okay so i'm going to read a few that are all kind of the same question and then i'll speak
to them uh daniel monteith says your failures often become emotional and if so what is your
advice on moving forward k morton says are any failures that you managed to recover and make
into something positive even if it was not exactly the thing you planned that's actually a really
nice thing to bookmark um has there any been sp productions have there been projects that have
frustrated you to the point of walking away and have you yet to bring yourself back to it um so
there is no amount of expertise
that will allow you to avoid failing
there's just none and there's no point at which it'll stop happening
that's you just resolve yourself to that like you're gonna keep screwing up
you're gonna screw up in different ways you're gonna get better at screwing up and by better
it's going up i mean you'll see the screw-ups coming from farther away sometimes just one
extra inch from farther away but that's a lot um so in my history of making um the godhead
the valhalla was for me always the industrial light magic model shop i've been reading about
it since i've been 10 years old and saw the first cine fantastique about star wars and as
soon as i knew that people did that for a living i wanted to work with those people uh i tried to
work in special effects in new york i worked for peter wallick enterprises and a few other places
uh i tried to work in special effects in san francisco uh and it didn't work for several years
until i got hired by jamie heineman at colossal pictures model shop um and what's funny is
when you're first starting out making stuff and you succeed at an aesthetic challenge
it's crazy exciting it's crazy exciting it feels it feels like you've cured cancer for yourself
it just there's a way in which that like that early stage aesthetic excursion that we make as
makers and you achieve this like the satisfactory interaction with the thing that you're making
it feels incredible and you take that out into the world and you're like i would like to
work in this industry right uh so like all of my early all of my early sculptures looked like
like movie props they looked like mcguffins they looked like pieces of cinematic history
so it was a natural for me to think that i was ready to go work in the film industry and
reader i was not because most of the challenges that you'll encounter in a job are not aesthetic
they're engineering challenges their personnel challenges their materials and schedule challenges
if you do all those challenges really really good every now and then you get some aesthetic
challenges it's like 90 is there's a corollary on that 90 of every job ever is drudgery and if you
do the drudgery really good you get about 10 of the time you get to do some really fun [ __ ] um
so i had worked for jamie for about five years and i started to meet model makers like mike wick
uh christine ells who worked in other places like skellington cwi other local bay area shops
and then uh let's see i moved from colossal pictures to zub and i was a director of r d
for zub for about 18 months and then i realized i needed to go back to making stuff for a living
and that's when i started hammering away at ilm i had started calling mark anderson who ran the
shop at ilm um and eventually i i got a hold of him and eventually i got in and i started working
towards the it worked on the last six months i think five months of episode one um and
a couple things one was as soon as i got to ilm i realized i was ready
but that i hadn't been ready until i got there seriously like it took a year and a half working
in manufacturing and the toy industry as an augment to my previous special effects and
model making experience to realize that here i was at ilm and my skill base was ready for
what this place was going to offer me in terms of problems problems to solve that was exciting
to see that to understand that professionally like oh here i am that's awesome that being said almost
every three days i felt like someone was going to come up and tap me on the shoulder and tell
me it's time for you to go you clearly have no freaking idea what you're doing
so it just that was the longest way of explaining the thing i said at the beginning is no amount of
expertise will insulate you from failure and it does get emotional and it does get dark
i take my failures really personally and get really mad about it i was
what was i machining for this oh right okay so i have this model i've been machining
off camera just because it's a personal project and i haven't been filming it
because it's kind of almost too big but i was machining some little tiny tiny
pockets in the side of aluminum and i was using a very very small milling bit like
i think i was using something like i think this was the one i was using this is a 1
16 inch milling bit um and this is my last one because i broke i broke its predecessor by just
pushing a little too hard and i was sitting here this is literally like two days ago i'm sitting
here on the mill and i'm feeding i'm feeding the piece in and i'm almost done and i lapsed my focus
and i forgot to check in with my right hand which was turning the dial and feeling the resistance
turning the hand crank and feeling the resistance and i turned just a little too fast chipped
and shattered the 16th inch milling bit and i got really mad instantly i throw like this
then what are you going to do you're going to stay mad at your mill am i going to stay mad at
my middle oh i have certainly done that reader but at this stage um i know that it's a process
so at ilm i started to realize oh wow this feeling of imposter syndrome that i don't belong here
occurs on everything i'm gonna do here every project i'm being given at some point during that
project i will feel like i have no idea what the hell is going on um and it's usually immediately
preceded by having screwed something up like i did a big vacuum form and then i boned it and i
had to do it again or i laser-cut something and it didn't work the way i intended it to
there's a buddhist phrase which is this is what's happening
and this is really important for me in terms of dealing with failures in the shop and dealing with
things that don't work the way i want them to um this is a really important distinction things that
don't work it's not the things that don't work it's things that don't work the way i want them to
i and covet has actually taught me that one of the things i do i've talked a lot about
setting arbitrary deadlines because it helps me finish stuff but it's also like arbitrary
deadlines are almost a pathology for me like it'll be 4 15 and i'll have told my partner i
was gonna come home at five and i'll think oh 45 minutes that's enough time to machine this
thing that i want to do i'm going to grab all the parts and start this is such a recipe for like
an emotional like it's such a recipe for screwing something up like oh i'm going to take this short
bit of time and try and cram as much into it as i can and it's it's because i have get [ __ ] done
itis like i i seriously get an endorphin rush out of completing a project putting the last screw in
finishing the last bit of the paint um and i want that brush all the time and when i don't
get it or when i set up an arbitrary deadline and i don't get it i get really pissed off about it um
so my answer to all of those questions sorry my hearing is bugging me
um my answer to all those questions is it's a process and it's gonna happen and the first
thing about failure is to recognize that it's gonna show up so that when it shows
up you're not you're not like what the hell is that doing here um nate jones
the topic of failure is often seen as an off-limits topic
but learning from other people's failures is a great way to prevent making the same
blunders what are some examples of other people's failures that taught you to avoid certain things
and what are some examples of don't do it this way that you can tell us okay the the topic of failure
it is it is a it is an off-limits topic but it's in a surreptitious way it's an off-limits
topic because we talk about it all the time we all we talk like god teach people to fail teach them
first of all i think most of the time when we're talking about failure we really mean iteration
we really mean it's just going to take a few tries before you get there each of those tries
isn't a failure it's just going down a branch and realizing it's not the right branch and coming
back to the tree trunk and moving up a little bit and then taking another branch and then you know
on and on and on um where it's an off-limits topic is in the very personal experience of it
because i do think you're i think you're right nate i don't think a lot of people don't
look i mean it's a classic job interview thing what are your greatest failures as an employee
well if anything i'm a perfectionist but that's you know when jk rowling
says i submitted my book to 59 publishers before selling it it's not a story about
failure it's a story about success with a little bit of delayed gratification um
what are some examples of other people's failures it taught you
so you said that taught you to avoid certain things
well i had a mentor early on in model making a man by the name of mitch romanowski um an amazing
amazing model maker everyone who worked with mitch will tell you complicated dude some definite anger
issues mitch is no longer with us and i'm very sad about it because i'd love him to hear my encomium
tim he's literally one of the most brilliant model makers i've ever met and he could do it all
he could mold it cast it animatronics he could do the engineering uh it could also do all the
painting i mean it's just like he ran the shop at skellington for a nightmare before christmas all
those tens and tens and tens of thousands of separate little pieces and bits and bobs that
were all handmade to create henry selick and tim burton's vision was supervised by mitch um and
mitch ran me mitch gave me lots of advice that ran disasters off of the pass because we were sitting
there in a mentor-mentee relationship you know he gave me advice would say do stuff and yeah if you
if you know in my experience this will screw up that way and that will grow up this way and
when i would find that match to what he told me i was really learning um but it's not
i mean what are some examples of other people's failures that taught you to avoid certain things
see i think that that is a tinier category than we often admit i mean certainly if you are removing a
part from the top of your engine you want to make sure you don't drop a screw into the carburetor
because then you you're very plausibly going to have to pull your engine to get that screw
out of one of the cylinders i learned that by watching some television show many years ago
but i think that if i truncate your question i get something
more interesting what are some examples of other people's failures that taught you
the people i have learned from the most have been the people
that have been the most honest with me about their failings
yeah those have been the relationships in which i i benefited the most from that
person's experience because they were willing to share with me both the highs and the lows so
we got to talk about this stuff more
guy you know you got to be i just remember with one of my kids we had some knock down drag out
when he was like 16 and he had screwed something up but he didn't want to admit it and if you have
kids you know that this can like end up being a real beast right like he doubles down on the lie
and you know it's a lie but you can't quite say you're positive it's a lie because you can't know
the full state of reality and you push on it and at the certain point it became really clear and he
admitted like yeah i lied about i can't remember what it was walking the dog something like that
and i said you gotta realize it's so much less energy to own the screw up right away right away
fall on your sword and then i literally said repeat after me my bad i'm sorry i screwed up
these those those three word those three phrases are like a mantra and we should all practice them
because we all screw up all the time and the people that express it the people the the
people i've been able to collaborate with over the years that i've been lucky enough to be able to
work with people like laura conf and simone and sean charlesworth and norm and will and i mean
these are all people whose egos are not tied into the success of everything that they do
they're totally willing to talk about it and that means the collaboration is really real and it
means that when you get to a difficult space there's conversational room to talk about it