We have been told that our attention is broken and that is the reason why we forget almost everything we watch.
The truth is that we forget because nothing was designed to stay.
I believe the work worth making is the work designed to change something in the person watching it. Not to entertain, not to inform but to transform.
And transformation requires three things:
It requires intention: Knowing from the beginning what needs to shift in the person experiencing it, and designing every decision towards that direction.
It requires friction: Making the audience work for the arrival. The destination needs to be deserved, whatever is not earned gets forgotten easily.
It requires discovery: Letting the realisation happen inside the viewer, unannounced. The most powerful moments in any story are not when you are told something, are when you understand it yourself.
This is not a process, it is a filter;
Every decision, what to implement, what to cut, where to slow down, everything, passes through these three points.
The work that comes out the other side is the only work worth making.
Three questions for every project:
.01 What transformation does this need to create?
Start from the end. Work backwards. Know the exact feeling, state you want to leave before you design anything.
.02 Where is the friction?
Make people work. The destination needs to be deserved, if they don’t work for it they won’t remember it.
.03 How does the audience discover it themselves?
Layer the meaning. Hide the metaphor. Let the realisation happen inside them. The moment they find it, that belongs to them. That’s what stays.
This is not a method. Is how I work.
Is what I believe makes things stay, even today.
