Attempting any medium profoundly deepens my appreciation for it. You get a sense through experimenting, through trying to see what you can do, and finding what you cannot, of the real skill, task, the potentials of each thing. I feel now that too many people rush into one medium, the obvious one being film, which is really a combination of all of the mediums. Myself being one of those people originally. I had the idea with all of these Think Worlds tasks, and even with my initial plan to write a short story a week, which I set out upon two years ago, to basically familiarize myself with the facets of storytelling. Because, even that word, storytelling, is taken far too often to be far too self contained. Marketing is just storytelling. Branding is just marketing. I feel that this has made me an immeasurably better public speaker just through intuitively grasping (and struggling with) these things for a few years.

As you embed yourself in the mindset of, “I am going to tell a story a week,” Not a good one, mind you, you begin to have ideas for stories all the time. I have now at least three or four story ideas a week. I write them all down, and I write out the one I am the most excited about. I am starting to fall in love though with a lot of them; I feel like my ideas are getting better and better (though so far my absolute favourite are from my first two months of story writing at all, which shows the beauty of ignorance). This is another benefit of the Think Worlds plan: I can pass off many of these to be collaborations with others, since I don’t really have the time to write and polish three or four stories a week, when, for instance, I am also going with my inventing.

Being familiar with different mediums, you get a sense of where these different stories should be told. I used to have the mindset that film is the best medium. I would still probably agree with that statement overall, but it is not the best medium for everything. In a story, for instance, you can have all these wonderful internal monologues and noticings of a character, which would only seem stilted if they tried to be delivered in a film. Film could capture the noticings, but not the past revisitations without flashbacks, which are now rarely executed tastefully, or in a sense of losing oneself in the memory of the moment. Losing a sense of reality, which is what I think they are very good for. In film there is always a sense of distance from the character as compared to writing, because it is being held up for you, not something that you can inhabit, sink behind the eyes of, imagine. This is part of why I realize I like Kubrick’s films more and more. People criticize them as being detached, but this is what film does, so it is playing to the medium’s strengths. In writing you can inhabit a character, in film you can identify with one if it is done well, but you always are still looking at them, observing them.

The goal is to become experienced enough with something to know the real and ready possibilities, as well as the out-there inventable ones (and therefore relative cost of money or time for a finishable project) without getting into habit, since repetition of a subset within anything blinds you to the full possibilities. Usually, the nature of work and specialization over the last century has made it so that people, even within fields, identify their specialty, what they can do well, and do it over and over. And this inhibits their sights and experimentation. Animation is itself a subset of filmmaking. And within this, you have many different ways of going about it, and most animators today are totally focused within whatever their subset is: 2D vector, 2D drawing, 3D — these are the basics. But there are other ways, are new potential ways being thought of all the time. Take the possibilities of slit scan photography, for instance, which still have not been really all the way explored. For iPhones now there is just on application available for slit-scan emulation, which I have been playing around with. Perhaps knowing what you can do, in the usual safe sense of how people take it, is less important to ask yourself than: /what can be done?/

We have to be. Each of us ourselves is so small. So I don’t laugh at people when they cry at their coffee being wrong. I will tell them to stop if they get angry about it. But I can feel how much of a disappointment them being out of your favourite food is, or a rock stuck in your shoe is, or a stubbed toe is. What is puzzling is that we do not take the same joy when these little things go right for us. We should. We should enjoy each and every regular and ordinary day; that ordinary cup of coffee, that ordinary morning kiss. These are the things that must keep us going as we plug along to the grand moments. There will be those, but even if we get a lot of them, they are few and far between; we are so small. We cannot write a book in an afternoon, or build a house in a day. It is many days, and they all start — and must be carried through — on the full heart, filled up by just that ordinary cup of coffee and good morning kiss. We let our days be ruined much easier than we let them be made. Made — the very word says it — we make the choice ourselves.

Writing is the perfect habit for the insomniac. It does not require the energy, like drawing or painting, to actually get up, to sit anywhere, to move anything but the slightest muscles and tendons of the finger. In fact, it benefits from the drunkenly honest electricity of being half asleep. That is when we think all that we can, and when we say what we want to (when we’re saying it to nobody). We can only be all-there when we are half-there. That is when and how we can get this false self out of the way.