Film and Family

Ep. 74 - The Power of 10 Minutes

• Anna Thalman

Share episode

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of the podcast at feature filmmaker. And we are so excited to have you here. This is a podcast episode that we want to keep short and simple. I wanted to talk to Anna who has worked directly with a bunch of clients regarding, time management and motivation and several things like this relating to. Making films. And I think most of us don't want to really, you know, it's not as exciting as talking about gear or. Then maybe even just the craft itself or writing, whatever it is that like, is most fun for you to think about in terms of filmmaking really good cinematographer or director or writer or whatever. Or even like financing films. I think a lot of us want to hear that stuff because we don't know how to do it. But really ultimately we can do any of these things if we just do them. If we move forward, if we learn what we need to learn and do what we need to do. And, but, and yet that sometimes it feels so impossible. We have all these mental blocks. And so today we wanted to talk about one of the things that we've been really focusing on, and it's a big theme of the, challenge. So Anna, could you tell me a little bit, first of all, about what. The free challenge is all about. Yeah. So I guess the problem is a lot of people want a career in this. And yet we don't really practice it on a daily basis. Like you said, we'll do a lot of stuff. That's a lot like filmmaking, but it's not actually making films. It's reading about making films. It's thinking about gear it's, you know, stuff like that. That feels productive. It feels like we're moving forward. But until we actually apply that knowledge, doesn't really go anywhere. So. I think a lot of times we also think that we're waiting on something we're waiting for money, time connections. Some sort of opportunity. But really you don't need any of those things. All you really need to do is sit down and start working just a little bit a day. Is all that it takes. So the challenge is to help people do that. It's just something I've seen so many times with clients where if they set a very simple, very doable goal to work on their film. So for the challenge, it's 10 minutes a day. Then they start to see. Huge results and a huge increase in confidence too, because. They realize I am a feature filmmaker. I'm making a feature film. I'm working on this every day and you start to see results and then you have a feature film and it just changes everything. But it all starts with. Setting a little bit of time aside, whatever that is for you. To work on it. And so this has looked different for a lot of people. Sometimes it's, I'm going to write one sentence of my screenplay a day, or I'm just going to open up the editing program. I'm just going to put one marker in of notes on. The edit or I'm just going to. Set a timer and do 10 minutes. So we've kind of taken that concept and created this challenge to help you get in that habit of working on your film career every day. So my question is Anna, have you implemented this habit or this approach to minimum baselines in your life, or even specifically the 10 minute rule that you're kind of doing in the challenge? specifically in your life in general and specifically in, filmmaking. Yeah, I'm not perfect at it. but whenever I find myself in a rut where I'm feeling some dread. Going into a project. It's usually because I just haven't been consistently doing it for a little while and I realized I fallen out of this habit. And so then I have two more intentionally. Set an alarm, create a timer, make myself go sit down and get started. And that really is the biggest hurdle is to get started. And there are times when I'm really busy and things are really crazy where I clock out after 10 minutes and I'm like, that's it today? I'm done. But most of the time, I end up working much longer than 10 minutes. And it's just getting over that initial hurdle that is really tricky. Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, I feel like we've mentioned this really on a very recent podcast episode, the Hans Zimmer said. He doesn't get writer's block. And when people ask him, what do they do? What does he do about writer's block? He says, I write. A few notes of music every day. And I never get riders born. Yeah. And so this idea that, because he's always speaking the language, he never forgets how to speak the language. And I think that, like anyone who's learned a foreign language. Or an language in addition to their first language. Knows that it only takes a few months of not speaking that language at all. And suddenly you're fluent. Do you think that that would stick in your brain? You start to realize that you forget you're forgetting words, you're forgetting. Grammatical approaches to structuring things and it goes fast. And then on a smaller scale. I had a professor who was very adamant about, when you're workshopping a script or you're workshopping and edit, you got to get in it. Get into it. Every day. It doesn't matter that you're in it for hours and hours a day. You just got to check in with that project every day. Cause if you, if you check out for too many days, it gets so hard, but Monday is always the hardest because you took the weekend off and you're like, where were we? What was the point of this? What was the vision? What was the approach? And I found that to be the case. And so it can be hard. I think sometimes. My biggest challenge in maintaining the 10 minute daily habit is if I forget, like, if I lose sight of like, What's the big picture here. What was the point of it? But I think what I've realized recently is. You don't have to be writing. It doesn't have to be 10 minutes of writing. It could be 10 minutes of thinking. It could be writing on a loose-leaf pays piece of paper. And just scribbling all your thoughts down. Like, why am I doing this? What's the point of this? Why do I even like this story, talking to someone about it, you know? And so. I feel like that's also working on the project for 10 minutes. That's also preventing writer's block. I mean scribbling stream of conscious thoughts is writing. It's not writer's block. It's writing. Just thinking about it is showing your brain. This is relevant. This is important. Hold onto this. And like you said, it's shocking how quickly you can forget things if it's not relevant to your brain. And that's how our brains work for our own good, because. We see the same things every day we get lots of stimuli. And our brain has to sort through all of that. So things we start to see over and over. We don't really see them anymore. They become invisible like that mess in the corner or whatever. You just don't see it because it's always there and your brain is looking for something new, something different, something. Relevant to what you're thinking about or working on. So it actually does help your member. I lived in Sheila for over a year and I got to the point where I was always speaking in Spanish, dreaming in Spanish, thinking in Spanish. And I was shocked when I called my family and I couldn't. Hardly speak in English. And I'd spoken English my whole life. So, so funny to forget that native tongue. You know, and it came back, but it took a little bit of time. So. And the same can happen with film. And, you know, we love to use this example from art and fear. This book, talks about a study that was done. And I recently re-read it and realized that I'd been saying it wrong. I kept saying it was paintings, but it's actually pottery. They did two different classes. One was graded by the weight of their pottery. They just had to reach a certain amount of finished products that weighed a certain amount. And then the other class had to just do one. One piece of pottery, but it was graded on its quality. And what they found at the end was the people who did quantity, who weren't concerned about quality actually had the higher quality pieces, because we can sit around all day a theorize like this other class did about what the perfect. Approaches to making a piece of pottery. But until we get down and start doing it, you know, that theory only goes so far. Well, and they said that the, the class that went by weight. If you took the best piece of their pottery versus. The one piece of the other classes the one that had been putting out more output. They displayed a higher degree of like an understanding of the principles that were being taught and everything. And so the 10 minute rule, if we extend that for me, what it says is. It's not just like the number of days you spend on like a huge passion project or even feature filmmaking. It's just the amount of work you're doing. And. The alternative is to sit around and theorize, like you said, Or try and make something perfect. And what we find is is that we spend. So long putting off it through passive action. What we actually want to create. That we never actually make any films, Well, Unfortunately, I have 15 seconds left because in honor of the power of 10 minutes, we are going to create. 10 minute episodes. So any closing thoughts in. Yeah, I just want to invite you to do the challenge. So many people have said this successful filmmakers are always saying, just go do it with what you have, what you can do right now. So that's our invitation. Awesome. Bye. Hi buddy.