isheyelens

It’s been a short week, with Holi on Monday, and Good Friday on, well, Friday. I’ve been trying to write a weeknote for the last two weeks and haven’t made any progress. Other than typing out so this week was… But I really wanted to keep a record of how we made Project Paper Heist. Let’s wind the clock back a little to give some context. A friend of ours has been writing a script for a little over two years. When we first heard him tell the story, Vaidehi was immediately excited and wanted to be involved. We pushed

2024-03-30

Learning Regular Expressions to Streamline Daily Writing Exercises

One of the key things about learning a craft and getting better at it is practice. Practice is how you learn to use the tools you have and how you find your own voice with them. It’s why the Leica Year or one camera/one lens are interesting exercises for photographers. But what about writing? Most of the advice for writing that I received was “write, write, write!” Which is well and good, but what do I write about? Fortunately, other people have had also thought about this problem and worked out solutions. I learnt about CM Mayo’s daily writing exercises

2023-10-05

Build It and They Won’t Come Unless You’ve Marketed It

It’s a fallacy that I see played out over and over again. I’ve fallen for the seductive charms of “if you build it, they will come”1 more times than I care to admit. This is something that I should know intuitively by now. I’ve been that nerd saying that Apple is only popular because they have great marketing. But now that I regularly use Apple products, there’s a lot of functionality there that makes my life easier day to day. Besides, I’ve learned this during my MBA, and also during all the time that I’ve been working. You can have

2022-09-19

Photographs, Essays, and Fear

I think that I want to talk about fear today. I’ve been trying to write more, and share photographs, and every time I do, I feel a twinge of terror that whatever I’m going to write1 is terrible. I think that what I’m writing right now is terrible. My heart rate is through the roof, and I try to find any and all reasons to not write. "My fingers hurt." "My keyboard doesn’t work very well." "I have no idea what to write." "I’m a slow typist." And on and on. I feel this all the time. And it’s a

2021-12-15

CV, STARs, and (Personal) Sales Pitches

It seems to be job hunting season for my friends and family. And I’ve been helping them write and polish their resumes and curriculum vitae (CV). I often find myself repeating the same information – how to approach a job search, how to write a cover letter and a resume so that it helps you find the job, how to keep a log of your accomplishments at your job – so I wrote up a few pointers that I send along and refer to as I walk people through the job search process. It is a process. And each step

2021-11-30

What’s in a Name

"What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet;" William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet I’m sure that Juliet’s rose didn’t have to deal with government documents and social media services. 1 I want to say that I’ve been thinking a lot about names lately, but the truth is that it’s been on my mind for years. Ever since some overzealous government official decided that I had to have a middle name on my passport, ignoring the fact that my birth certificate doesn’t have one. How much grief has that caused me?

2021-09-22

Commemorative Coinage

Ever since demonetisation and the introduction of new notes in India, I’ve been thinking about how that was a missed opportunity to celebrate the country. Sure, the new notes do hype our space programme, and different monuments, but it’s Mahatma Gandhi on every note. That’s to be expected – the notes are part of the Mahatma Gandhi series1. What I’ve been thinking about was a new series that resembles the commemorative quarters programme in the US. For about a decade, the US Mint released 4 or 5 special edition ¢25 coins that celebrated a state each. Starting in 2022, the

2021-09-13

A Jigsaw Puzzle: Distribution Options for Indie Films

As the pandemic stretches on, I’ve noticed friends and family seek out lighter fare on TV and streaming platforms. Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and the like.1 They’re bouncing off prestige2 shows faster than ever. No one wants to see hard narratives. Life is hard enough, and what people are looking for is escapism. I briefly mentioned in a previous post that every film faced distribution challenges during the pandemic. Everyone is trying to figure out how to make movies during the lockdown, and then, sell the movies to make enough money so that you can make the next

2021-08-08

Stringing the Necklace: What I Learned at Marche du Film 2021

I attended Marche du Film virtually for the second time. For all the discussion about how it would be so much nicer if the festival was 100% in person, I was struck by the thought that I wouldn’t have been able to attend the market if it was. It’s a very expensive conference in France and UAKC is currently entirely self-funded. Without a virtual option, I wouldn’t have been able to meet so many wonderful people from around the world and learn from them. So, what did I learn? The most important thing that I took away is to take

2021-08-03

All Systems Go

For the most part, I’ve got by so far is having systems. Systems for everything. It can get annoying for the people around me – not everyone thinks in systems. I like systems – we had a lot of them in school and I’ve tried to keep them around as I’ve grown older. They really helped me stay functional before I was diagnosed with ADHD. So let’s talk about some of them. Since I wrote about hoarding information, that sounds like a good place to start. Information Management In my previous post, I mentioned that I didn’t really have a

2021-06-27

The Collectors Fallacy: How I Hoard Shit And Don’t Produce

I feel overwhelmed all the time. I know that a lot of people feel like that these days, so at least I’m not alone in this. I try to do a lot with UA Kathachitra and my personal life. And sometimes, I can fall into what some in the productivity porn1 circles call “the collector’s fallacy”. I came across this way back in 2015 (I think) on zettelkasten.de. Now, I know Zettelkasten are the rage these days. There’s Roam Research, Obsidian, Tinderbox, Devonthink, Drafts, Taio…to name just a few apps that I’ve seen. Not to mention Emacs, Orgmode, and all

2021-06-21

Travel, Cash, and Potatoes: Lessons Learned on My First Film

Film production was an expensive and complicated thing when there isn’t a pandemic. Now that there is, the necessity of cast and crew safety, combined with the reality of releasing a movie without a theatrical run complicates production even further. Large studios have experimented with different release strategies from “in theatres only” for Tenet, ticketed within a paid subscription service for Mulan, and direct to streaming on their own paid subscription service platform, HBO Max, for no extra charge for everything from Warner Bros.

2021-06-13

isheyelens

Weeknotes #001, Week 13, 2024

Learning Regular Expressions to Streamline Daily Writing Exercises