isheyelens

Tag: learn in public

  • Photographs, Essays, and Fear

    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 problem because I want to write. I want to write a lot. I want to write essays. I want to tell stories. I want to make movies. But this fear – of speaking up, of being heard, of failing, – just won’t go away. And in the end, I don’t know if it matters.

    It’s the fear that keeps me collecting. Keeps me from focusing long enough to put down what I want to say2.

    None of this is good when I’m trying to write posts here, write short stories, or write accompanying blurbs with photos. Not to mention helping Vaidehi with her writing and marketing, and working on building a presence for UAKC. It’s all a lot.

    Anyway. I’m scared every time I sit down to write something. And I think that the only way to make the fear go away is just to do it more.

    1. I’m trying to write something to go along with every photo that I put out, and have a photo accompany every piece of writing.  ↩

    2. Or dictate. I’ve been practicing dictation with the new iOS 15 update. It’s weird to hear myself speak out loud, but it’s getting better. The worst part seems to be holding a train of thought without giving into the urge to correct errors.  ↩

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

    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 a step back from the films that we’ve made. At a session on short films, the speaker put it really well. She asked us to think of a film as an individual pearl on a necklace. The necklace represents a career. Each film, each project, will create that necklace, but no single one is going to dominate the whole necklace.1 You should have goals for what you want the film to achieve, and what you, personally, want to achieve. Make plans A, B, and C for them,2 and follow the plan. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of having brought a film to life, and to show that to the world. But it’s all too easy to get disheartened if the response isn’t thunderous.

    It was nice to see people acknowledge something that I’ve felt while we’ve been figuring out a festival and release strategy for Josef – Born in Grace and The Salon – submitting films to a festival can become addictive. It’s far too easy to add a bunch of festivals to the cart on FilmFreeway and throw it all on the credit card. This is where plans and goals come in very handy.

    I did see some opportunities to teach other filmmakers what we’ve learned over the last few years with UAKC. Things like how to create a website for a film, how to create a press kit and marketing material for a film, and how to apply to festivals. We’ve been hacking away at this and have been slowly figuring out that part of the process. I can only imagine how many people get disheartened once they’ve made a film and then don’t know what to do next.3 Watching sessions where everyone was there to share what they knew, and learn from one another was really invigorating!

    It was also really nice to see that a lot of the people who spoke on stage were running companies that were not as large as I expected. Yes, there were a few there whose company libraries were hundreds of films deep, but there were many, many others that were small just like ours. What united everyone was a love for cinema and telling stories.

    At the end of Marche, I felt excited. The road ahead looks incredibly hard, but there are a lot of other people on it and I can’t want to move ahead on it along with them.

    1. Well, it shouldn’t anyway. Not in your own mind. ↩

    2. This really appeals to my inner list-maker. ↩

    3. I still haven’t figured out how to get a film into theatres. One of the few times we spoke to someone about distribution, it left me absolutely broken because they were incredibly dismissive of what we made because it didn’t have a bankable star on the billing. I remember wanting to quit then.  ↩

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

    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 the wonderful tinkering that accompanies them2. All of them promise that you will be able to produce things faster and better. That you will become a creator.

    There’s just one problem: you still need to do the work. And be confident in the work that you are doing. Now, I have an ADHD fuelled brain that is sure that it will remember everything 3 combined with some perfectionist tendencies. So I want to hoard ALL THE INFORMATION.

    Let’s get a glimpse into how my collection (read: hoarding) problem works. It looks like this:

    • Hundreds of open tabs in multiple browsers4 (I’ve maxed out my phone’s maximum allowed on more than one occasion),
    • Nearly 4000 bookmarks in Raindrop.io (mostly unread, or read and unprocessed),
    • My RSS reader (The Old Reader & Reeder 4) regularly acting as a holding space for things I want to read,
    • Outside of Raindrop and Reeders, in several other places, I have saved to read/listen/watch:
      • tweets and twitter threads,
      • reddit post and comments,
      • YouTube videos, and
      • podcasts, and
    • A constantly growing backlog of media to explore between all the streaming services.

    You remember the list of apps I threw up before? I try to test ALL THE APPS. This drives a constant search for the next shiny object that will help me DO SOMETHING with all this input5. I’m pretty sure that I’ve paid a lot of money for apps and services for notetaking and productivity that I have never used.

    Really though, all of – the hoarding of information nuggets, the switching of apps, the quest for becoming more efficient – it’s procrastination. Procrastination driven by fear. Fear of forgetting. Fear of not knowing. Fear of getting it wrong when the work is out there. Fear of… who knows?

    The first thing that Christian and Sascha write is “Collectors don’t make progress.” That hit me hard. It hit me hard when I first read it, and it hits me hard today, when I’m writing it here. There are times when I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress on turning information into something that I can use for my entire life.

    Over the last few months, as Vaidehi and I have been finding better ways to work. We’ve been forced to. So, it’s time to simplify and let a lot of things go. I promise you, this isn’t because I’ve read Cal Newport’s new book (I haven’t, and I’m not adding it to the pile).

    But how do I simplify? And how did I cope this long? That’s for another post.

    1. Productivity porn (or food porn, home improvement porn, or travel porn) is like regular porn. You watch someone else do things instead of doing it yourself. I look at how other people do things efficiently and think about how to apply those tactics to my own life. But I don’t actually do that – because that is hard. It’s also hard to figure out if something is useful for me if I haven’t settled into a system. Spoiler: I never do. So it’s a hamster wheel of the next system, the next app, the new hotness. It’s exhausting. ↩

    2. The two reasons I haven’t fallen down the Emacs rabbit hole is that it isn’t available on iOS and it’s not good at working collaboratively. ↩

    3. Spoiler: it doesn’t. ↩

    4. I’m ashamed to say that there was a time when I lost my shit on a poor QA tester who borrowed my phone to test a webapp our company was working on. He cleared the cache as part of his process, and I went nuclear because I had lost a few hundred open tabs. The sad part is that I could reopen most of them from memory… ↩

    5. I vaguely considered writing tech reviews, but honestly, I don’t have the money, nor the energy to keep up with all the services that I want to explore. And if I did explore them, I would be dropping the ball on my life, and the company that we’re trying to build.zettelkastenzettelkasten method ↩