By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail – Benjamin Franklin

Since I started making videos and films about 16 years about, I have definitely learned there are a few keys areas that I need to execute well in order to accomplish the result I want:

INSPIRATION

It doesn’t always come naturally. It does require effort to find inspiration, in some ways it’s about finding your happy place. I don’t subscribe to the theory that you wait to be inspired to do things. In this industry you either can produce the goods or you can’t. No one is going to care that whether you are inspired or not.

That being said it is important to stay on top of ideas and always have a few ideas brewing in your mind. For the Hillsong conference 2010 promo I got the idea for transitions between the pictures and preachers from seeing the slide mechanism of a slide projector, the way it flicks to white for a few milliseconds out of focus before it brings in the next slide. Of course the way my slides move through isn’t exactly what a slide projector does, but that’s where I got the inspiration from!

What I get inspired by varies, and it can from very different places. I am usually inspired by visually interesting concepts and shapes and how light bend through different materials. Or robots! I looove robots

IDEAS ARE FOR FREE

When I wrote my Easter film for 2009 I wrote down about 20 ideas before i finally settled for the one i decide to make my film about. My film ideas ranged from the absurd (Jesus anime cartoon) to the very sweet (story about children). Not all of them were good, but they at least I know i had the ideas ready to go.

In the end it was the scene “If only one thing didn’t happen” from Benjamin button (a movie by david fincher) that helped me settle on my idea.

When I watched this scene I decided to port across the concept that perhaps God uses all these little incidents to bring you to him, and that it is so intricate that every moment is orchestrated to bring you closer to Him. Hence why I wrote the movie “The Orchestration of Salvation”:

Write down as many ideas as you can, it doesn’t cost you anything! Don’t worry if people say they are dumb. By gathering inspiration and ideas, you’re subconsciously building you’re own style of what you like and subsequently what kind of work you will eventually BE LIKE! So make sure you find a journal or an ipad and jot every single idea you have. Whatever you do, don’t judge them, just write them down, cause you never know when that idea will grow up to be a big ol film like “the matrix” and then you can finally buy that island you always wanted

PART 2 COMING SOON!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 8:13 am and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.