amanda riles says my emotions play a big part in the successes and failures of my making
have you had a build go wrong because you weren't in the right headspace how do you manage that
yeah okay so i said at the beginning of this that
the that i'm in this always a bridesmaid never a bride situation with my costumes um
it has this long tail effect for me of feeling like i'm not finishing anything in here
because i'm not taking it out into the world and realizing its final potential for the
ironman suit or one of the other costumes that i'm working on right now and that is actually
making me feel a little like i'm languishing in here um and the practical result
is that the endorphin rush i get from finishing stuff has been diminished significantly and it's
i think it's over the arc of this last year i really do think it's coveted the fact that i'm
working in here alone almost all the time and i am not uh having the same avenues of sort of uh
exultation and demonstration that i usually do at the end of my projects and that is
just it is a part of my process but i noticed that like my joy in being in this space is just
the volume on my joy is lower and that's depressing it's a little depressing um
my emotions amanda also play a big part in this in my perceived success and failure
of my own projects um what i try and do is exactly what i've been talking about as far
as i try and recognize that it's a process that my emotions can exist in the space and
i don't have to respond to them i can here's what i have learned after 40 years of making
stuff for a living i can break a milling bit on this mill i can be really really mad at myself
and the world at the fact that this screw-up has taken me more time and i gotta redo this thing
and i can feel all those feelings and i can still in the midst of that emotional turmoil
walk over to my machining end mill my end mills by 64th drawer and pick up another one and bring
it back over and take out the old one toss it out put this back in just perform the actions
i don't feel them i don't feel good but i don't necessarily have to feel good in order to proceed
yeah i mean
these are weird things these minds of ours these minds and bodies the the this coupling
of of sentience with intelligence and emotion is a bizarre mix it is totally fascinating to me um
our sentience is absolutely the weirdest miracle i can point to in the world that i know about um
and the emotions don't have to be attached to the physical actions
they just don't and for me that was liberating um not to say that i succeed all the time
because i don't i fail because of overloaded emotional content to something all the time
all the time that's real that's i mean that's being a person i don't think i'm unique in that
way in any by any stretch of the imagination um all right let me move on to page two we're
doing great i again i really appreciate the emotional content in these questions um
um c2 lawson says do you ever hesitate to start a project but due to a fear of failure i am guilty
of doing this even though i realize i will never learn or get better if i don't try yeah totally
totally um i totally have not started projects because i wasn't sure
that i had the skill base to bring them to the level i wanted to i in that case one of
the things that i do is i sit and i ponder the thing for the longest period of time
um and i mean for me as a skill collector there's often this this this duality also of like is this
the project i'm gonna learn this new skill on and is it worth it like am i going to go through what
i need to go through on this to get this skill down and will it bring me to a point of completion
if i'm uncertain i wait frankly if i'm uncertain i wait and i think about it i keep thinking about
it and i keep on pondering and i mull it over in my head and i make lists i make notes and
sometimes i make drawings um usually for me it is that it is uh it is am i going to learn this
skill to do this project or am i going to wheel in somebody else to help me with it
right like rifling the barrel of my of my samaritan i was that was that was the last
thing i did on the samaritan pistol because it was the hardest problem to solve um the original maker
had just taken a nine flute uh reamer and pushed it through the barrel and i was considering doing
that i was even considering having a reamer made and then victor broadley presented me with the
beautiful solution i ended up using and that's a great example of me reaching outside my own sphere
to ask for help to complete something not sure that was exactly the answer you were looking for
but it's a good question um do you ever get vicki bly hi vicky bly uh do you ever get creator's
block like writer's get writer's block how would you suggest overcoming it i clean the shop
that's what i do when i can't figure out what to make or how to proceed i
clean the shop or i choose a shelf and i fix it every shelf needs work
every shelf everywhere needs work needs your attention every shelf needs attention
just choose one and start tackling it mary carr the memoirist who wrote liars club and i
think lit i think that's her other one um liar's club is one of my favorite books and mary carr
taught writing memoir before she actually wrote her memoir
um and one of the things that somebody she gets this question a lot uh about writing
what do you do when you can't write and she says i copy writers who i love in longhand
she says my fidelity my my fidelity as a writer is to sit at the desk and to write it doesn't have to
be my own words and she found a long time ago that copying out the words of writers she loved put
those words in her body in a way that felt similar to the act of writing and greased those wheels
i think that's a great analogy i do think that like when you when you when you have that kind of
i'm seeing a connection here when you have that kind of blockage that feels like you don't know
what direction to move in my advice is move in any direction stationary is the wrong move
i think this applies to relationships too man um when you're stagnated remaining stagnated
is not the solution you've got to push things in some direction i talked about this in painting a
few weeks ago during one of the live streams i talked about not being able to i had this hand
sculpture and i couldn't figure out what color it should be and in the exercise of sitting there for
days staring at it and having nothing appealed to me nothing flashed i'm running through every
color and every kind of thing i can think of i'm looking at all this inspirational
material and none of it's lightened some part of my brain up so then i thought
i don't know anything about this that's what i thought i don't know anything about
this piece and then i thought wait a minute that's not exactly true
let me ask some questions i might know the answer to what color shouldn't it be
oh i shouldn't be candy striped it shouldn't be red and white candy striped all the way up
that that flashed right away as soon as i asked that question that image flashed and i was like
okay done we're going to paint a candy stripe i'm going to paint it the wrong color to try and learn
from the fact that i know that's the wrong color is information i'm going to pick at that tease
it and see what i learned and so i meticulously masked this thing for six hours brooklyn 1988.
it's six out oh no no no no it wasn't 19 years 91 91 over on baker street in my loft and i masked it
and painted it for six hours and it was a harsh show it looked ridiculous it was awful and the
second i saw it i understood what color it should be so what i do when i don't know what to build in
here is i organize i sweep up i clean i tackle a shelf and it usually does it doesn't it might not
make me want to build that day but absolutely the next day i come in the shop feels like
there's more of a flow going on i've removed something from my task list and i've refined
something and it feels a little bit better it feels a little more like a little more as possible
um that's my technique and i've been doing a lot of it lately i've been i i mean the the
when this space gets real messy i get more and more kind of depressed about it because it just
feels like this mountain of stuff to deal with um
so cleaning to me is a really important important part of getting past that kind of blockage
uh my gosh there's so many great questions here i'm gonna i'm gonna continue to answer some of
these offline as separate videos because there's so many great things to talk about
lee marsh wants to know did i suffer any embarrassing failures at ilm well thank you
lee for asking me to relive that moment yeah i i endured a really crappy one um
there's a scene in episode two when obi-wan and anakin go into the bar uh and i think it's the
bar where they chase zam weasel in there i can't quite remember anyway the entrance to that bar
in the film it's cg in reality i made a model but i built it wrong
yeah i i i didn't just mess up the scale because it would have still been shootable if i had mis
mixed up the scale i mixed up one part of the scale so it was literally like it it literally
couldn't match the cg set extension that i was making the model to be part of um and it was that
was one of my biggest scrubs um my supervisor was like dude you are killing me i am bidding against
cg all the time here in the model shop and you just handed them a fix like they now get
to take our screw up which is yours and they get to succeed at it and it's bragging rights
and it just limits the amount of jobs we can get here you really really screwed up that sucked um
yeah that straight up sucked that was not a not a not a pleasant week that was not a good one um
but the other thing i love about the film industry in particular is that
there's your results may vary but in my experience of the film industry there's very little grudge
holding and i like it about that one of my earliest jobs in film was i was working on
a commercial in new york and i was driving the rental van and we also we all met and like six in
the morning at this coffee shop and then we split up and went to the set in all of our vehicles
and i had driven the rental van to the coffee shop but i hadn't driven it away and somehow i had left
the coffee shop with the keys to that van in my pocket i got all the way to jersey to the location
and the rental van was back in new york and a producer had been like working for an hour
and a half to figure out who had the damn keys to this dumb truck and when it turned out i had them
he was like you screwed up and then he turned to my supervisor and said you screwed up all right
let's get to work and then we never dealt with it again like just clean i there's not enough time
no don't get me wrong i am sure that many of you have horrendous stories about really crappy
supervisors and co-workers that held grudges for years and i know that that kind of stuff happens
in my experience by and large on the wide scope of the film industry in la and san francisco that is
not endemic but again i am me i'm a white dude my experience of the world is different
than many other people so again your results may vary i just want to accommodate for that