This style of putting forth so much all
at once, being deeply immersed in it,
it is very much what is called flow,
thanks to Mihaly Csikszak Mihaly.
I do think there's
other sides to it, though.
It is wonderful to go into it.
Like you say, it's great
if you're a creative person,
if you can tap into it as deeply as
possible, as long as
you keep coming back.
Because failing to come back is the road
to perdition, as some might say.
It's certainly not going to be
comfortable for you or
for the people who love you.
On the other hand, there's
also failing to get going.
You said that the only person who's
stopping you is you,
and I think for 99% of the people who
might hear this podcast,
and for almost 100% of those who don't,
yes, that's the same number.
That's true.
However, we are also constantly
interrupted by the traveling salesman
who won't stop knocking at our door.
When you're busy
writing down or dreaming up,
and Xanadu did Kublai Khan, a stately
pleasure tone decree,
if you're writing that poem and a blasted
door-to-door salesman won't
stop banging on your door,
interrupts you, and you
never manage to finish the poem,
as is the case in that
example, then that connection is lost.
And maybe you can go into the realm
again, but not with that connection.
Whatever elements were going on that were
feeding into you or
that you were feeding from,
those are now different, and that story
can no longer be finished.
Which is one of the reasons
I hate open concept offices.
Great studies have been done about it.
If you are in an open concept office,
you tend to average less
than half an hour of work a day.
Because every single thing going on
around you interrupts you,
and if you are trying to do
something in a deep flow state,
something creative or something truly
productive, where you're at your best,
anything that interrupts you will take at
least 20-25 minutes
for you to get back to.
Yeah, build up the momentum.
So even if, yeah, well,
momentum or depth or whatever it is,
build up the connections, build up the
lack of connections.
If you study the neuropsychology of flow,
it's really quite interesting.
And I've got some theories about that
that I haven't had the
opportunity to try to disprove yet.
But it seems to me that the resources
that you usually spend in,
say, blocking out a story,
the resources that you usually spend in
doing that are quite limited.
There are certain parts of your brain
that are good at that kind of thing.
But if you can get deeply enough into it,
then all of the little processors that
are worrying about the room around you,
that are worrying about,
"Have I eaten yet this morning,
and when do I have to
use the toilet next?
And what is my
partner thinking right now?"
And all those other distracting thoughts,
they all fall aside.
And all of the resources that are
processing those things focus instead on
helping you block out the story.
That's why you lose sense of time. That's
why you lose sense of personal space.
That's why you lose sense of discomfort
in your limbs or in
your digestive system.
I've told stories about that to you
before, and I think
on the podcast before.
When you go into flow, you're vastly more
productive for the same reason
that you feel like the rest of the world
has disappeared or that
you've fallen into another world.
It's because your sensory perceptions
aren't happening anymore.
Instead, all of those resources are drawn
into helping you
accomplish something great.
Anyone who's played a video game and
gotten completely caught up into it
and done better than they
thought they could have,
that's what's going on.
You're suddenly using resources to
imagine what's next in the game,
anticipate it, and take the appropriate
actions with just
exactly the precise timing
that allows you to succeed
and go on to the next level
where it's just a little bit more
difficult and a
little bit more demanding,
specifically because it's designed to
bring you into flow.
So if you've played that kind of a game
and you've been lost in it,
the reason you lose track of time, the
reason that your partner or your parents
or your children get upset with you
because you were gone all night
and you really thought you were only
playing for 15 minutes
is because your innate sense of time,
yes, humans have much more than six or
seven senses or five,
your innate sense of time disappeared
because those resources were
busy helping you win the game
or tell the story or write about Xanadu.
Maybe that's what I was trying to
articulate a bit with the honesty.
You're being dishonest to whatever it is
that we're talking about here,
that depth that you're going into.
If you're worrying about anything else,
you're not being true to it.
And we all kind of know it
and feel it because most,
I'm pretty sure everyone listening has
seen someone perform in some sense,
be it act and a play or perform music.
If someone's not there and not fully in
it, you can feel it.
It's not quite there.
And then when people truly are and
they're 100%
synchronized to that flow zone,
that's when people truly
shine for no better word.
That's what you look for.
You need people being 100% committed and
at their very best in a given moment.
I agree completely.
I agree with you and I think the terms
are interesting
because it is 100% committal.
That's what comes across is that you are
fully invested in
doing what you're doing.
And yet I think if you were thinking
about it consciously and
trying to be committed,
those thoughts are
too slow for it to work.
It has to be something
much faster than that,
something in one of the other processing
centers of your brain that isn't as slow
and ponderous as that.
Okay. And I've just figured out another
part of my honesty thing,
which annoys me with
myself a little bit as well,
is making things that aren't
even truly resonant with me.
Like I'm not with art
and maybe film or writing,
or especially maybe
writing songs or anything.
If you're not writing about something
which you genuinely feel, have felt,
then what are you doing?
Yeah. Making commercial
work and getting rich, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a great question.
I've noticed your last few examples have
been about music and writing,
and I can't help but wonder if that's
because of what I'm doing tonight.
No, no, not at all.
It's just such an easy, it's just such an
easy visceral one to understand.
Phew. Thank goodness it's
my ego getting in the way.
No. But the greatest artists in the
world, the greatest songs in the world,
they're deeply, deeply
personal to a human experience,
and they resonate so much with other
people because of that.
And that's where I go with art.
The best art is when someone's being
truly honest to something that they felt.
They've not let themselves get in the way
in how they're communicating it,
even though they are communicating
themselves paradoxically.
It's true synchronization with a feeling
and using artistic tools
to try and communicate
that feeling to other people.
Yeah. Sorry.
Go ahead.
No, it's just what you were
saying there really resonates.
And as always, you're using these great
turns of phrase that I agree with,
but then I also find some disagreement
because there's such
cool turns of phrase.
You said, ironically, it's also you
communicating yourself,
but that's how we lie all the time.
Every lie we tell to ourselves and to
others is a
misrepresentation of ourselves.
And we do it constantly all the time.
It's part of being a human being, right?
When a little baby refuses or a small
toddler refuses to be put to bed
because they're not tired.
What they're really saying is I don't
want to be excluded from
what's going on with you giants.
Right.
But the way they tell it
is to say, I'm not tired.
Yeah. And this honesty
that I'm exploring here,
it's not just art where you
see it getting in the way.
It's normal human communication too, and
especially in workplaces.
I can't stand the dishonesty in most
workplaces that I've been in.
Even in myself, it's like you fall into a
role, you fall into a pattern.
And people not saying the obvious
sometimes, like the emperor has no
clothes, for example.
I feel like it's a similar
thing, that kind of dishonesty.
I agree.
Some people say that society is bound by
the lies they agree to share.
So we are a society if we have agreed to
support common illusions or delusions.
Boy, I love it when we get into this
stuff that isn't easy to answer.
And I hope that folks listening aren't
expecting that either of us are going to
come up with the simple answer to this.
The simple answer to this is, man, keep
thinking about this long after we've
stopped thinking about it.
Yeah.
Who knows what you'll find.
But yeah, the need for dishonesty in
order to have things go smoothly,
I think is a fundamental society and it's
a fundamental of every workplace
and it's a fundamental
of dealing with yourself.
Right?
How much would I hate myself if I had to
be brutally honest about my own
limitations and biases and mistakes?
Yeah, and I feel like there's lies we all
need to continue operating.
Like I know there is, I'm trying to think
of an example though.
I'm struggling to think of an example.
Well, it depends on how
much of an example you want.
Yeah.
The really simple one from the terms of
science is how does gravity work?
Things like that.
I'll see you at sunset.
There's lots of examples like that where
these are just convenient lies we tell
because it makes it easier to function.
Will the sun set at six o'clock tonight?
No, the sun will never freaking set.
Don't be silly.
Earth is rotating around the sun.
It's rotating around its own axis and we
get an illusion of the sun setting.
But much more in line with the kind of
thing you're talking about, there's the
lies we tell ourselves about
things like, I can do this.
Yeah.
I can get through this.
Oh, it's just for a couple of hours.
Right?
Think of anything you've ever been asked
to do that you didn't want to do.
Yeah, okay.
And yeah, there's, the way I find to do
those is do the things you don't want to
do like you love them.
That's the best way to try and get around
things that you know you need to do.
Some things you can just say no to, but
the things you don't want to do for a lot
of people, let's say exercise, can be
hard for some people
to get into exercise.
But just tell yourself you love it.
Weirdly, it works and you
can really commit to it.
Yeah, that's another aspect of lying.
Humans are constantly deceiving
themselves about everything.
And you can do it deliberately with
ridiculously positive effects.
Fake it till you make it.
Yeah, yeah. A colleague of mine
specialized back when I was doing my
master's degree, he was doing his PhD on
negative self talk in
professional athletes.
And at the time, everybody said self talk
that's positive is really, really good
for you as an athlete.
Talk yourself up.
Come on, I can do this.
Come on, you can do it.
You can do it.
Come on.
Harder, harder, right?
People coaching you and
doing a press or something.
What he found was that negative self talk
worked even better
among certain athletes.
And I am unable to go into the details
even if I wanted to right now.
But yeah, these disparaging lies insults
about your own ability to perform the
task you're here to do.
I've found that with myself, for example,
if I go in for a run, that's a positive.
Positive stuff
doesn't work at all for me.
But if I overly critical and say, you
know, the most horrible things in my head
to myself, it does bring an energy for me
that my body goes, I'll show you.
Shut up, brain.
That's lovely.
Last November when I was in Denmark
working at the Aarhus Institute of
Advanced Studies for a month, I shared an
office with my colleague, Lucas Esterly,
who I've mentioned before,
and will continue to mention probably for
the rest of my days.
And he noticed something that I hadn't
noticed that I had developed during the
pandemic because of the accident I was in
where I got all that nerve damage.
We're working, sharing a desk, sitting
opposite each other like
co-programmers or something.
And at one point he said, I don't know
why it's changing, but you went from
saying, come on, come on, John, to come
on hand, to come on
mouse, to come on cursor.
And as the nerve damage was asserting
itself and it became more and more
painful for me to function on simple
things using the computer, I had to more
greatly abstract the
control I was trying to assert.
So I knew I couldn't control my arm
anymore, but I could
freaking control the computer.
No, I can't control the mouse, but I
could control the cursor, damn it.
And it was just this strategy to get
through these horribly frustrating times
that I had developed
without realizing it.
But that in a way was lying to myself and
doing negative
self-talk at the same time.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, too much negative self-talk. We've
killed the enthusiasm in the room.
No, no, no. I was just going to my, I was
just breathing out
for, I don't know, Brad.
I was looking at my list of,
I've already gone through it.
Stripping things away.
What is creativity, John?
Well, what do we mean? I use it all the
time. I used to call
myself a creative director.
For the longest time, I still call myself
a creative director.
I call myself a creative in many ways,
but what on earth am I meaning?
Well, the difference between a creative
director and a director is a certain
decrease in
responsibility and increase in salary.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Create, create. It's probably lighten.
Well, if--
There's probably some interesting
etymology into the word.
I'm sure there is. If you want to look at
what the word means in
terms of its application, right?
To be creative means to do something that
isn't intuitively obvious, I think.
So you're coming up with new paths, new
directions, new
interpretations of the things around you.
Yeah, I think that's a good
way to define it in some sense.
Branching out from established paths.
Possibly-- No, I think we're both very
spatial thinkers, which might be
confusing for some of
the people listening.
Possibly you're branching out, possibly
you're branching in.
Or crossing branches.
Yeah, you may be filling in a space where
there's a gap. You may be
reaching out in new directions.
Or you may be finding new connections
between areas that already exist.
And what is that space
we're branching out into?
It depends on who's hiring you, or which
project you're working on, or which opium
dream you're having when the salesman is
knocking on your door.
This is-- I'm getting
platonic thinking here. Are there--
Do--
Is there a space where thoughts exist?
Okay, that's too platonic for me. I am
just a shadow on the cave wall.
Yeah, yeah. I was going back to-- I think
we discussed something
similar in our first podcast.
But--
Have you ever read-- I ask you this
almost every podcast, hoping for a new
answer each time. Have you
ever read Robert Heinlein?
No, no, I'm sorry.
So Robert Heinlein wrote a great novel
called The Number of the Beast.
Spoiler alerts now
for a 70-year-old novel.
And you wonder why I haven't read it.
One of the things that is slowly
uncovered by the main cast of characters
is that every fictional world that they
love exists in reality
as part of a multiverse.
So they are themselves fictons, is the
natural corollary. If all of these people
exist in their world inside books,
probably they exist inside these other
worlds inside of books.
And he uses that as a way to tie together
all of the fiction he's ever written.
Yep.
And to bring in his favorite writers and
his friends from his long life and tie
them all together into a story.
Recently, fairly recently, within the
last 10 years or so, long after his death
in the 80s, it was found that he had
written two novels at the same time.
The Number of the Beast and a sister
novel that tells the same story.
What is it? The Flight of the Pancarer or
something like that. It's called.
I just finished reading it while
recovering from my latest injury.
And my gosh, he has the same characters
go through the same story up until they
start hopping the multiverse and then
they just make one different decision.
And so the second novel is the same story
but going off on a different branch.
Possibly tying into the same ending. I'm
not sure. But it's up
to the reader to decide.
That's always fine. I like when fiction
does things like that. I remember the
animated Spider-Man TV series.
Yeah.
It goes standard as most Marvel stories
do. They end up going into multiverse
down the road when they try and figure
out how to bring new versions of things.
But in one of them, Spider-Man went to
our reality and there's Stan Lee's on his
back and he's just going,
"So you're saying in your universe you
wrote me as this comic character?"
He's like, "Yeah, I did.
As a matter of fact, I did."
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, that was one of the animated
series. I think it was
actually one of the 60s. No idea.
No, it wouldn't have
been the one in the 60s.
I think it is. It might not have been.
With the really static animation.
Yeah, I think I genuinely
think it ended up crazy.
The famous Spidey.
Spidey. Spidey. Spidey. Spidey.
Yeah, I could be completely
misinterpreting. We're talking about how
bad perception can be.
This is me remembering.
It's definitely one of the
animated series at least.
While we're talking about how bad
perception can be, I've just got to say
something about illusion.
Because storytelling is all illusion. Our
sensory perception is all illusion. You
were asking earlier, is
there a place where ideas exist?
That's all illusion. We live in these
sacks of wet meat that are fed lies
constantly. Not deliberately.
But we perceive all kinds of sensory
information much more
than we can process.
So we have these mental shortcuts that
allow us to process them by making huge
assumptions, lying to ourselves.
If you want someone to fall into a story
of one sort as opposed to another, you
just set them up. You prime them to be
thinking one type of
thing as opposed to another.
So the loud bang can be a great relief or
it can be terrifying. The soft scratching
sound can be the monster under the bed or
the kitten trying to get into your lap.
Yeah, with that, I've noticed just in
myself, depending on factors unknown to
me, sensory inputs like a touch on my arm
can feel the most irritating thing in the
world or the best thing in the world.
And it's all down to factors which I'm
completely non-control of.
Yeah. And a good story takes control of
those things. So that when the touch on
your arm happens, the audience is
triggered the way you
want them to be triggered.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's, I imagine it must be great to
go and see an audience, watch a film that
you've made and watch them react.
It is.
To something that you did.
Yeah. That's, it's one of the best or
worst feelings in the world. I remember
the first time I had to happen was one of
the first short films I made was a 48
hour film project in 2014.
The first one I got
screened on the cinema at least.
Wow.
Because afterwards it got screened on the
cinema. Yeah. It was fun. We made it with
friends, but then we heard people
laughing at our jokes.
And it was like, cool. We didn't screw up
completely. People are enjoying this.
Oh, that's lovely.
That feeling of, there's not much other
art for, there are, there are other art
forms where you, I mean, I'm not picking
on you again, but performing music, you
kind of immediately there
see the reception of it.
Yeah. If you can interpret it
correctly, it's another thing.
Yeah.
I always have a hard time believing that
people are actually
applauding for what I've done.
My default is to think that they weren't
really listening very closely or they
wouldn't be applauding.
When I, I mentioned earlier in this
episode that I loved comic
strips when I was a little kid.
When I first went off to university, I
wanted to be involved in the newspaper
and I went and met with them and asked
them, you know, what do you need?
I can, I can write. I like sports. I'm
involved in athletics. I could write
about that. I'm involved in student.
What, what can I do for the newspaper?
And they're like, yeah, yeah, we got all
the writing we need. And somebody said,
well, we don't have a
comic strip anymore.
So I thanked them very much and came back
the next day with a bunch of comic strips
done and ended up having
some real success with it.
It got syndicated and was carried at
university newspapers across Canada.
And I had this great experience where I
went on a date with a young lady and we
went back to her dorm room to get her
shoes or something like that.
It was nothing illicit. And as we were
walking down the hallway of her dorm, her
neighbors had my comic strips on their
doors and it just felt so amazing.
Yeah. And I would stop looking at one of
them just thinking, how can this be? And
a young woman said,
oh, do you like that too?
And I said, sometimes. And then a whole
bunch of them started talking about the
comic strip and which
characters they liked.
And I just sat there thinking, I'm going
to start telling people that this is my
comic strip. I signed it with an
illegible signature.
So nobody knew. And I said, I'm going to
start telling people. And I was off at a
party that night and mentioned to some
folks that, oh, yeah, that's me.
That comic strip. And the room went quiet
and the guy closest to me said, you
should try making it funny.
Yeah. Yeah. That's that's one of the
hardest parts of creation is it's it's
you are opening yourself up
and that's especially some.
Okay. When we're talking about this
honesty in this place that you're tapping
into and if you're being honest and
you're communicating something very
personal, you're opening a door.
You're opening a gate right to your
heart. So it hurts even more of a narrow
flies in. And I think that's why so much
of us walk around with
walls up all the time.
You're here. Is because we're we're we
don't want to open ourselves up and
communicate. We're all
terrified of being hurt.
Those slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune that the comic strip Charlie
Brown or other peanuts had a great
version of that where one of the young
women who I think didn't stay around in
the comic strip after the 1950s.
One of the girls turns to Charlie Brown
and goes with their tongue sticking out.
And then the girls all walk away and
Charlie Brown is standing there with his
hand on his chest and he says, those
blares just go right into your heart.
Yeah. I remember that one. I used to have
a little comic book of a bunch of them.
That one actually stuck me. I remember
that. I can I can see the drawing now
with his hunched and folding. Yeah. Yeah.
Those were wonderfully powerful comic
strips. Schultz was just a genius.
That's something that you see in
children. They've not learned. They have
to have walls up yet and they can run
around and be open and honest completely.
And it's I don't know. It's there. And
then there's a magic to always being in
that state that that you lose as you grow
up and that complete openness and
creative honesty as well.
I was waiting. I'd have whole universes
going on while I was a kid just all the
time that I would always want to go back
and experience like how much could I. How
much was I actually visualizing because I
remember all being very very vivid like
an overlay over reality.
Right. That slowly over time disappeared.
That would be a great comic strip or
movie to show that. Yeah. There's been a
lot of stuff in the theaters lately about
childhood friends and imaginary friends
and things like that. But yeah. It'd be a
nice way to do it if you could come up
with the right way of showing that
overlay on reality. Yeah. There is.
There is before but I like that. There
is. I mean there's inside out. There's
some of some of there's some there's
literally some stories about that. Yeah.
There's a new one about imaginary friends
but there's two different films that are
about childhood imaginary friends coming
back. Yeah. There's that recent one.
It's called Slumberland or Nemo where it
basically said that the brilliant Windsor
McKay comic strip from the 1920s
Slumberland was probably actually set in
the 1990s and now here is the daughter of
the main character. Anyway spoiler sorry
great great movie.
Surprisingly great movie.
And okay I hear I did had I'll explore
this thought I had before because I
thought about that before
being in that open magical space.
But there you you pay attention to
reality a little less in that state. And
that's kind of what being an adult is
about. You have to pay attention to
everything else because it's up to you
now to look after everyone else.
And you've got to be switched on and
tuned into the physical the mundane that
you've got to perceive everything as best
as possible. Yeah. And survive it and
navigate in a way that allows you to
support others but maybe that's part of
what people are escaping from.
In delving so deeply into social media
and video games and all of the other
current distractions from reality that so
many young people live in right now.
Escapism yeah.
But not not escaping to a rich self
constructed or shared fantasy world that
you and your friends or your family or
you yourself have built up.
But into a world of quick reflexive
chemical rewards for quick decisions. So
the world of scrolling through tiktok.
No particular hatred against tiktok but
the world of scrolling through tiktok
until you find the video that catches
your eye or scrolling through Instagram
until you find the
image that catches your eye.
That's not the same kind of fantasy world
that little kids are in when they're
overlaying their imagination with the
real world and
creating a richer experience.
And even this idea of augmented reality
through special glasses
or glasses and headsets.
It isn't that kind of thing because it's
information that other people are
choosing to throw at you rather than
information that you are generating on
the fly and then preserving.
Yeah. Or you're curating.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It would be an
interesting thing to try to make a
product like an
Oculus something like that.
But where you generate the content and
you decide where it is and you share it
with those who are closest to not friends
in a fantasy world that's really just
using you for clicks but actual friends.
And if you could create a version of
Oculus that does that.
Yeah. I would love that. If you could get
to there that it could
just be as fluid as well.
You talk about calm technology and
technology that doesn't get in the way
and everything like that. The technology
that could do that very well
would be amazing. Wonderful.
That's one of the reasons I am a creative
is because that doesn't exist. So the way
I have to make the worlds I want to make
I have to make a film.
Nice.
That's what drew me into it from the get
go I guess is this fundamental feeling of
oh no it's disappearing it's going away
and it's childlike attempt.
Well not a childlike attempt but an
attempt to get that
childlike feeling back in many ways.
That's what I love. I love. I love work.
I love being around creatives the most.
Everyone can be creative but I love when
people are gathered around and aligned to
creating and everyone is opening up and
coming into that space because when
you've been in some of our writing
sessions before as well.
That's the things I love most. You're
sure humans get away and you try and
fight for your idea and there's all this
other things that could happen.
The whole act in itself of you're all
pulling this thread and this story out of
somewhere and you're trying to make it as
best it could be but it's just yeah it's
one of my favorite things because
everyone is opening
themselves up a little bit.
Trying to be as nice to
each other as possible.
While defending their ideas.
Whilst defending your ideas strongly and
letting them know why
their main idea was bad.
Yeah it's a beautiful environment that
kind of shared thing. It's like when
you're role playing.
A well run role playing campaign smooths
over all of the difficulties there
because there's a position of authority
and somebody else is making the decision
so you don't have to debate them.
You can debate what the party should do
next but you're not
going to debate reality.
Something I miss
about role playing games.
Early next week I'm going to have dinner
with one of my nephews. I've only seen
once in the last couple of decades and I
can't wait. He's a full grown adult.
In every way but I knew him when he was a
little baby and I knew him best when he
was a little kid and we used to go on
adventures into his imaginary world when
he was small and I was big.
And we would lose days wandering around
the world that he could
see and he could help me see.
But I never really saw it. I
could only see him seeing it.
And it was a wonderful
experience to do that.
I think about that all the time and him
all the time because it's so fundamental
to my own life that I
got to share that with him.
And I got to share that with other
nephews and a niece and I got to share
that with other people's kids. Most of
whom are now adults.
But I'm really looking forward to seeing
him. I don't know if he'll listen to this
podcast but I am tempted to ask him what
he does to experience that kind of joy
these days and whether he
remembers what he used to do.
Or if he does will he be honest to it? I
can imagine that being a thing of talking
to someone like "I don't
know what you're talking about."
He's an incredibly creative person. He
lives in the artistic side of it.
I'm not saying that specifically but
there are types who would...
Absolutely. So much so that it's a trope
in fiction about
real-life childhood experiences.
That great movie Hook
with Robin Williams.
I've been thinking about that a lot when
I've been talking about this.
It's a marvelous,
marvelous version of that.
But yeah, the dinner will be wonderful
either way because I miss him and I can't
wait to learn what's going on in his life
and see him as this adult that he is.
But I am interested to hear what he
remembers about the hours we spent, if he
remembers them and what they were to him
in his understanding of it now.
Yeah, there's... I've had random periods
of reflection every now and then.
But every now, I don't know what it is
about your brain but sometimes it will go
into a space that it hasn't been in
decades and you go "Oh, I forgot this was
a feeling. I forgot this
was a place of experience."
Just random memories will pop up.
Weird one, going in the back of our
garden and I wasn't allowed to but I
could climb over the wall of the garden
and it would be this
space in between two gardens.
So there's a wall between someone else's
garden and a wall between someone else's
garden and in between there's just this
space with trees and stuff like that.
I remember going into there and one day
finding some sort of tubing, some sort
of, I don't know, plumbing tubing or
vacuum tubing but it
was a pipe that long.
And then me and my other friend figured
out if you swing it round in the air it
makes a whining noise.
And the stories that we would make up
about the things you could conjure and
call just by doing that.
And yeah, I was wanting to just pop into
my head the other day and I was like "I
forgot that whole feeling."
Yeah, and then as a creative you want to
be able to tap into things
like that and try to communicate.
Not just the facts of the matter. Try to
communicate what that feels like. That's
what a lot of art is about. You're not
trying to communicate the fact of the
matter, you're trying to
communicate the feeling.
Yeah, because that's what we all have in
common if we're lucky.
Everyone who's lucky has some version of
that living in their
memory and their heart.
Yeah, no, that's wonderful. I saw the
musical come from away at His Majesty's
Theatre here in Aberdeen on September
11th, the anniversary of
the events depicted there.
And I went into it after years of trying
to avoid seeing the play or read too much
about it. I just didn't want to know
because I was involved.
I was in a small town in Newfoundland
when all that happened and I'm one of the
people who dealt with things.
In a very small way I played a very small
part in this huge
international operation.
I went to the show quite looking forward
to it and in the first few minutes was
weeping, sitting in my chair in the
theatre, just weeping.
Because I was back there feeling the
feelings of that first night.
Actually what hit me first was the
feelings of that day when it happened and
we saw it happening.
They depicted that better than anything
else I've seen about it.
But then showing the people
reacting to their situation.
For those of you thinking about seeing
the show, I spent a lot of time laughing
out loud and cheering.
It's a very, very good show and it's very
well done. It's very uplifting.
But in order to become uplifting, they
have to gather the audience together
emotionally and give them
something to move up from.
And that show does it so well. A number
of different characters experiencing a
number of different things all experience
the same moment of horror
that happened on September 11.
This particular moment of horror in
September 11, there have been other
moments of horror on that same day for
people from other countries and cultures.
And I don't mean to disrespect them by
talking about what happened
in New York and Washington.
My point is, when they did the
transformation scenes, the emotional
switches scenes on the stage, I had that
experience you were just talking about.
I was back in a space emotionally that I
had forgotten still exists.
I had an intellectual memory of the rooms
I was in and the smells of them and the
feeling of the people and the sounds, the
incredible richness of sound
and horrible richness of sound.
I had some intellectual memories of all
of those things, but the storytelling on
stage brought me back there viscerally.
And I had no choice but to weep. I was
weeping before I knew it.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's the game of it. And that's
ultimately the best advice
that we can give to people.
What are you communicating? A lot of us,
I used to get caught up in that.
I want to be a filmmaker because
initially I just
thought they're cool and fun.
But then it took me a while to figure out
that you've got to do it
to communicate something.
And if you don't know what that is, if
you can't feel it yourself, because you
need to feel it yourself
to be able to pull from it.
So you need to conjure it up and call it
again in different ways to try and figure
out what it is and use all the tools
available to you to try and whatever your
medium is to try and communicate that.
But you got to start there. You got to
dig deep and figure out what you're going to communicate.
And I feel for some people starting out
because a lot of the time, if you're
younger, other than childhood, some of
the biggest things in your
life haven't happened yet.
You haven't had the biggest tragedy of
your life yet. You haven't had these
highlights, well not highlights, but
these massively shining moments of your
life which are going to overwrite the
majority in terms of your life.
Visceral experience. Most days will be
forgettable, but the days that won't be
forgettable are ones that
you probably haven't had yet.
But there is still going to be some. And
those are the places to draw from most.
It's your job to figure out what those
are and truly feel them and be true to
them and communicate
them through your craft.
Get better at your craft, work on it,
iterate, show it to other people, take on
feedback, work at it, get better at it,
but you got to stick to the heart of it,
which is communicating those experiences.
You say take that feedback on board.
There are two kinds of feedback you
shouldn't take on board. Otherwise listen
to everything from everyone.
But if anybody tells you that your work
is so bad you should never do it again,
ignore them. And if anyone tells you that
your work is so good you don't need to
ever change it, don't listen to them.
But otherwise get all the feedback you
can and listen to everybody.
And accept that John has just
communicated many of them. I communicated
less of them. Those moments where that
arrow flies straight into your heart,
they're going to happen.
Just take note that when it happens you
go, ah, there it is. That's what Jamie
was talking about. It's a sharp little
moment to ignore and keep pressing on.
Yeah, exactly. That arrow will stay
there. And if you decide you can't do
anything because you've been wounded,
then you won't do anything ever.
And the good news is that you can reach
over and tweak that arrow anytime you
need to be reminded of your passions and
things you care about.
The bad news is that
other people can tweak it too.
Yes, yes. Don't let it show that it's
there. When someone nudges into it and
then those types of people that see, oh,
that hurt you. And then
they'll tug at it and press it.
That's one of our shared lies. We all
pretend that we don't have that so that
we can all function.
And the people who are willing to
acknowledge that you have it come in two
sorts. The ones who are
going to help you protect you.
And the ones who, as you were just
saying, are going to take
advantage of it to manipulate you.
It would be nice if they could be weeded
out as children and corrected in their
behaviour. But unfortunately
they exist in large number.
Yes. So be wary as you walk through this
journey of creativity in life.
Find the good ones around you. The ones
who make you strive to be better. Always
aim high. Compare yourself against the
very best as well because it
will make you keep growing.
I find that to be a great tool. Don't
just look at everyone else around you
because you'll all
plateau, aim high, very high.
Don't just look at people in current
time, look at current space, look at
people in time. There have been people
who echo throughout history, creatives,
and stand in awe of their work and aim
for the divine as they did.
Yeah. 100%, Jamie. If you're doing comedy
and you haven't watched Chaplin, then
you're not doing comedy.
If you're doing tragedy and you haven't
watched Kurosawa, then
you're not doing tragedy.
100%. Okay guys, we're going to finish it
up there. I think there's some practical
little things for you. But as always, if
you listened this far,
thank you very, very much.
We hope, hope very much so that you got
something useful out of this
and we'll see you next time.
Take care everybody. Bye-bye.
Production from the Robert Gordon
University School of Computing.
Today's episode was brought to you by the
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