[trop]

This has some relation to the "Disney Method" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_method) where one delays self-criticism until after one has engineered out the problem, and delays engineering things out until one has dreamed up ideas. Of course the Disney Method is cyclical, and requires returning to the dreaming-up state and on from there.

This also reminds me of how 35mm street/photojournalists work (see, for example, Garry Winogrand, or Josef Koudelka, or Robert Frank). One makes tens of thousands of images, culls them down via work prints to hundreds, then choose a few dozen to print well as the final work. The final images appear inevitable, though it's unclear if there was something magical in the moment of the photography, or the culling process is the secret. See http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/robert-frank/the-... for an example of Robert Frank's contact sheets and how he homed/honed in on an image.

EDIT/ADDITION: A fiction writer I met teaches her students to make three passes at their work. As I recall, she described the first being for ideas, the second for intentions, the third is to make it read as inevitable.

[vvanders]

Yeah, photography has all sorts of parallels. Most people are shocked to find out that shooting ~1-2k images on an outing is normal.

95% of the time I won't know if a shot is "worthwhile" until after I cull/process but it's all about setting up environments that promote the chance of that happening.

Major respect for the people who used to do it in Film, much more discipline and technique required back then.

[hammock]

How does this work for video though? I remember reading somewhere there is about 3 hours of film shot for every hour of final product. That's more than some might think but not close to 100:1

[ecdavis]

There is significantly more planning behind video than most still photography. Scenes are story-boarded, shots are carefully set up, lighting is adjusted, etc.

When you look at video that was not carefully planned the ratio of hours shot to hours used goes way up. The Blair Witch Project had a ratio of about 12:1 and while the video from that film was effective it was hardly outstanding from an artistic point of view. Shot-on-location documentaries like Happy People or Welcome to Leith have similar ratios. Even though they're carefully shot, the ad-hoc nature of collecting footage for a film like that makes it necessary to amass a huge amount.

[Someone]

And of course, there are outliers. Stanley Kubrick did both insane amounts of planning _and_ an insane number of shots. Eyes Wide Shut, at 2 hours, 39 minutes, took 400 days of filming (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/trivia). I guess that gets you over the 100:1 ratio.

On the sitcom front, there is Fawlty Towers, where they six spent weeks writing and up to 25 hours of editing on each _episode_ (http://www.tv.com/shows/fawlty-towers/)

[hammock]

I dont know what TV editing workflow is like, but 25h doesn't seem outrageous to me. I would budget 2h of edit/mix per song when producing an album. I'm sure there are many who spend way more than that.

[caseysoftware]

> A fiction writer I met teaches her students to make three passes at their work. As I recall, she described the first being for ideas, the second for intentions, the third is to make it read as inevitable.

That's really intriguing. Do you have any more info or background on this?

[trop]

It was a conversation at a party, and I fear I've even forgotten the author/teacher's name. She used the three "i"'s as a mnemonic. Thinking about it, I wonder if the sequence was actually "incident", "intent", then "inevitable".

The scheme is to write down what happened in the first pass. Then the second pass is to make things follow -- fix plot holes, clarify motivation, iron out chronology, etc. The third, "inevitable", pass is, of course, key. It is to hide the seams, to make the story/book appear as if it came whole cloth.

One (counter) example would be Faulkner's first novel, "Soldiers' Pay". In it you can see the hand of the author, self-conscious characterizations and manipulation of scene. It's educational to read, as it clarifies his technique in a way that his accomplished and inevitable-seeming books obscure.

[hellbanner]

One of the major AAA companies (Bethesda, iirc), uses this on their level design. They dream up all of the levels, then design all in parallel across 4 passes.