Eight Things I (Re)Learned Editing Travel Anonymous

Sometimes having no limitations is the hardest obstruction. * To paraphrase the late novelist E.L. Doctorow., “[Making a movie] is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.” * In other words, the only way out is through. * It’s hard to be spontaneous if you’re clinging to the some vague notion that what you’re doing is wrong. If you let yourself fail extravagantly, you might succeed beyond expectation. * "The first draft of anything is shit." - Ernest Hemingway * The unconscious mind loves to work out problems. You may feel doubt and uncertainty but your brain is busy untying knots. * Write down insights and ideas immediately. You’ll forget them otherwise. Seriously, you will. • The simple answer comes last, after you’ve worked your way through all the rest. It’s like sculpting: you…

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Travel Anonymous: Lessons Learned, Again

I’m a big proponent of working within a set of limitations.

I’ve purposefully done this numerous times both at MediaStorm and in my own work: from setting out to make a film that’s exactly one-minute long to creating a fictional movie with the attributes of a documentary. Setting yourself up against restrictions can be a powerful means of encouraging creative problem solving.

But with Travel Anonymous, a MediaStorm collaboration with photographer Jeff Hutchens, I could literally do anything. Nothing was out of bounds.

Case in point: at one of my first meetings with Jeff, he told me he liked the idea of using only the tiniest portions of his images. A corner here, an interesting blur there. To work without regard to the “sacredness” of a photographer’s pictures felt both exhilarating, and quite honestly, a bit blasphemous.

There was just one objective: to convey what it feels like to travel so much that you lose all sense of time and place. This was to be an immersive, sensory experience.

Early on, though, I was confounded. (more…)

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