to know what you want, learn what you don't

Suddenly, amidst all the chaos, confusion, and commotion,

There was clarity.

…is what I wish I could be saying right now 😬

Welcome back to Creative Chaos, a something-monthly newsletter about the chaos of attempting to be a creative.

Last week, 52 folks read my rant about not gaining clarity from my first three weeks at film school, which ended with a motivational WhatsApp message about that somehow being okay.

(this is the point where I ask you to click that big blue subscribe button if you haven’t already - lets get that number up to 55 maybe?).

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This week at the UCLA Film & TV Summer Sessions, we somehow dove deep into the same concept of that motivational WhatsApp message - here it is as if it were a fancy quote:

To know what you want to do, you must first learn what you don’t want to do.

Throughout the week, we got to experience first-hand what it’s like being a member of the different departments on set.

I learned how to be an assistant director (+ editor) on a practice shoot where we learned the importance of coverage in scenes,

… block a scene, directing professional actors to recreate a scene from the movie Parasite,

…work with the school’s fancy iMacs to edit the first actual shoot we did with real actors,

…act as a sketchy neighbor in a cinematography lighting exercise,

… and even got to voice act for the role of an evil old man at our second screenplay table read, this time with the entire class of 45 students.

On Friday, we had a 5 hour long workshop where we had to pick cards from a box, and the card we get has the role we end up working on for an hour.

I learned how to be a Director, First Assistant Cameraman (setting up the camera and pulling focus), Second Assistant Cameraman (marking actor positions and slating), and a Grip/Electric (setting up and plugging in lights, adding diffusers, etc.).

Aside from getting to experience all sorts of different roles on film sets, we also get to learn from industry experts through weekly panels.

This week’s panel featured experts in post-production, including a guy who worked on post-visualization for Superman, and a woman who’s working directly with Denis Villeneuve’s wife to create content for Dune: Part Three.

Something I really appreciate about these panels is the honesty. Online, Hollywood loves to talk about itself as being pro-creativity, but the panel members all openly state the truth: it’s all about money.

The panel members all started off going through the same experience as us, which means that they can relate to us better than Oscar-winning directors yapping on podcasts.

In some ways, it’s very demotivating when they truthfully explain how cooked the industry is right now - strikes, AI, streaming… the list goes on.

But on the other hand, some stories are quite motivating, showing how taking the right steps can really get you far.

I’ve been compiling all my notes from these panels and my classes on Notion - check it out :)

So… next week is a big one.

I officially got the Editor role for our final short films.

That means going in on Friday and Saturday from around 2pm - 9pm and editing basically non-stop,

then getting an assembly cut ready for screening on Monday in front of 50+ people,

and having the Picture Lock version ready by Thursday, to be screened in front of hundreds on Friday.

I’m pretty excited to kickoff the editing once filming starts - the team is incredibly talented, and the film genre is what I’ve always wanted to edit.

It’s pretty hard to do pre-production for the editing process itself, so I’ll just be praying for the best when I step foot into the editing suite.

See you in two weeks, when hopefully I’ll have edited a banger short film 🙏