Creator Notes#0: Introduction to Creator Notes
A new series for creators & entrepreneurs
People often ask me about making things, documentaries in particular. They ask me about professional situations, around which they have anxieties and aspirations that they think I might know something about; I’m old friends with anxieties, frenemy with aspiration. Sometimes they’re thinking about starting a business, particularly in the creative industries, and want to know what that’s been like, is it as daunting and brutal as they say, or as exhilarating and rewarding as they pretend? (it’s both).
These conversations typically take place pressed into some corner at a party, where my thoughts face a desperate fight through thick alcoholic mist before any prospect of emerging into coherence.
On other occasions they apologetically invade my mailbox, where, unfairly, they become collateral damage in my frontal assault against that morning’s email hordes and phone call cavalry charges.
Still other times people ask if they can schedule half an hour or so on the phone – “just to pick your brain?” I always agree and, after, they always generously say they found my stream of consciousness helpful, but I’m a little doubtful, aware that my route to the point may have been circuitous and perplexing.
So, since I have a newsletter, I thought that I’d share some of those thoughts and experiences in a more serene atmosphere, for anyone who might find them useful.
Time has expanded a fair bit. We opened our first production office and post-production studios, above a button dyer in Shoreditch, in 2002; we had enough cash to last for three months. 22 years have bled away since, I’ve picked up a thing or two.
I’m going to start an ongoing series called ‘Creator Notes’, in which I’ll record lessons from my working life as an independent creative, writer, filmmaker and studio owner. These will begin gently and we’ll see how it goes, we may get to the $3.6m lawsuit.