Two Friends, Two Films
Imagine you went to a premiere of a friend’s new art film. The lights go down, the title sequence runs, and then the movie begins. On the screen you see a big white circle on a black background. It doesn’t move or grow.
It just sits there.
Thirty minutes later it’s still sitting there.
And unfortunately, so are you.
After another 30 minutes, this non-moving movie finally ends.
You friend gets up front to talk about the film and do a little Q&A.
He explains that the color of white you stared at for the last hour was a very rare white. That it took a certain type of very laborious process to generate that white. Then it took months to develop a way to get it on film, and then they even had to replace the screen it projects onto so that they could get the white just right.
He talks about how that screen had to be made specially in Korea, which involved some of the world’s top material scientists and many flights for him back and forth to Korea to examine, test, and try again and again.
He talks about how they had to transport the film in a certain way and adjust the air quality a certain way in the theater and how the seats were actually lowered an inch so that each audience member’s view of the white would look the way it was intended.
But all you can think about is how your friend made you stare at a stupid white circle for an hour.
After the Q&A, it is announced that another friend has a film that will be screening next.
Oh geez.
Because you are a sucker and/or a good friend, you stay for the second film.
The second movie is a sequel to your favorite movie. Somehow this second friend has captured the full essence of the original and made a spectacular film that exceeds both the original and any other film in existence and also your wildest dreams. You love it and feel you could die right now having lived a full life.
After the film ends, the second friend gets on stage and tells everyone that the movie was developed using some website he found yesterday. The way it works is, you type in a movie you like and it generates the perfect sequel in three seconds. Then you can download it to watch. He says he made the film you just watched during the previous Q&A.
Nobody Cares How Long It Took You
It doesn’t matter to your audience how much work or time you put into it.
It doesn’t matter what epiphanies you had.
It doesn’t matter how clever your solution is.
It doesn’t matter how many people were involved in getting it done.
It doesn’t matter how much you struggled. It doesn’t matter the sacrifices you made.
All the audience cares about is what they experience.
On the one hand, this is pretty depressing. I want my effort to be acknowledged! But on the other hand, it means that you can create (some) great experiences in a short amount of time.
All the audience cares about is what they experience.
I try to be mindful of this when I’m working on a project that consists of a lot of parts and a lot of decision making. I ask questions like:
- How long will they actually experience this thing I’m putting my time into?
- What will they be experiencing the most? Should I focus more on that?
- Which, if any of these features really need to be perfect? Is it the audience that needs it perfect or me?
- Which tiny details might get missed? Can we just remove them to save time?
Your Struggle Is Not Your Product Unless It Is
One caveat: sometimes the backstory is part of the whole work. Sometimes the work is not just the end product but the story of how it got to be the end product. A lot of contemporary art is this way. But most other things aren’t.
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