The Story Stays

My job is to sequence a want. And the first task is knowing who wants it.

Jerome Bruner said we think in two ways. What belongs in which category. What happens to people.

The first tells us a ring is a circle of metal. The second, what happens when someone slips it off over dinner and sets it down by your plate.

Running a workshop, helping others speak for their brands, or simply cutting a spot: I always keep this in view — who wants what, and what follows.

My job, more and more, is to generate less and discard better.

When shooting went digital, extra takes came free. The films didn't get better — the cards just filled up. Forty takes where there used to be five, and the good one hidden among them.

AI does the same thing a floor up: it orders an archive in an afternoon, tries twenty versions of a sequence, builds the shot nobody filmed. So the work is no longer producing options — it's knowing which one serves.

The machine sets the speed; whoever steers it brings the judgement.

Sometimes I join films already in motion — many cuts behind them and a deadline overhead. Other times, projects that never quite close.

A project that's gone wrong is almost never wrong where it looks. The problem you see in the third act was planted in the first, and whoever has been inside for months can no longer see it. Shklovsky called it the automation of perception — look at something long enough and you stop seeing it. Your nose has been in frame your whole life. It's not that you can't see it: you forget it's there until someone reminds you.

A technical fault doesn't cost the two minutes it takes to fix. At the University of California they measured how long it takes to return to a task after an interruption: twenty-three minutes.

Now multiply that by the times a project pulls you out of your rhythm in a day.

So the media, the formats and the workflows are settled before the work begins. Not for tidiness, but because judgement wears down. Every decision you hand to the technical side is one you take away from the film.