On Artistic Tool Agnosticism - #39
HAPPY 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY!!!
And it all started with a CC email list of 2 people on my work’s Outlook. It’s amazing that we’re at 39 issues of this newsletter, but here we are. Thanks everyone!
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Hello Maiyah (and friends)!
Apologies for the delay.
Welcome to another format change! — I promise this’ll be the last time for a while:
The structure of this newsletter will start with an Intro; then the Silly Sh*t 1-minute vlog will segue you into the week’s Essay/Short Story.
This newsletter will stay bi-weekly on Wednesdays (~2 posts per month). At this pace, we will hit issue #100 in 2 years 3 months. A few years down the road, I’ll probably have time to do this weekly, but right now, I’d prefer bi-weekly.
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I was going to send this out 9am Wednesday, but the essay I prepared hit a snag. I was going to share a series I’m starting called, “Letters to My Brother”, a monthly letter series that wouldn’t be sent out with the newsletter. I wanted to share the first letter, but my brother preferred if I didn’t send it out. So, I’ll respect that, and therefore shift topics.
That said, enjoy my Silly Sh*t vlog piece. Thank you!
Silly Sh*t
On Artistic Tool Agnosticism
1,396 words | 05min 05sec reading time
As some of you know, my mother is a wood sculptor (finewoodcarvings.net) in North Texas. She mainly does animals, but her focus as of late has been artistic furniture that’s half-rustic, half-modern.
I was talking to her recently about sculpting and asked, “Would you like to do other mediums aside wood?”
“Yes. I’d like to try ice sculpting.”
I then asked if she’d have to learn different skills or such.
“No. Sculpting is sculpting. It doesn’t matter if it’s wood or ice — or clay. What matters is if you can see the depth, proportion, and dimension of the figure you are trying to sculpt.”
Many customers ask her if she uses a chisel to get all the detail into her sculptures. “No,” she usually goes, “I use a Dremel and power tools. It’s faster.”
Sculpting is sculpting.
You hear lots of aspiring artists (and maybe some STEM folks) put the tools and software ahead of skill: “What gear do I need? What program should I buy? I don’t have money for a Macbook Pro? Or money to buy this software?” I’m here to momentarily break that notion if you still believe in it.
To make good work, you have to look past tools. Focus on skill.
Everybody in the entertainment industry says, “You must use the industry standards: write in Final Draft, shoot on Arri cameras, edit in Avid Media Composer, compose in… well, whatever the industry standard is and gear they, uhh, need…”
Let’s talk about Final Draft, the industry standard.
But why? Why is it the industry standard? I personally use Fade In. It’s nicer, more comfortable, minimalist; it makes intuitive sense. You don’t have to pay every time there’s an update like Final Draft, and customer support (who’s Kent Tessman, the creator of Fade In) is way easier to reach. “Seriously Don, who uses Fade In?” Rian Johnson, a guy who uses Fade In, is currently writing the next Star Wars Trilogy with it. Not to mention Craig Mazin, who wrote Chernobyl (HBO) all in Fade In.
Story is story, or drama is drama. What matters is if one can write a compelling story, even if it’s in longhand. Longhand first drafters include John August, Tarantino, David Mamet — Lawrence Kasdan initially wrote The Empire Strikes Back in longhand (source). As long as you have access to exporting Final Draft files (which, Fade In does) for industry purposes, you can write using anything you want, in my opinion.
Arri vs Red vs 35mm film vs Lytro — “What gear should I get? What camera should I buy?” Good questions. Here’s Roger Deakins in an interview:
“I certainly think there is an obsession with technical abilities at the expense of creativity and substance,” […] “If you can light and photograph the human face to bring out what’s within that person, you can do anything.”
— ibc.org (article link)
Lighting is lighting. Can you block, frame, light, and shoot the scene that pushes the story to its cinematic need? The camera is just as much a tool as the Fresnel or the light meter.
Variety Journalist: Do you ever find yourself trying to convince the Coens to go digital?
Roger: I think they were. I don’t really know, but apparently Ethan at some point was talking about shooting the next film digitally. And then it turned around. They’re really debating it. I was in Albuquerque shooting “Sicario” and they were talking about it and they said, “I don’t know how you feel about it, but I think we want to go on film.” And I said, you know, “I don’t mind. I’ll shoot it on a cell phone if you like. I don’t mind. I really don’t.”
— Variety.com (article link) (2016)
[By the way, totally check out Roger’s new podcast.]
What about the edit? Avid vs other NLE software, like Lightworks — “What program should I get? In order to edit, I need Avid, or Premiere, right?”
My editing professor in college said, “Software doesn’t matter. Be software agnostic.” Because…
… Editing is editing.
Can you feel the cut? Do you know how to string a group of footage into a narrative? I cut my vlog piece using Lightworks. I wanted Avid, but Avid’s free version was heavy and limited and stupid. Lightworks is a Linux-based editing software. Its free version has all the components one needs to cut, the only downside is a max 720p export. I’m not exporting a cinematic masterpiece, so I use Lightworks.
Not to boast, but I shot my dumb vlog on a 2018 LG G7 ThinQ (which I don’t see replacing anytime soon) and edited on my low-spec 2016 Asus laptop that has a bad battery which must always be connected and a screen dotted with dead pixels (which, again, I don’t see replacing anytime soon). I don’t care — my little 1min35sec piece, which I whittled from 10 minutes of footage, is decently shot, decently edited, and clocked to the runtime I wanted with well-timed cuts. And I didn’t pay for anything.
Composing is compo—“wait? Really? But gear matters?” Does it? Let’s ask Junkie XL (aka Tom Holkenborg), the Dutch composer, DJ, and sound engineer who scored Mad Max Fury Road, Alita: Battle Angel, and plenty of other films and video games. Tom, to what degree does gear truly matter?
It doesn’t.
— him, in the video below.
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The program doesn’t matter. The software doesn’t matter. The tools don’t matter.
However…
I will concede to one point.
I do believe that changing of the tools does change the style of the artistic work sometimes. Novelist Neil Gaiman spoke about this on the Tim Ferriss Podcast, and I believe this essence can be attributed to many other disciplines. Here, he talks about the different-ness he got from writing longhand vs a word processor:
What I would do back then is I would do my rough draft on scrap paper, single spaced so that it couldn’t be used, and also so that I could get as many words on. Paper was expensive. […] I remember the joy of getting my first computer, and just the idea that I wasn’t making paper dirty. Nothing mattered until I pressed print, and that was absolutely and utterly liberating.
And then, a decade on, picking up a notebook, it was for Stardust, which I’d decided that I wanted the rhythms of Stardust to be very antiquated rhythms, and I thought there’s probably a difference to the way that one writes with a fountain pen. [17th and 18th] century writing, you notice [tendencies] to go in very, very long sentences and long paragraphs. My theory about this is that one reason why you get this is because you’re using dip pens, and if you pause, they dry up. You just have to keep going. It forces you to do a kind of writing where you’re going for a very long sentence and you’re going to go for a long paragraph and you’re going to keep moving in this thing, and you’re thinking ahead.
If you’re writing on a computer, you’ll think of the sort of thing that you mean, and then write that down and look at it and then fiddle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean. If you’re writing in fountain pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page covered with crossings out, so it’s actually so much easier to just think a little bit more. You slow up a bit, but you’re thinking the sentence through to the end, and then you start writing.
You write that, and then you pause and then you write the next one. At least that was the way that I hypothesized that I might be writing, and I wanted Stardust to feel like it had been written in the late 1920s. I thought to do that I should probably get myself a fountain pen and a book, so that was how I started writing that. Again, what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated. Saying, “Ah, I’m not actually making words that are not going down in phosphor on a computer screen.”
— The Tim Ferriss Show, interview with Neil Gaiman (link to podcast transcript)
Tools could change style. But whatever tool you choose, remember:
Skill is skill.