it's Robert Macfarlane here and today we are going to explore why failure is essential to a filmmaker
my failure right now is that I forgot to change the color in the background I know this might be
a bitter pill to swallow but you will fail and you know what that is fine accept it enjoy it
remember failure is a part of the process episode done that's it that's a wrap guys let's go home
back in the early 2000s feels like hundreds of years ago now I was a student believe it or not I
decided for my final major project I was going to go and go big that was a mistake because in that
final major project I decided that I was going to do a bunch of things that I'd seen other people do
I was going to expand the production value and I was going to expand the size of the story
the crew the cast pretty much everything beyond what I'd ever done before what I assumed was
going to happen was that I was obviously going to produce a masterpiece of filmmaking
well unsurprisingly that didn't happen instead what I experienced was a metric ton of mistakes
and don't get me wrong those mistakes have gone on to help me grow as a filmmaker in so many ways
but it probably was the most expensive way to make those mistakes to learn those lessons many of you
have probably seen the arguments for and against universities and learning film in an institution
and I know filmmakers like Christopher Nolan make the argument that actually
learning through an institution or system turns you into the same generic filmmaker that we all
know and love instead I chose to treat university like a playground like a place that I could make
a whole bunch of mistakes film now many of you have been in the situation where you have sunk
your own funds your own savings into creating your films and there is nothing wrong with that
but I do believe there is a sliding scale of risk when it comes to investing in your films and we'll
take that into consideration in a little bit but for now let's just talk about some of the other
things that I learned along this journey called failure I am what you might call a hard knocks
learner which means that you can tell me straight to my face what issue is about to come up but
quite often I won't truly understand just how tricky or difficult that issue is going to be
until I feel it myself and then I'm able to make the better judgments later down the line
but what I've recently realized is there is a huge amount of value in feeling to learn because you
feel it you understand it in a technical practiced way so how do you practice making mistakes so then
you don't make them later and mitigate the risk of messing up someone else's video that they
have put in your hands that is why it is just so important to be regularly creating short films
the biggest directors in the world in between their big feature films
will produce short films this is not just a way of practicing their craft but it's also a way of
testing out new ideas and techniques in a far less risky situation and this is what it comes down to
what you want to do is you want to enable yourself to confidently utilize new tools and techniques
but you want to do it in situations where the risk of failure doesn't mean it's going to damage
your career I can tell you I have made quite a few short films in my career some of them have been
successful you had like this moment yeah that was crazy but each and every one of them have been a
valuable learning experience in fact I would say the ones which did the worst were the ones which I
have grown from the most I would say if I had made great movies from the get-go as I started making
short films I probably would have never grown to where I am now in my career purely out of an
unwillingness to grow if I was already brilliant to begin with then why get better we always go
into every short film every crew member is on that set because they want to make a great film they do
they really do they don't want to make a bad film there are a lot of bad films out there but I think
for a lot of us and myself included the fear of failure has actually stopped me from making films
I did a film in 2013 which was the largest film the longest film I had ever created and it didn't
get great feedback in fact I got a lot of negative feedback that caused me to not make another film
for five years I focused on helping others produce their films I should have seen that
film as a stepping stone so instead of trying to make a perfect film which is impossible by the way
I challenge you use this next two months to make a film to get past this fear of failure
and this concept of a film being perfect it cannot be done even if you had the 200
million dollar budget of the justice league even the most talented directors in the world
no matter who they are no matter where they're from have made bad movies but I guarantee you
those directors learned a lot on the movies that they didn't do so well on look at Rian Johnson
after making star wars episode 8 the backlash he received from that film was tremendous but then he
went on to go and make one of the most tremendous murder mysteries of the last decade in Knives Out
so your new mantra for 2021 is going to be done is better than perfect that means in the next two
months you are going to get together with your family friends whoever you can pull together in
whatever way shape or form while staying safe obviously and you're going to produce a short
film if you need even more impetus than this I believe one of the best ways to make sure that
you consistently turn up you consistently produce is getting yourself an accountability partner
find someone who like you wants to produce great films wants to direct and both of you keep each
other on the straight and narrow keep each other creating content once you have created your film
share it with the world there are so many ways in which we can get feedback on our films and
I thoroughly recommend festivals as well as there are lots of online ways such as shooting people to
get great feedback on your films learn from your mistakes and finally don't forget to keep failing
until you don't thank you for joining me in today's episode guys if you found today's content
at all useful don't forget to check out the links below to up your game on your next film