It's the Process, Not the Results
on creating from where you're at
Let’s lighten the mood around here. :)
I’ve been thinking about doing this post for a while but it’s going to be embarrassing as all hell.
For the longest time, I’ve aspired to make art.
Garett — the boy I long pretended to be — had poured countless hours into pursuing filmmaking.
The journey began for him when he was a teenager. He’d make a film at school and find the process intoxicating. He’d start making them with his friends. He was kind of a dictator about it.
The thing that hooked him was putting it all together in editing, adding in music, making it an experience to watch.
That very first film he made was purest trash, as would be much of what he made.
He knew it though. That was the fun.
This first project he’d done that I still have was from Freshman year. It was made for a friend’s class. They’d needed to make a ‘commercial’ for a gnome doll in business class.
He’d convinced them to let him make it into the pilot for a TV series, which could be pitched as something to run in tandem and sell the doll.
He made… this.
His friend would get an A+.
I honestly cannot believe I just shared that. I hate this so much.
From there, things would improve, he’d try his hand in horror and dark comedy. He’d make things that were attempting to be dramatic.
Yet, Garett was not an authentic person.
What he had to say was tainted by the things he’d denied within, which was everything. It was the fact he wasn’t even a boy.
So, no matter how long he worked at refining his craft. His obsession was with finding a way to produce things entirely by himself with the highest technical quality, always searching for what might be a story that worked despite his lack of authentic voice.
He liked things that were stripped down and visceral, they spoke to his talents and lack of heart.
The greatest lesson he’d learn from these many years was to appreciate the process of creating art, and not the result, always losing himself in the making — feeling so dissatisfied with everything after.
Even still, I have trouble finding motivation to seek an audience for my writings, to try and get published or do it myself. The process of creation itself is what matters to me.
My uncle was a famous baseball coach. His first national championship had him crying in the parking lot after the game. All he’d striven for, all he’d sacrificed to get there, and it felt meaningless in the end.
So, he’d committed his life to what he loved, the coaching. Working with young men and grafting character into them. The results became a biproduct.
He’s the winningest coach in college baseball history.
The filmmaker who made Dazed and Confused even made a documentary about his coaching philosophy.
Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach
I really appreciated having it to get to know him better. He’d cut out my dad rightfully, because of his toxic victim mentality, and it meant I only got to see him a few times through my life. Though, he always treated me like the dearest family when I did. I’d longed to know him better when he was alive but just not had the chance.
The lessons from his philosophy apply to every situation in life.
To find what matters to you, then commit to your process — making that where you place your energy — rather than focusing on the results you hope to achieve, is the recipe for success in all things.
After years of striving to make something that would break into a film festival, attempting to make genre pieces which were elevated by technical ability and sported clever production value, Garett gave up.
The writing was on the wall. People just didn’t like his art.
So, he’d decided to go out in flames, the way he started, with completely overt trash-art.
Over the course of a year and a half he’d produce three episodes of the most nonsensical web-series ever created. Its purpose — the joy of creation.
I still believe the number one reason my ex-wife has so much resentment towards me, is that Garett convinced her to produce this with him.
He’d pour thousands and thousands of dollars into this. Making film is not cheap — even when you’re doing it at a basement level.
His entire process for writing was to channel a 12-year old boy who was making all of the dumbest decisions based solely on what was cool, specifically ignoring if things didn’t make sense.
It was Garett’s magnum opus, this web series. Especially the final episode.
The series was called STONE. It was a parody of action films that made no sense — where the hero is a murderous psycho being pedestalized — where the morals of the storytellers are far beyond suspect.
Something about the absurdity of 80’s and 90’s action movies, their unadulterated toxic masculinity, their subtextual homoeroticism, just how plain bad they are — I still love them.
The idea was this would be a tongue in cheek parody, with the veneer of seriousness, which was undermined at every turn by the most terrible storytelling and character decisions possible.
Throughout the entire production — from writing the scripts, to storyboarding every shot, shooting the film, editing the video and audio — he’d made the dumbest choices he could.
Look at these masterpieces of storyboards.
This terrible series of shorts would find its widest audience in India — absurdly, to be honest — where they didn’t know it was a joke.
Nobody but Garett had any idea what was going on. Still, everyone had more fun than they had since we were kids. We’d made a little stupid family of creative joy over the course of three dumbest productions.
It was all hugs and love. So much laughter. Everybody started taking part in adding into the stupidity by the third episode.
Literally, a part of the concept, was that the plot itself would never come together into anything tangible.
This was a mistake.
When you make terrible parody trash, having a stupid and easy to understand story is key. To have made the story itself so written in method — channeling that that little boy — made it come out intangibly strange.
People didn’t realize it was a joke. They’d think he made this thing and thought it was cool.
That tongue was too far in cheek apparently, and the way he’d gone so hard on the music, sound effects, and editing made it super confusing tonally.
I’ll stop setting it up this masterpiece.
Here is Garett’s final, greatest work.
(WARNING: VIOLENCE AND STUFF)
After all that, I’ll just say — thank God I found my voice.
It makes up for everything to be able to create art that makes my heart sing. Especially after so long having had to watch Garett make shit like this.
I’m excited to keep writing The Justiceers. :)
