mix darwin life says time crunch is often a factor in jobs what were some of the
strategies you used to help you get through it well my biggest problem for time crunches
in the early part of my career was not asking for help was mistaking being clever for being good
they are not the same thing and you'll find lots of young people who are clever
and the moment their cleverness is put up against a time deadline uh it can turn out that
they're not as clever as they thought that's what happened to me um so asking for help is a
key thing about time crunch and making sure that you've bid a job to obtain the help that you need
to actually do that job the second one for time crunch is communication communication
with the client communication with your crew about what the expectations really are um you
uh way way early on in my life i was given a credit card i then spent money on that credit
card and tried to ignore it for a period of time this led to me having terrible credit
for a huge portion of my 20s in my early 30s i had to actually consolidate all my debt through
a wonderful non-profit organization called consumer credit counselors uh who actually
negotiates with the credit cards on your behalf consolidates your payments makes them affordable
and i was able over uh several years to eliminate my debt but way back in the beginning when i was
ignoring the credit card company because i thought that was a thing you could do
my friend ernie said to me you're thinking about this all wrong when you owe money to someone you
should not be avoiding them you should be calling them all the time because when you owe money to
someone you are in a relationship with them and the key to a good relationship is communication
and he was right i mean he was totally right the best way to deal with credit card debt
is to actually be actively calling them if you are actively trying to solve the problem they
will work with you within reason and i know the american credit situation is terrible and i don't
yeah with all the caveats of privilege and the modern shitty world give as a given communication
is the key to every relationship including ones that might feel adversarial um at one point i
had to tell a client i was going to be able to deliver 70 of the job on time but we were still
two weeks out and i could already see that i was not going to be able to deliver this other part
um they stopped payment on the checks for the stuff i'd already built and they ended up having
to borrow money from my then brand new girlfriend oh my god who later on i ended up marrying but i
remember her saying is this the way your life is going to be are you like totally bad at all
this stuff and i was like no no this is an outlier and luckily reader it was an outlier
um so time crunches effector jobs the strategies to get through it asking for help communication
and realism being really realistic about what can get done and how long it can get done
and i know i seem fairly unrealistic here in the cave like the joke is that
no one day build takes a day every one day build takes longer than a day to achieve
that's sort of within the function of this place because i'm trying to make everything
to a spec that i love on the job it gets done in time on the job it gets done in
time i'm highly realistic about what it takes to get something done on the clock and that's
the main thing is experience just keeping on doing it for experience so in order to get experience in
the early part of my career one of the things i did was i would make props for free if they paid
for materials because my labor was cheap man but the materials just getting a 2x4 in my shop was
more money than i had in the in in my pocket at the time so materials where the expensive part of
the materials will be the expensive part of the equation in the early part of career so i would
like i said i would go to a client or not go to a client but like if a small theater company needed
something i'd be like i'll build that for you for almost nothing just pay the for the materials and
let me have the prop back when i'm done that was a really good one that got me a lot of a
lot of small jobs that were really really useful um oh you know what c2 lesson there's one other
thing i made a note here about freelance work and advice on setting prices um fon davis who
many of you know as the proprietor of faunco down in la the creator of mouse or mecha catbot meow
uh and a great close friend of grants and mine for many years fawn is a wonderful human being and
fawn and i built our little freelance businesses at the same time in the early aughts here in san
francisco um and we just checked in with each other all the time about little jobs and i think
we might have even done one together i can't quite remember but like just that that check-in my wife
is a marriage and family therapist and she has a group of people she meets with every single week
colleagues who are peers of hers and they just meet to chat about how that week went for them
and issues they are having with their profession and then they support each other in that
that is a codified and structured thing that's fantastic and everyone should be doing it if i was
starting out in my career now i would totally be doing that because those early phone calls and and
get togethers that fawn and i would do to compare notes were super vital for us in understanding the
landscape that was out there okay oh and moving on to the second page about 15 minutes till
the end of the hour okay while working in the theater were there any tools or techniques you
found particularly useful that you wish you had known about sooner mt asked this question i and
i mean mostly what i learned about in theater was how to get stuff done in no time for no money
right away uh yeah that was definitely one of the main things it wasn't like there were key
skills i think yeah there wasn't you know um
no it was it was early part of my career i was learning everything for the first time
um kerry shanahan says i'd like to hear about some theater in the round effects you talk about
in your book every tool's a hammer uh available on amazon i believe it was a chair moved and
some other effects do you have any relics from theater shows in the past that you can share
yes uh when jamie and i share when jamie and i toured around the world with our science show
we brought several of them over the years and we toured between 2012 and 2016.
um we had an effect we built several different versions of an effect in which jamie impales me
uh and in one we had jamie doing knife throwing for real on stage
and then we introduced this concept that i had learned how to catch jamie's knives out of the air
and then we went to demonstrate that and in order to and then we made it look like jamie threw a
knife and it landed in my arm and this is the rig that did that um it is composed of nothing but a
aluminum cuff that i wore on my arm and it goes like this yep okay and so this went under my
sleeve of my orange jumpsuit and you could see that the sleeve could come up here and we had
a split built into the sleeve here so that when i reached out when i reached out to get the knife it
would look like it appeared in my arm and i have a little uh little leaf lock here this is really
old and untuned but i had a little leaf lock in here so it would stay up and then we would let
the audience imagine for about five seconds that had really been hit in the arm and then i we we'd
break the illusion and go up this this uh this came about in one day because i thought we had
hired a magic designer to build this effect for us and it turned out we had and i only found out
about it the day before we were leaving for the tour so i i put this together in one day and it
there's no springs or anything it just literally uses centrifugal force to allow the the blade
to come out i thought you would enjoy that um all right moving on
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