Film Courage: Currently you're an author, screenwriter, story artist and director.
Which came first? Adam Skelter: I would say a writer and a painter or a writer and an artist.
I was one of those kids that was constantly drawing my parents would
bring home you know giant reams of computer paper they started out buying
like sketch pads and things like that for me and I would fill up a sketch pad
in just a couple days so my dad would bring these you know in the old days
they would have like these reams of paper with like the perforated edges so
he'll just bring that home and I would just be drawing everything in sight I
draw flowers faces my hands anything that was in front of me kind of
obsessively in a way and at the same time I was drawing you know it's like
they always say that like whatever art or skill you're passionate about like
you're married to and in that sense I've always been a little bit of a polygamist
because I love drawing as much as I love writing but both of them kind of been
formed the same thing that it is visual storytelling and so visual storytelling
has been central to it like I had this one video that I am it's a film strip I
made when I was a kid and literally it was just probably 16
frames and I could draw directly on the filmstrip and it was called drinky and
blinky I had this really I was grew up in learning to speak in New York and I
had this really bad accent a bit of a speech impediment so I always said Winky
Winky cuz I couldn't say my arse or elles but so little by little was just I
did this story about these two aliens and the classic frame like I recorded
the sound and everything that went with it it was like this like I don't know if
you remember the old film strips you'd have to do a beep like little beep to
twist it so anyways every time you do a beep to kind of signal moving forward
and so I recorded the entire audio track myself and it's embarrassing but you
know I mean it showed that like literally at four years old I was
already trying to invent stories except one of them was literally Twinkie and
Winky sat down it was ridiculous but uh but yeah I mean I guess I guess I've
always been fascinated by adventure I think the more I matured as a writer I
became interested in character and how
adventure really becomes the pretext to explore character and and then
eventually I think a lot of I became fascinated by philosophy and things like
that like you know like many people that are studying art and writing and I
became fascinated by kind of the the connection between the way we build our
understanding of the world through stories and now stories behind kind of
become like a filter through which we interpret our experience like for
example my my video is called my video series it's called anatomy of chaos and
the reason is like people this is part of the issue of I've had with an
animated cast like they're always asking like what it means and it starts off
with this idea that like the way our minds work is that we are we have the
kind of subconscious is constantly drawing in information from everywhere
we are everywhere like you walk into a room your subconsciousness picking up
all the details it's reading every single label on every single book it's
picking up like if this person's shirt is wrinkled and then as our subconscious
gathers information it has a kind of filter through which we prioritize the
information so it's like we're swimming in the sea of chaos and we're trying to
make sense of everything and ultimately our subconscious is kind of filtering
into our conscious through narratives those narratives help us develop a value
system which help us give us meaning and that meaning is a kind of structure or
an Anatomy so I refer to it as the anatomy of chaos or in other words how
we use story to make sense of the world around us and that's ultimately where
where the name came from the problem is is that the average person who's looking
up how to write a story is not looking for how anatomy of chaos you know I had
a bunch of friends that were like you need to write how to write a story how
to write screenplays which always seemed like the worst title for I mean it's
effective because it comes to you know the algorithms when you're like
searching for for interesting story or for for whatever you're looking for but
for me I tend to lean more towards poetic than the practical so it's it's a
big reason why I like for example originally I released it and it was like
it was called the anatomy of caste channel we've since changed it to the
art of story so it's kind of more relevant to like the actual the actual
thing that we're like that I'm the the disciplines that we're teaching or
discussing but it's still called the anatomy Cass series within that and
you're still narrating to going back to Mary four years old and you're still
yeah I'm still that you're right yeah anybody watching this I highly recommend
they check out your channel I mean maybe twelve videos or eleven I have about
twelve videos I'm working on the next one okay in fact if we can discuss that
at least a new announcement we're I've been getting a lot of requests to
release the transcripts of the different videos and so what I've done is a friend
of mine actually took the time to transcribe the entire series we
formatted it we're putting it into a book and this week we're releasing it as
the novel or as a book so you'll be able to buy you'll be able to buy it's called
the lost art of story as in Lost Tribe Entertainment which is my production
company oh okay so it's and it's just the transcripts of all of the videos so
a lot of people have been wanting to read it as they go along or just look at
the lecture itself I also have a lot of like friends that are deaf that can't
the subtitles for example are very good with the algorithm so so the book will
be available and you know Brian Koppelman once said that like every
screenwriting book is bullshit every one of them which is why mine is only five
dollars so that'll be coming out this week and it'll be available on Amazon
right now it's just ebook but we'll be getting to print later on great well I
highly recommend to anyone watching the videos because visually and if they are
able to hear and you have with the music and you intercut your own audio with you
you know different scenes from movies it's beautifully done no and I noticed
that all the comments were like I'm shocked that you don't have more
subscribers and I was shocked too yeah so that actually kind of goes back to
the the fact that I tend to be more see here's the thing so the impetus or the
the history of the videos was that I went to CalArts studied film and I got
hired to teach there now I had sold one screenplay to an
independent production company and I got to work with great producers great
writers got to work with David Trottier came on as a consultant and I learned a
ton and so when I was teaching the screenwriting herstory class at CalArts
I was able to take all this information that I was learning and try and teach it
to students which is that's when you really start to learn it when you have
to communicate it to somebody else so I would teach I kind of set up these
curriculum with these lectures kind of talking like the the basics of some of
the different lessons that I had learned and I always kind of had that like in my
reservoir or or my toolkit for things I could work with and you know also with
writing it explores a lot of the the techniques that I use so years later
when I was releasing my novel I was profit margin I wrote it and released it
independently and in researching a lot of the promotions for your books and
stuff I think everybody kept recommending you should start building a
following by doing videos and they recommended how-to videos and things
like that and I was like well I mean I've got this experience teaching at one
of the top film schools so I was very lucky to have that and I'm like I'm just
gonna take some of my lessons put them in these short discreet little videos
and that'll hopefully kind of draw attention to the novel which is funny
because the videos have kind of taken on a little bit of life of their own and
now we've become their own book so it's it's kind of funny full circle but but
yeah so it's it's basically it's a college course from a major film school
but it's completely free on YouTube or five dollars if you buy the book
you