Process schmocess

I've been noticing that while my creative process is horribly inefficient, it is useful and curiously consistent.

When I first started working on the film we created as solid a structure as we could. Then, when we started shooting I started improvising and shooting new things like the "photo flying out of Ben's hand in the desert" shot. Then after improvising I seem to lose track of what I'm doing. I just go on auto-pilot and keep working. Then there seem to be gaping logic holes so I try to fix things, sometimes radically restructuring the project. That's the stage where I added the voice over. Then I think this is nonsense, let's get back to basics, so I try to strip everything down to the core. Then I start adding things back in. Then I finally figure out how and why we did everything in a particular way in the first place.

So it's like starting out with a vision, losing your way and exploring and then finding your way back to the same place you began. Like Dorothy said, "there's no place like home."

The disadvantage of doing things this way is obvious: it takes a lot of time and energy and is brutally inefficient. The advantage is that you really learn a lot about what you're doing inside and out.