How To Prioritize Your Spending Zero Fluff
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- Visual Arts
When you have extra money, what do you spend it on? Typically for me I have a list of things prioritized, but the question is how do you prioritize them? I’d like to suggest that you prioritize them by impact. Sure there’s all kinds of things I could buy but the question is which things are going to make a difference my audience will experience? I don’t know if you’re noticing a theme here at all by I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder against production. It’s just such a big hairy beast it’s easy to lose sight of one thing in particular and it’s that one thing you can’t afford to lose sight of, the person actually experiencing whatever the crap it is you’re making.
But back to the money. Lets use a real world example, I’m talking about situations where you could either make your process more convenient or use your money to do something different that you couldn’t have done otherwise, like as a filmmaker spending let’s just say $300 to rent a dolly vs using that same $300 to rent a system to wirelessly monitor the footage from the camera to an iPad. Which one is the audience actually going to experience? The dolly. Because when we push the camera forward or backward the audience is actually seeing and feeling the impact of that shot. The camera movement communicates a ton to my audience. And on the flip side, no one in my audience knows or cares how convenient it was for us to monitor the footage on set. And sure, if you’ve got the budget for both then do it, but all I’m saying is don’t sacrifice impact for convenience. It’s an issue of priority, and there are countless decisions like this to be made.
It’s a big deal because we as artists don’t just serve ourselves. We also serve a whole world out there full of people who we have the potential to impact with the art we make and it’s really important not to lose sight of that and let materialism run the show and rob everyone of what could have been if our priorities were straight. And I realize I’m talking about filmmaking because that’s my world but this applies across the board into any kind of art form, do you work for your tools or for your audience? That's the question. Who are you working for? Because personally I don’t think anyone really cares what you have, they just care what you make with it.
When you have extra money, what do you spend it on? Typically for me I have a list of things prioritized, but the question is how do you prioritize them? I’d like to suggest that you prioritize them by impact. Sure there’s all kinds of things I could buy but the question is which things are going to make a difference my audience will experience? I don’t know if you’re noticing a theme here at all by I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder against production. It’s just such a big hairy beast it’s easy to lose sight of one thing in particular and it’s that one thing you can’t afford to lose sight of, the person actually experiencing whatever the crap it is you’re making.
But back to the money. Lets use a real world example, I’m talking about situations where you could either make your process more convenient or use your money to do something different that you couldn’t have done otherwise, like as a filmmaker spending let’s just say $300 to rent a dolly vs using that same $300 to rent a system to wirelessly monitor the footage from the camera to an iPad. Which one is the audience actually going to experience? The dolly. Because when we push the camera forward or backward the audience is actually seeing and feeling the impact of that shot. The camera movement communicates a ton to my audience. And on the flip side, no one in my audience knows or cares how convenient it was for us to monitor the footage on set. And sure, if you’ve got the budget for both then do it, but all I’m saying is don’t sacrifice impact for convenience. It’s an issue of priority, and there are countless decisions like this to be made.
It’s a big deal because we as artists don’t just serve ourselves. We also serve a whole world out there full of people who we have the potential to impact with the art we make and it’s really important not to lose sight of that and let materialism run the show and rob everyone of what could have been if our priorities were straight. And I realize I’m talking about filmmaking because that’s my world but this applies across the board into any kind of art form, do you work for your tools or for your audience? That's the question. Who are you working for? Because personally I don’t think anyone really cares what you have, they just care what you make with it.