Learning to fail

You need to have the bad to appreciate the good. I’ve long looked at the idea of Karma as a great way of making sense of the world and film making and other creative pursuits are no different. For every day you feel that buzz, that rush from a new, exciting idea that you can’t write down fast enough you’re bound to have half a dozen days where all you want to do is space out in front of the television and just do bugger all (although I call telly watching “research” :P). For every success, there will be other failures. However, if you constantly had that buzz and achieved perfection each time would there be any magic left in trying?

Many people far more successful than I say you should write every day but that’s just not feasible sometimes when you’re working a full time job and want to keep an active social life (I know: excuses, excuses). Hell, I hardly ever update this blog because every time I go to (this post included) I feel that if it’s not going to perfect and world changing is it worth the bother? The same goes with my films – I don’t make half as many as I want to because of pressures on finances and time. I guess, if you wanted to be harsh, you could call every day that a creative person doesn’t create something a failure day. But that’s not such a bad thing.

Recently, I took to streets of London with a friend who wants to get into film making armed with her Canon 5D camera. The day before we had come up with a loose concept based around Alice In Wonderland that in my head that wasn’t impossible but did require a little bit of luck, so we were pacing up and down Brick Lane desperately in search of someone sat outside with a Hookah pipe for our caterpillar and my definitely-not-vague-at-all request for a “pretty girl to be our Queen of Hearts”. I had a hat with white rabbit ears from a previous short film Deep In The Maddening Mind and a deck of cards packed in a bag ready to go (TIP: it’s probably stupidly obvious but keep all your props from Halloween or house parties or collected oddities together in one place so you can dig it out quickly when inspiration strikes) so we were just relying on a few chance willing participants and ideas to come to us as we went. Needless to say the shoot was a bit of a failure. But that’s not such a bad thing.

There are plenty of positives I took away from the experience, even if it didn’t yield the results I was expecting. I got to play with the 5D for the first time so now I know what different factors to consider when planning a shoot around it. I built up my self confidence and communication skills by approaching complete strangers on the street and asking them if they would be part of the project. Most importantly, though, I remembered why I usually spend hours planning a shoot beforehand from concept to script redrafts to call sheets and editor notes. If this shoot had worked perfectly, then I’d have felt there’s no need to put in all that pre-production effort and sooner or later I would have got sloppy. The reason why we plan is because we’re often flooded by a hundred different ideas and we have to wrestle them down onto paper before we can decide which is actually best in the long term.

Even if it was a failure, the person I was working with was convinced enough by the idea and my enthusiasm to commit to the project long term. Now, we’re slowing down the process to do it properly and I’m even more excited about it than I was at the start. So maybe failure is the wrong phrase – let’s call it a “delayed success”…