SCREEN KISS

You know they're just actors. It's fiction, after all. They're not really in love. Nonetheless, many, many people closely guard memories of their favorite screen kisses, proxies for embraces they wish were their own.

Not you? Perhaps you're more of the heroic type. Perhaps you imagine yourself clipping the red wire four seconds before detonation. No doubt the batteries in your walkie-talkie are long since dead, and you're unable to get help from the demolition experts back at HQ.

Not quite right? Did you see yourself as the girl with the winning piano performance in front of a hostile audience? Did you see your teenage nemesis grudgingly stand with respect when you took your bow?

Fiction gives us raw material for vital thought experiments, while simultaneously presenting us with a forked decision tree. The fictional circumstances into which we project ourselves offer distraction and respite from day to day realities. That means they can either become permanent blindfolds as we're never going to find ourselves with orchestral scores rising behind our actions, or they can show us constructive alternatives to the lives we're already leading. How we imagine ourselves will always be the first step in creating selves capable of living lives we value.

Not every thought experiment needs to be a positive, constructive one. The safety of fictional experimentation can serve as safety valves so that we don't traffic with dangerous trade. Simultaneously, it is precisely because of fictional invention and experimentation we may discover ways to remake our immediate present and long term futures.

The the rain falling around our leads is rarely cold in a Hollywood screen kiss, just as the grime covering the police officer's face when he snips the bomb wire always looks stylishly rogue. It's not necessary to aspire to last minute rescues or endless romantic clinches, but as a viewer you still have a choice. You can let these images bounce off your retinas, eternally imprinted as lives you will never lead, or you can choose to transform them into metaphors, by which they may come to influence some momentary, vital moment when your own life requires depth of feeling or decisive action. And if there's one thing you know, everyone in the entire world will be called upon at one time or another to make a vital decision or clarify a deep feeling.

Here's looking at you, Kid.

-MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

PULSE

In your sharpest suit, or that fabulous dress you never get to wear, you're coming down the elevator. It's nighttime, and you never even saw this event on your own horizon, popping up as it did at the last minute. This thing you're going to, this hard-to-believe-you're-even-here moment, suddenly puts you in orbits with people and experiential opportunity that you couldn't possibly have predicted. Yet here you are, and what's more, you're ready for it. How you carry yourself tonight will determine how tomorrow proceeds.

The elevator slows. The door chime chides you to let go of the breath you didn't realize you were holding. You listen closely, and hear in your ears…

…your pulse: thumping as make your way down the gravel covered highway shoulder, headed for the green fluorescent glow of the truck stop. That stupid car: you've been trying to ditch it all summer. Here it is a chilly, late October at two in the morning, and the smoke seeping from your hood like fumes from the nostrils of a fat and lazy dragon remind you how much you've got to make a change. You knew you shouldn't have left so late in the first place, but that's totally besides the point of still having that stupid hatchback at all. Of course, how can you possibly replace the car with that dead end job of yours? How are you going to get out from under when can barely find the time to get your day job done in the first place? You can't leave--you need the work--but you can hardly get something new started while doing your day job.

But first, you have to walk another mile in the thin Autumn air, with the grim hope there's more than just a pimply adolescent behind the register, hope you can solve this mess before the sun starts to creep up the sky. It's hard to know if it's your walk or the furnace in your chest that has your…

…pulse racing. This is the moment, the one you told yourself you were trying to make happen. Months of planning, of meetings, of negotiations behind the scenes, and now they want to hear about your development idea. Striking a balance between cool, steely confidence and strong, muscular command turns your skin to aluminum, sets your finger tips to painful tingling, dries out your eyes before you realize you haven't blinked in a full minute. This is the chance of a lifetime, the moment you told yourself you wanted, but success in the next few minutes will mean nothing but hard, high pressure work. Of course, failure in the next few minutes will mean a return to everything you tried to escape, what came before, what was unambitious, neutral, ordinary. Success promises the toughest opportunity. Failure promises everything you already know. In your ears you hear your own…

…pulse.

It's that part of your life that tells you you're alive in the first place. It's the thrumming engine of something you're trying to build, the thumping drum of romantic embraces, the defining sound of the future imploring your to lean forward, lean in to your life, try, try, try.

Your pulse is the reassuring sound of your own engagement. It's the journey, not the destination, although it sometimes calls attention to itself at the moment of truth. It's the blood of invention, the reminder of life, the tap, tap, tap of water wearing away hard stone.

It reminds you that what you're experiencing right now is real. Some people lose the ability to feel it any more, to hear it, even to listen for it.

Don't.

--MS

PS -- Yes, yes, here's where the good people of 1AU ask our dear readers to share what you've read with friends and colleagues. And here's the place where you think, "Oh, sure, one more imposition of my precious time." Well, we're asking. It's something we value above rubies, above gold: if you like an idea enough to give it a moment's thought, then consider giving it a measure of freedom. When you share an idea with another person, you release an idea to grow freely in the world. Like what you see? Set it free.

THE SHOW

If you do creative work of any kind, you've approached the moment of truth many times.

Performance day. Delivery. Showtime.

Months of work across multiple departments compress into a single shiny point, a captured spark inside a gleaming stone.

It's always the same, and it's always different. By the time something is finally ready to leave the workbench, creators knows every single pixel, every sound, every explanation and justification and reason and inspiration behind every molecular detail in what's about to be revealed. On small projects the coalesced energy presses gently, urging enthusiasm. But on big projects, the potential energy grows exponentially. The coming kinetic release threatens to break on the shore of the event like a tidal wave, like the San Andreas fault growling to tip Los Angeles into the hungry sea.

Oh, Sweet Experience! There's no better teacher for managing the rolling deck of the boat than having brought many, many of them in to shore before. But that doesn't mitigate the buzz. And make no mistake: there's always a buzz.

Everything can go wrong. It's vastly challenging to predict every single eventuality you're likely to encounter on the day of a big show. No matter how much you like to think you leave nothing to chance, variables have a way of creeping in. Generally big performances do not happen in locations of your own choosing, or your own control. That's the biggest source of unexpected drama. You're also likely showing your work, whatever format it may be, to people who are not specialists in your field. You're not showing to other painters, nor dancers, nor even caring school guidance counselors who will clap enthusiastically for every single kid who gets up at the spring talent show to belt out a song. In the real world, your audiences demand something that wows 'em, that moves 'em, that makes 'em think their money was worth spending with you. But caution: if you're thinking you might get away with a Music Man moment, think again. You're not going to engender warmth simply because your clients will see themselves immediately reflected in their so-very-wise commissions. You're going to need much more than that, and flim-flam gets you nowhere. You have to deliver the goods, and you know it.

The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz once said, "If I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don't practice for three days, the world knows it." I've always regarded this as a cautionary tale from a performance master. Coasting on talent and experience is never enough. Preparation and practice makes all the difference in the world, and there's no getting around it. And if…IF…you should be so lucky as to have generated a good idea to work with along the way, well, that never hurts either.

Assuming you're serious about your craft, there always comes a day when what you're working on needs to get seen. Whether you've been commissioned by a big corporate client or you're working on your magnum opus of a novel, there always comes a time. Practice and preparation will get you far; they're essential, and deadly serious. Yet real life is not a practice run. Like Han Solo said, "Going against the living? That's something else." Expect to be scrutinized, expect to be cross examined, expect to be dissected in a million different ways. You may have been working on this thing, whatever it is, for months, but to your audience, it only lives for the few minutes they get to experience it, and they don't really care about how hard it was to create.

Everything can go wrong, perhaps. But everything can go right, too. Walk carefully but confidently. Answer questions, but don't defend positions. Own your creations, but be generous is sharing them. Because if you've been honest about the work all along, and it really is something of value, then your big performance--and that's what it always is: a performance--will be the vehicle that helps convey your vision to eyes that do not know what to expect. It's through those eyes that you have a chance to reach someone else meaningfully.

That's why this moment matters, because, as you know, the eyes are the gateway to the soul.

--MS

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Try Poetry

Sometimes things that look easily categorized actually belong under their own heading. For example, does anybody really regard the millions of jangly ditties beeping out of endless cell phones as music? The fact that ringtones can be notated using the same graphical language as songs, symphonies, and spirituals does not make them categorical kin. They may both be "musical", but the description of something is not the same as a thing's actual identity. How we categorize things helps us keep them organized in terms of their value, but categories themselves do not confer value.

Language is like this. While just about everyone can dash off a grocery list--or at least dictate it into their smartphone app-- it's probably fair to say that mustard, pretzels, and laundry detergent hardly constitute award-winning prose. (I'm guessing there's a small portion of our readership who recall the famous scene in Norton Juster's classic "The Phantom Tollbooth". I'm talking about the time when court ministers to King Azaz the Unabridged spout the names of favorite foods in the town square, followed immediately by bountiful platters of the same.) Yet this very same language, prosaic nouns and verbs arranged with precision, becomes the tangible flesh and bone of literature.

Grocery lists have their place; they help you remember what to buy. I don't need extensive description, delicate metaphor, or surprising characterization to remind me to pull a quart of milk off the shelf. But when I'm making a movie, mixing a soundtrack, taking photographs, or leading a rehearsal for a live event, it's not enough just to stick together a string of words, sounds, or pictures. No matter the medium, the challenge is always the same. Of all the many choices possible, even if those choices are unattainable dreams, the job always comes down to synchronizing vital choices into larger context. That arrangement of options, that selection process demarcates the intangible boundary between poetry an an ordinary jumble of words on the page.

This process takes moxie and a surprising amount of energy. In fact, sometimes this process takes nerves of steel. Most creative acts have finite production clocks. No matter how self-indulgent an artist or creator of any other type, one thing's for certain: life runs out. On a more down-to-Earth, day-to-day level, schedules and budgets also run out. When creating something, the pressure to complete the job often acts like it's own gravitational field. Complaining about gravity doesn't make it any easier to leap tall buildings just as wishing for clarity and artistic inspiration doesn't make delivery schedules any less agreeable.

In a more literal sense, poetry as a construction of language often has a tough time coexisting amid the ordinary thrum of grocery lists and e-mails to your child's guidance counselor. With its intended precision, poetry functions differently, communicates more precisely, strikes the ear more powerfully than the many conversations and advertisements and newscasts and tennis lesson schedules we more regularly consume. No matter how much we say we're interested, sometimes the saturated clarity of a poem is more intense than we're prepared to experience. Imagine if everyone you met-- lover, friend, acquaintance, and stranger-- came up and gave you a hug. Sometimes Mcluhan's medium for conveying a message matters a lot.

The challenge remains the same, no matter the medium. Music, movies, poetry, cooking: adequacy will always be enough to get by, but excellence demands something more. Excellence demands critical decisions delivered without infinite amounts of time.

Perhaps we should practice more. Perhaps part of the process is making sure that we give ourselves license regularly to reflect on intentional aesthetic thoughts. We should multitask less and listen to music more, without doing three other things at the same time.

Now here's a bizarre, but essential inversion. Remember my charge at the top that cell phone ring tones were not music, that just because they could be reduced to musical notation did not mean they were equivalent? It was a trap, dear reader: a trap to make a point. While I don't regard cell phone ringtones as music, per se, I do understand that quality is an attribute that can appear anywhere, in anything. Quality is the process of reaching for apotheosis, never actually arriving, of course, but reaching, reaching, reaching nonetheless. Whether we prefer one type of craft over another is not precisely the debate here. I find most ringtones to be little more than sonic indicators telling me that one person wants to speak with another. But even for the decidedly disposable craft of ringtones, I suppose I must also grudgingly acknowledge that there's such a thing as better or worse examples of the craft. Ultimately that's what may best define the essence of a poetic experience. If good words in intelligible order communicate, perfect words in sublime order also communicate. That they say more than the value of the literal words themselves is the reason they matter. Acts of creation lift the spirit, and the best acts make spirits soar. But even disposable acts, intentionally selected, can get you to answer the phone.

--MS

PS -- To our regular readers, please take 20 seconds (or thereabouts) and retweet, cross post, or otherwise pass the link for this blog and it's 1AU Global Media home onto your readers and friends! Call it karma, call it kismet: we'll just call it cool! Cool?

THE TROUBLE WITH LOOKING BEHIND-THE-SCENES

Back in the 1950s, Superman leaped tall buildings in…a theatrical harness with a couple of stage hands pulling rope through a block and tackle off set. But what did we see?

"Truth, justice, and the American way!"

Superman flew. He had to: people watching television decades ago saw it with their own eyes.

But that's television; we all know it's just make-believe, even if we tune in to lose ourselves intentionally in the story. Movies are a whole lot more immersive, just by means of working within more expansive boundaries and defining different expectations. But things are changing all over the land of make-believe, from the Province of Television to the Domain of Movies. None of our electronic fictions are precisely what they once were, and it isn't just because computer generated effects have replaced ropes and harnesses for our heroes.

Movies still command a certain measure of cultural attention, but not like they did as recently as twenty years ago. Arena- filling rock and roll bands have taken on profoundly different roles in the culture, too, as have books and other cultural events to a lesser degree. Even television no longer acts as the soothing zone of cerebral down-shifting that it used to be. Twenty years ago NBC's "must-see-TV" line-up held much of the country in thrall, provoking Friday morning office conversations that must have sapped a measurable portion of the nation's productivity.

The change came slowly, methodically, creeping in on catspaws. An easy cause for the change, obviously, was the advent of millions of new web-based ways for people to spend their time, distracting them from large, more widely shared events. The web and its handheld, wireless offspring further fragmented attention. But I believe one of the greatest factors in a new cultural ennui is the corollary to infinite choice. Infinite choice demands an inevitable qualitative discount on well made work just to keep the endless pipes full. As a result, theatrical curtains that used to hide how everything in the world was made have suddenly parted.

Typically we enter into a partnership with performing arts, or any work of art, for that matter. Even if a rock star makes it look like they're just wildly gyrating, the reality is always so much more prosaic: hours of rehearsal, endless practice all alone to perfect complex riffs, preproduction planning, and on and on and on. The partnership with an audience is about suspension of disbelief. We dream about our media idols because the illusion of so much charisma and power and performance excellence is one of ease and effortlessness. We want our magicians to levitate, even as we know that gravity never takes a holiday. We want what they seem to have.

Ever watch a cooking show? Millions do. Cooking shows teach you everything, even if you never intend to cook what they're showing. Most people never try the stuff being made in state-of-the-art studio kitchens. But expectations rise by watching these things, nonetheless, and with those expectations puffing up like soufflés, so do the minimum requirements for general satisfaction. Is this bad? Probably not. An educated public, no matter what the subject, is a better social body. But when everything is ordinary, it's harder to hold an audience's attention.

Lower production costs and an effectively infinite number of media outlets means that humanity's innate curiosity can now be effectively sated for any subject at all. Behind-the-scenes programs, blogs, podcasts, photo galleries, magazine articles, and more can teach you the secrets of just about any subject or endeavor you may want to know. Curious about how to play a diminished C chord on a guitar? Check. Want to know about the manufacturing process of fast food french fries? Yep: that's available too.

It's a funny thing. I like having access to all sorts of information about how the world works. I like knowing how papayas grow just like I also want to be able to look up how to properly place a comma in a sentence.

But endless informational resources about endless subjects is not the same as going behind-the-scenes. Behind-the-scenes programming removes the necessary suspension of disbelief required for theater. Just like audiences still go to see magicians even though they know it's a trick, they go to the movies knowing that the stories they're watching are built by armies of people working for months in movie making businesses. The compact audiences metaphorically sign with creators not to see how it's done facilitates necessary disbelief. The fact is, Superman only makes sense if we believe he can fly. If we see the ropes, we all laugh; it ruins the magic. The moment we go back stage and see that there really isn't a bottomless pit into hell but instead just a wooden trapdoor, we lose a bit of the surprise and emotional connection with regard to the plight of the character and his our her narrative.

And it's a tough thing, steeped as we all are in infinite information. We all have access to trailers and magazine articles and web sites that reveal tons of details about how something gets made. But I suppose my thesis is this: treat behind-the-scenes information with respect, lest you no longer appreciate anything. It's one thing to learn all about a magician's life; it's another thing entirely to learn how he makes the tiger disappear. As soon as you know where that tiger goes, you'll not only stop caring, but you'll be more likely to click on something newer, something incrementally more scintillating, and your own attention will continue to fragment.

Fragment it too much, and then nothing matters at all.

-MS

PS -- Yes, yes, it's always the same old request here at the bottom of the blog. "Please share with your friends if you like it...yadda, yadda, yadda." There are even the little buttons around here where you can post it to Facebook, Tweet it far and wide, distribute it all sorts of ways. But you know what? You COULD! And you know what that would do? That would make us SMILE.

Marveling about THE MASTER

Pop culture is not always the province of art. Creativity? Absolutely. But art?

It's been said that movies are the ultimate middlebrow experience, art for the mainstream. Sure, sure there are those outlier projects, cinematic experiences that push aesthetic, artistic boundaries or strive for narrative and visual novelties outside majority experience. But most of the time, movies reach toward the middle. Despite the spectacular complexity and expense to make one, they're easy and cheap to consume. They require minimal commitment on the part of the casual viewer. They're fun for a date night, a sleepover, a long airplane ride. Most of them are disposable, forgettable.

Still with me? I know this chafes a little, but be honest with yourself. I'm not talking about the many movies you've already woven into the weave of everyday life, to which everyone who knows a readily quotable line can relate. ("You talking' to me?") Fame and sheer memorability do not confer greatness all by themselves.

I love movies; that no surprise. But I find that it's the eternal promise a great movie might--might!--emerge amid the maddening throng is only one of the many reasons I pay close attention to them. It may sound like my middlin' opinion of the form belies a hypocritical sentiment…but I say "no". Instead I believe that an honest regard for the categorical value of something should not offer qualitative appeasements of earnest critical appraisals. There is no absolute measurement of quality, therefore there's infinite potential for discovery. Or, said another way, just because there aren't a long list of great movies doesn't mean there aren't lots of good movies, even interesting ones, too.

In a future essay I'm going to talk about some of the shared attributes that define lasting works of art. But today I'm going to focus on one work, a rare cinematic outlier. It's called "The Master", and while it's most certainly not for everyone, I regard it as one of the great works I've seen in years.

There's a common presumption that real artists can't be happy. The Hollywood corollary to this suggests that this is the reason why there are few real artists who make movies: movies that don't make people happy rarely turn a substantial profit. As a statement of conventional wisdom there are grains of truth here, but I don't believe it's actually so simple. If anything, Hollywood is the problem; serious cinema is not. 21st century moviemaking is much more democratic than it was in the 80s and 90s, with digital technologies forcing budgets down and raising the artistic dreams of independent filmmakers to astonishing heights. "The Master" certainly doesn't find its soul in an imagined super-eight world of backyard suburban sets, but nor does it find itself in the three act world of neat 'n tidy dramas with beginnings, middles, and ends. To be clear: this is no Hollywood film. For starters, it's daring.

Then consider this surprise: who shoots with a 65 mm film negative anymore? Not many, but this crew did. The colors are saturated and lush; the framing wide, yet powerfully intimate. There's nothing like an extreme close-up in a wide format to bring out nuance and saturated emotional vibrations.

The director Paul Thomas Anderson has done something which I consider remarkable. He's made all of the leading characters, most especially the two principals, volatile and intensely flawed. The character of Freddy, played by Joaquin Phoenix, presents a compromised soul to a degree that I don't think I've seen portrayed so honestly before, so richly painted.

I'm not writing a movie review per se, although let me reinforce what you've already gathered: I thought the whole thing brilliant. What prompted me to write about "The Master" were the choices the production team made in an effort to bring it to life. The actors, the production designers, the camera and lighting crews, and the writer/director all must have lived through a single, shared fever dream of rich intensity and soulful honesty. Ostensibly about the power of charisma, we experience the challenges and seductions for both charismatic people in love with their own influence, and those more ordinary folks who follow the charismatic ones. The movie prompts us all to consider why we get up every morning and face the day. The narrative is thick and dense. It does not give the audience lots of breathing room in its urgent portrayal of intense characters, and the vivid visuals offer little in the way of elbow room for us to slacken our focus. But most of all – – and I want to emphasize this above all else – – the movie doesn't show off simply to show off. It's true that creativity of all types and styles by its very nature puts itself on display. Emily Dickinson may have tucked her finished poems in a steamer trunk, but the moment she set ink to paper she decided there was some measure of those works destined for eternity and ultimate presentation.

There are some artistic enterprises that make presentations of self-indulgence a priori requirements. Rock 'n roll, opera, mural painting, Hollywood movies, television commercials, and many other forms of invention strive to grab you, to say, "Look at me". This movie does that too of course; it's just the nature of the form. But that's not the reason for this movie. "The Master" has no gratuitous car crashes, nor "how-did-they-do-that?" camera moves, nor location shots that strain credibility about how the production team gained access. People wear clothes we recognize, they eat food we recognize, the music playing in the background sounds like things we all heard growing up. It's a movie that has the confidence to plumb the murky machinery of people you know, not people you want to ape. It explores beauty in the ugly, in the weary, the busted. It provokes in its precision of voice, and in its precision--for that is the right word-- it evokes a strange interior sensation of hopefulness. Here is a movie that engenders a humane sense of hope because it presents itself in a precise, truthful voice, and considering how much media we all consume that's designed to be anything else but truthful, the sheer audacity to witness the world and then project it brightly back without blinking builds gravitas.

No, this isn't a movie that's going to rake in the mega-bucks. It takes a little work. It's neither disposable, nor easy. But as an antidote to the endless anodyne acts foisted on our media consciousnesses, The Master offers an alternative. It asks us to listen closely; watch carefully; think.

Sounds like good advice for life.

--MS

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INSURMOUNTABLE?

Staring into a blank canvas or empty screen, toeing the starting line of an endurance race, taking the first step of a 2100 mile journey - the end seems so far away, impossible to conceive. Yet the human spirit never stops craving the unknown, the obscure - whether it be a scientific breakthrough or a foggy mountain peak. Maybe it's that challenge that drives change, fueling humanity's movement forward.

In a recent expedition to the top of Mt. Katahdin, arguably the most formidable mountain of the Northeastern US, this energy was physically tangible amid the intrepid climbers, as thick in the air as the clouds themselves. In many ways everybody on the peak was at the high point of their own pilgrimage - some were completing a six-month hike of the Appalachian trail, others had scrambled over the lichen covered granite for a challenging one-day hike. Everyone was together - smiling, congratulating, stripping to their skivvies for a well deserved photo-op - yet each individually had just completed their own trip into the unknown, overcoming their own pains and challenges, bringing their own creativity and two feet to get them to the top.

Every painting, every movie, every climb begins with the same inner quandary: insurmountable? Maybe. But there's only one way to find out. Commit to the first step, then put one foot in front of the other.'

VW text EE photos

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[flagallery gid=5 name=Gallery]

STIRRED

Movies are like food. What's perceived as good isn't the same for everyone, and it isn't even the same for each of us sampled on different days. A person don't have to give up what he or she already likes in order to discover something else. Therefore, even though I'm going to guess that you hadn't planned on this trip into French New Wave cinema when you started reading, check out this five minute clip from Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 movie Two or Three Things I Know about Her. I don't like to make it a general habit of focusing on a bit of media out of its proper context. But this scene strikes me as something representative of a much larger idea. It's also happens to be beautiful on its own merits.

I've read about this scene before, but I must sheepishly admit that this scene and the entirety of the movie from which it's excerpted has always been a yawning hole in my cinematic background. By now I'm assuming you've clicked the link and watched it. One of the things that grabbed my attention even before its famously existential coffee moment is the fabulously sculptural way Godard arranges his space. Twenty seconds into the clip we see a man and two women at a corner banquette in a Parisian cafe. The nearly perfect balance of their triangular sculpture is as much a part of the overall narrative as the individual characters themselves. Even if we know nothing about the movie, nor the stories of the characters it contains, we immediately feel a smart tension in this image, the three players each in their own worlds, all balanced spatially in the shot. The geometry of the scene tells us that each plays a role in the other's life; without one, the triangle would collapse.

Godard deftly deftly directs us to the contents of a magazine one person is reading by showing us one of the actor's eye lines-- that is, the direction the character is looking. It's too easy to poke fun at the avant-garde voiceover that immediately follows; if that's what you're doing, cool it for a second and listen again! This isn't twenty-first century irony; this is an actual idea, fresh from the moment it emerged into the culture.

The shots are tight, whether framed on the magazine pages or on the faces of the characters. The minute vibrations of the carefully handheld camera place us directly in the scene, at the table. But it's the movie's sound in cinematic collaboration with the picture that makes this special. Television would not ordinarily try something so experimental, so unrealistic. Television pretends to be real life, even if it sets its stories on distant planets or gilded cruise ships. Cinema has the freedom to think differently.

The background sound drops away, replaced by our narrator's interior monologue, whispered no less. Could we declare this the exercise of a showy young auteur, a self indulgent artistic stunt? Sure. But listen to what the narrator says and watch his characters embody the space.

"Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing us to live in society, to be together." We see coffee stirred in a cup, a froth of bubbles spinning on the surface like galaxies, like dancers, like flower petals in a stream. The monologue muses about objectivity and subjectivity, about finding a place for oneself in a world in motion, in relationships of all kinds. That first line, about objects serving as links between subjects, is as much about human relationships--intangible things, but still objects philosophically--as it is about the value and aesthetics of those relationships--the biggest subject in most people's lives.

"Say that the limits of language are the world's limits," it continues, "…and that when I speak, I limit the world, I finish it….But if by chance things come into focus again, it may only be with the advent of conscience. Everything will follow from there."

No wonder this man is whispering. It's challenging to discover the universe in a coffee cup, to say nothing of confronting your own mortality in a Parisian cafe.

Now look: I like a spandex superhero movie as much as the next popcorn chomper, and I'm plenty geeked about Double-Oh-Seven and a band of long-marching hobbits heading my way. But here we see a collection of washed out close ups and stirred coffee and Parisian faces and cigarette smoke and I feel my blood accelerating. Artistic invention is not always about light and color and movement. Sometimes it's about noticing the most essential details in the world right in front of us, and then taking the time to wonder about it all. Those observations take moments of focus sometimes, and any subsequent wonderment takes internal resolve. Most of us do not want to spend precious personal energies to question our place in the universe when we stir our morning cuppa joe. But there is easily as much surprise, energy, amazement, and daring romance in the keenly observed real world as there will ever be in the manufactured life of our fantasy creations.

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FIGHTER PILOT VS MISSION PLANNER

…or, "You can't have one without the other".

Shortly after a recent production meeting, I was talking with one of our animators. He usually says a lot even when he says a little, but his brain is always working in the background. Smart, smart, smart, the guy focuses like a laser, works really hard. In short, he's good! So I was thoroughly fascinated when he said, "I'm really glad I do what I do for you instead of what you do for me. I'd much rather be a fighter pilot than the guy who's in charge of where to send the planes."

There's a reason we're a good team.

The truth is, I really love working with people who deeply care about what they do without me having to worry about them hating what they do or trying to do what I do. Sounds obvious, but as we all know work teams are not always harmonious.

He's the kind of guy who genuinely feels like he's doing his best when he can deeply dig in to a discrete assignment. As an animator, his creative life is intensely technical, even as it aims to deliver something that doesn't look technical at all. To viewers, the final result of his labor should be visually effortless, conveying whatever story or feeling it was designed to impart. Viewers doesn't care how it was made, and nor should they. But as a producer or director I most certainly do!

What I've come to appreciate, and what I love best about working with artisans of all sorts, is that inside a discrete assignment, there's no singular way to solve any specific creative problem. I turn to experts to do specific things because I can count on novel ideas to get proposed, no matter how specifically or clearly I think I'm defining the task. I also turn to experts because their expertise is what empowers their own creative contributions to be special.

Now here's the other side of the equation, and try not to flinch 'cause this could sting a little.

You may be a master producer, director, civil engineer, or flower arranger, but the moment you work with any other living person, you've got to accept that you're going to have the living, breathing influence of that other person invested in the output. Even if you give precise instructions -- "Make it powder blue, two meters long, five centimeters thick, and carved from aluminum"-- there will be inevitable surprises. Yes, you most certainly can demand a revision if work delivered doesn't fit your inner vision, and compromising on vision is generally not something you should easily accept. But you're a fool if you don't at least consider the alternative solution presented to you based on your initial assignments. If you really respect your team, you will enter in to a pas de deux with each player, individually. Even if you don't like each other personally, the pursuit of the work itself should be as if you were both trying to have an intimate conversation while walking the wrong way against street traffic on a crowded sidewalk. It should be as if you're making every effort to stay close enough through the endless oncoming distractions, internal and external, to stay on the subject, keep the conversation going, reach your destination in mental sync and understanding.

Are you nervous that I'm suggesting that everyone should have the same level of authority, that everyone is equal on a team? Far from it. The director decides the movie. The architect decides where to place the windows. But the great ones listen closely to the key grips and building engineers. One of the things I respect about the fighter pilot vs mission manager metaphor is that properly compartmentalized, both players each get a positive boost from doing their specific jobs right. They both may be able to pilot a plane, just as they both may be able to make an overall plan, but left to pursue excellence in their individual dharmas, a cohesive team becomes capable of greatness.

Here's where the strategy trips people up. When the pilot doesn't appreciate the challenges of the planner, trust erodes, and the mission suffers. Where the planner doesn't listen to the realities of flying by night, low to the ground, under fire, the planner compromises mission success overall. If you're going to work with a team--and face it: in the modern world everyone works with teams of varying size and scale--you've got to build multidirectional respect. Without it the team fall apart, or at best only achieves middling results. If you can't find a way to respect the various members of your team, you either need to find another team, or quit doing what you're doing.

--MS

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IMPROVISATION

Improvisation: that's when you have an idea and you make up the next bit based on what you just did a moment ago, right?

I bet you do this a lot. We all do. But often people mistake improvisation for "making it up as you go along". No doubt there are elements of this in all improvisation, but artists know something intuitively that onlookers may discount. Lots of practice making things up leads to better results when you've got to perform.

We're heading into presidential debate season and no matter which side you support, keep one small corner of your brain open to the inevitable display of improvisational footwork from both candidates. They've both practiced prior to the debates; we all know that. They both have their standard buzz lines and tropes and stylistic flourishes; we know that too. But we don't know precisely what they're going to say to the inevitably unexpected events that arise and neither do they. They will improvise.

Each of us improvises when we reach the next moment in our lives. Do you think every surgeon knows precisely what they're going to see when they cut someone open just because they've had twenty years of training? Does every NASCAR driver know what's going to happen on lap 217, even though the job can be reduced to "drive fast and turn left"?

So, what's not improvisation? I could argue that all things fit the improvisational spirit, considering that life will eternally provoke unexpected moments for "making it up as you go along". But some things aren't so fluid. Some things are genuinely predictable. Monthly bills to pay, nightly dishes to wash, weekly reports to write for your boss: none of these fit the spirit of improvisation very much. But sometimes moments of inspiration springing from deep understanding of these tasks leads to invention and innovation, and the first time you try them out…voila: improvisation. Things only become codified, even ossified, after they've been done a million times.

When you give a speech, you're not improvising. You're presenting something that's gone through revision, trial, testing, and rehearsal (and if you're not, you definitely want to call us, 'cause we provide all sorts of great coaching services!) When you're building a model rocket from a balsa and cardboard kit, you're not improvising either. But the moment you're not sure what to do at the podium when one of the spotlights inexplicably goes out, or you discover that the rocket kit came with a cracked stabilizer, you've suddenly been thrust into the realm of improvisation.

This is not comfortable for everyone. Not everyone likes to riff on a theme. Some people feel much, much better working from a set of known data, from a cookbook, or a sheet of printed music. This is not only okay, it's valuable. I rely on concrete thinkers to do concrete things. I demand it of myself, in fact. Cooking, writing a novel, flowcharting the architecture for new software all require disciplined thinking and rigorous labor. They cannot be done well without a focused mind. But focused thinking is not the same as rigid thinking. The value of improvisation is being able to notice an unexpected opportunity, seize it, and not get tripped up by the inevitable surprises.

Undisciplined improvisation is just making it up and you go along. The difference in being a good improviser is the ability to impose the ballast of discipline even as you tack with ungovernable winds. Good improvisation is being able to take cues from known rules, briefly experienced inputs, precedents and even accidents, and not get thrown. Great improvisation is being able to take those elements and turn them into something breathtaking. Done well it's effortless; it just flows.

--MS

PS -- Have something to say? Leave us a comment! Don't want to miss the latest from 1AU? Sign up on our mailing list. (Cool email like ours is better than that boring stuff that clutters your inbox, right?) Consider yourself a fan? Please re-Tweet us, post to Facebook, or otherwise forward us to your friends. Cool? Yep: cool.