Glorious Failures

"You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished."
- Neil Gaiman
As found here.

What wonderful advice that is.

In Adaptations someone gave a presentation today where she was comparing a draft of a script from October 2005 with the shooting script which was from November 2008. I think I got those dates right. Either way, the point is early draft vs late draft. The early draft was a mess. It was something like 30 pages longer, and it had a slew of sections that not only didn't appear at all, but couldn't possibly have appeared. They didn't make sense, they didn't forward the story, they were often kind of half baked. Later during the discussion Debbie said, "Be unafraid." Make a mess, and then go back and clean it up later. Just don't be afraid to experiment. You can't really know something won't work until you try it.

After that I had Line Producing where we recently got our first assignments back. It was mark up the script, do the breakdown sheets for each scene, and figure out the schedule. I got a B largely because there were a couple of moments that Charles looked at as stunts and I had no accounting for stunts in either the breakdown or the schedule. My lesson learned from the assignment though is not so much "tripping on the stairs counts as a stunt" as it is "you can't produce a film in a vacuum" I was talking to Aaron, whose script it is, about his vision for that sequence after getting the assignment back, and discovered from the way he talked about it that yes, it would need to be a stunt. I'm too used to shooting stuff myself so I scheduled it for how it played out in my head. But how it plays in my head isn't relevant. Nor is how it plays in Charles's head to be honest. How it plays in Aaron's head is the only play that matters. But I can't figure out how to produce what is in Aaron's head without actually talking to Aaron.