Ignorant Child Without Any Idea What He's Doing

I'm talking about myself, I would never insult another person in this manner. I'm much more passive aggressive than that.

I like this, it was a very quick solution to coloring a drawing that I pulled out last minute, but it looks intentionally distressed in a way that I love. This merits further consideration.

I saw something on Instagram that turned my head recently. I know, what are you doing on Instagram? Whatever. It turned my head because it was about fish eye perspective drawing, which when you approach it from a linear academic structure is one of the last things you learn about perspective drawing. BUT. This dude Paul Heaston laid it out in a simplistic way that I thought was intuitive and low-pressure, not necessarily drawing from the building blocks of 1-point, 2-point, 3-point perspective and on. Because, technically, fisheye is 5-point perspective drawing which I find way harder to explain than to actually just do.

With this technique, I think I could teach a determined middleschooler how to draw in fisheye, which is pretty epic.

I may come back to this technique and explain it better later, you can watch his process here, but I have it a couple of 15-minute drawing shots here and I can tell you that the technique works if you can wrap your head around the basics!

Try 1: Interpretation of indoor workspace; I really ran out of patience with the ponytail palm.

Try 2: Interpretation of outdoor workspace. I cursed myself for leaving that extension cord on the table.

This has seriously opened my mind in the sense of what I can teach and in what order. You don’t have to start teaching color theory by having students make a boring color wheel, you can go right into color harmonies and mixing with a color wheel as a reference. Just another example. Thinking out of the box, thinking out of doors. Thinking solution-based thoughts.

This book amputated and cauterized any chance of me having a career in filmmaking

When I read this book I was 16. I’m pretty sure it was a Christmas gift, it was well known that I was at the height of happiness when making violent movies with my pals. They usually revolved around 30 seconds or less of context followed by us experimenting with fight planning and special effects. My senior year in high school we actually started to get pretty good with fake blood, I was sharing our movies with groups I was intimidated by before, and I started making okay money (for a jobless highschooler) editing videos for other peoples’ school projects. I had no idea that I was inflicting upon myself a real banger of a Golden Child syndrome, and Rebel without a Crew welded my coffin shut. Or rather, the excuse it gave me not to take anyone’s advice did.

Of course I’m not blaming Robert Rodriguez for why I did not seriously pursue a career in the moving pictures, it’s just that this book made me think that I fucking knew everything already. Maybe what made it worse was that I had a falsely humble attitude while thinking in my head all the while, “I don’t need anybody’s advice, I could do it better.“

Were there merits to my thinking? Sure. I had ideas, I executed them, I knew how to edit, I was serviceable as an extra or for light stunts (I always got killed at least once in our movies) and I knew my way around the cameras of the day. The problem was that my ideas were shit, my execution was passionate but undisciplined, I was not professionally guided in any way, and Rebel without a Crew gave me the excuse to refuse and hold in contempt any thought of formal training. Halfway through my senior year I made the decision to not even apply to film schools because I felt that I was somehow going to become the next Tarantino out of my garage in Sacramento. All of my actors joined the marines after high school, and my metamorphosis into film auteur never took place.

I don’t really regret this. I took a path that was directed by my aspirations and abilities. It took a long time to congeal into a business, but I think it happened when I was ready. I was a fucking idiot when I was 18 and I’m 90% certain that I would have squandered my time at a film school or UCLA or whatever and wasted a lot of money. I wasn’t ready.

Rebel Without a Crew holds a special place in my heart. In the hands of a stupid teenager it was apocalyptically ego-inflating, but to a more thoughtful reader it’s a story of struggle, hardship, and being lucky at the right times. The book is an inspirational story, but not a blueprint for success.

Robert Rodriguez’s movies run the gamut of quality but I can tell that with every frame he’s having the time of his life. So instead of “I don’t need anyone’s help“, I’ll take these lessons from it:

1. You don’t need anyone’s permission to make (movies, art, music, smut, literature, pottery, poetry, culture, counterculture, Garfield’s face in burning gasoline on the White House lawn) or anything else for that matter.

2. Don’t apologize for your work.

3. Enjoy.

Thank you all for your time and attention. I leave you until next week.