Studio Sessions

In It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter offers George Bailey $20,000 a year to work for him, and George turns him down. One of us has watched the film every year since he was 7. The pull between money and the work runs through the whole hour. One of us is 44 and feels behind, so he puts out a video every week to catch up. Meanwhile he's still sitting on a documentary we shot together, 5 terabytes of footage about a man in his early 60s, met in South Omaha, who's chasing a life as a touring musician. For him, YouTube is like knowing the lottery numbers, since every video earns something, and a film that may never pay keeps losing to it.

What helps is being where you are. On the drive over, one of us pulled into a car lot in Council Bluffs to finish a roll with 4 shots left, and a man on a BMX bike rode straight into the frame. Then we get practical, with what we call controlling the stack: owning everything about a piece of work, including where it's shown and what it earns. Nobody who depends on YouTube quite does, since the platform can switch the work off. We wonder how big a one-person operation can get before the machinery takes over, and end on Casey Neistat, who won't let anyone else edit his videos.

-Ai

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We read and appreciate all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Show Notes:

It's a Wonderful Life - https://bit.ly/3PFHThF
Matt's FilmConvert Video -    • Comparing 16mm Film 🎥 to Video 📹 | Is... 
The Toymaker -    • Short Documentary | THE TOYMAKER | Ba... 
General Dodge - https://vimeo.com/622537380?share=copy
Oppenheimer Medium Format Black & White Film -    • Oppenheimer: Shot On Kodak Film 
Mr. Destiny - https://bit.ly/3PNfuGK
Mr. Beast's Interview with Colin & Samir -    • An Unfiltered Conversation with MrBeast 
Casey Neistat -    / @casey  

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 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

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Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

One of us went to VidSummit, a big YouTube conference in Los Angeles, and came home put off. One talk on growing a channel suggested finding a charity to build your videos around. He'd rather see more people like his brother, whose 20-minute video, made with no thought for views, he couldn't stop watching. A line in Killing Them Softly, that America is a business, hits home for one of us. He majored in finance and once wanted to work on Wall Street, until The Wolf of Wall Street and reading about the financial crisis turned his stomach.

Then one of us makes a confession. A friend of his, another Final Cut Pro YouTuber, got big views by picking apart a famous creator's editing. With his own videos doing poorly, he made his own version about Marques Brownlee's editing, and it took off. He calls what drove him to it unbecoming. From there we get to fame and what it does to the work. Hunter S. Thompson ended up signing more autographs than Jimmy Carter on the campaign he was covering. A photographer has the same problem, since once he's famous he can't disappear into a crowd. We talk about drawing a few lines around your work that you'll never cross. Near the end, one of us shares a line he read calling photography the best description never written.

-Ai

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider liking, commenting and subscribing. Thanks for listening/watching, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Show Notes:
VidSummit - https://www.vidsummit.com
Killing Them Softly - https://bit.ly/3PLldxZ
The Wolf of Wall Street - https://bit.ly/3PwyuJs
Patagonia - https://www.patagonia.com
The Founder - https://www.netflix.com/title/80101899
The Final Cut Pro Video Copy I Made - https://bit.ly/3ZpV7DH
Bob Dylan - A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall Lyrics: 

Support the show

 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask

Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

Bob Dylan started out as a young Woody Guthrie imitator and kept reinventing himself. His line "All I can do is be me, whoever that is" gets us onto the interests people hide because they don't seem to fit, like the pro wrestling one of us grew up on. Then someone we know writes to say they've been feeling stuck, and most of the episode is our answer. Film school taught one of us to treat screenwriting as a job, so he wrote at least 5 pages on every day he wasn't on a paid gig, inspired or not. It's the discipline of the apprentices in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, who spend years on the rice before they're allowed to touch the fish.

The other half of the answer is a framework. One of us makes every video on his photography channel to the same recipe, 6 video clips and 10 photos, so only the camera and the place change. Our rule is a routine you could keep on your worst day. At the College World Series, in awful light on a 92-degree day, one of us shot anyway, and watching a small moment unfold with a little boy made the trip worth it. We end on a Dylan song one of us has carried since he was 13, about being sure of your song before you sing it, which makes him wary of putting work out.

Mentioned in this episode: Bob Dylan, Walt Whitman, Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 2, Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, Stephen King's On Writing, David Gelb's Jiro Dreams of Sushi, George Lucas, Anthony Bourdain, Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Akira Kurosawa.

-Ai

Support the show

 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask

Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

 Show Notes: 

Rick Rubin's book "The Creative Act: A Way of Being" | https://geni.us/CreativeAct 

Fred Herzog | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Herzog 

Fred Herzog's photo titled "Curtains" | https://bit.ly/44jIH0Y 

Alec Soth | A Pound of Pictures | https://alecsoth.com/photography/projects/a-pound-of-pictures 

Gary Winogrand | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Winogrand 

Joel Meyerowitz | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Meyerowitz 

Harry Gruyaert | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Gruyaert 

Charlie Trotter | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Trotter 

Canon Canonet G-III 17 | https://global.canon/en/c-museum/product/film84.html 

A family snapshot pulled from a shoebox at an antique store can hit as hard as a Fred Herzog photograph, and we spend a while trying to work out why. Maybe a photographer's intention shows in the picture, or maybe it's only what we bring to it. Garry Winogrand wanted the camera to see the world without him in the way, and Alec Soth built a whole project out of strangers' snapshots bought by the pound.

Anthony Bourdain once drew a line between chefs who are technical masters and the few he'd call artists, and it starts an argument about whether anyone should call themselves an artist at all. We talk about staying power, too: how Bob Dylan made records that mattered again decades after his first ones, and how much a famous name changes what we see in new work. It ends in a thrift store on the way out of Rocky Mountain National Park. A day that didn't go to plan turned up a Canon Canonet QL17 GIII behind the counter, and one of us takes it as a lesson straight out of Rick Rubin's The Creative Act about letting the plan go.

-Ai

Support the show

 If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. 

Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask

Website: https://studiosessionspod.com