12 Films. 12 Weeks. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

Lessons from Semester One

I finally had a chance to catch up with our web designer (and my longtime cousin) Robb Stey the other day, and I asked him for his thoughts on the blog.  He said he thought we were doing fine, but the blog was lacking a lot of “big picture” posts — the kind that reflect on the experience to date and summarize the lessons learned.

He’s right, of course.  In the thick of production, it’s hard to step back and take stock of where you are and how it’s going.  In fact, it’s hard to want to step back.  It’s far easier to sift through a couple hundred production stills, pick out the gems, and adorn them with captions, than to really take a moment and ask yourself, “What have we learned?”  Or “Are we accomplishing our goals for this project?”  Or even “What are our goals?”

But now, with no movie to post on Friday, we have enough time — and just enough perspective — to take Robb’s suggestion to heart.  So here’s a short, no doubt incomplete list of what we’ve learned so far.  In a sense, we’ve learned all these lessons “the hard way” — through firsthand experience — but we’re tempted to posit that that might also be “the only way.”  On the other hand, if it is possible to learn from someone else’s mistakes, then please — for your own sake — read on!

• Small things take time. The biggest time-waster on the “Script 2″ shoot was figuring out what to do with our several “stunt” baseballs — where to write on them, how much to tear them up in advance, how to get a Good & Plenty into the heart of one, etc.  In a perfect world, we would have done all this well ahead of time, in the course of a leisurely pre-production, and wasted no time on set.  We don’t live in a perfect world (and maybe we don’t want to), but it’s worth noting that the smaller the object, the more trouble it can end up causing.
• People will leave. For any number of reasons, some of which you may never understand, the people you start the journey with will not be the same as the people with whom you finish.  This is neither an insult nor a tragedy; it’s just a fact.  Of course, you should do everything you can to make people feel valued and rewarded and eager to stick around.  But some of them will leave anyway, and the project has to soldier on.
  

  Our hands blur with sorrow, but we go on.

• People will join. If you start doing something intriguing and a little crazy, people will want in.  They’ll volunteer their time, energy, and intelligence, with very little tangible reward, just for the chance to be a part of something cool and unusual.  In addition to being immensely helpful and fun to have around, these people will end up reminding you of why you’re doing this in the first place.
• Space and time are correlated. This is the chief lesson of the “Sublet” shoot.  That shoot dragged on for what seemed like forever, largely because we were operating in a severely constricted environment.  Word to the wise: if you don’t have time, give yourself extra space, and vice versa.
  

  It's all this guy's fault.

• Leave room for the unexpected. As of this writing, “Captivated” is tied for the most popular film of Semester One.  As you’ll recall, that’s the one we shot without a script. Way back in March, “The Queen Bee of Mushroomtown” benefited from a similar on-the-fly approach.  The best stuff is generally the weird stuff, and the weird stuff is hard to plan.

I’m sure Semester Two will bring its own insights, some of them perhaps contradicting the above, and we’ll do our best to keep you posted!  Learning new things has been one of the main goals of 12in12 from the beginning, and whatever else we may or may not have achieved, that part has been a decided success.

Posted by Keith