Glad you’re liking them, Enos!

I’ve had success with the very same tactic, Enos. Obviously, it can’t always be employed (it’s a good idea to pick and choose your battles), but it’s an excellent approach if you have strong reasoning for the choices you’ve made. If what you think is a great idea doesn’t make it into a project though, you can always kick it down the road to a future project. That’s the great thing about creative work, you can come back to ideas in different contexts when they don’t work the first time you’ve tried them.

However when presenting these things to the directors we often just play them a scene to review and maybe do not explain our thought process so when they hear something we think is great they will just be like…’not sure about that little sound there…take it out’. That little sound may be the essence of this idea we put so much thought into. I feel if we do not explain the thought process to them then we are not doing our work properly and we need to at least have them see what is behind that idea. Too often we just say ‘oh sure yea..we can take that out’ and a great idea may go unused. Even better…we should involve them earlier on in our thought process so that it evolves together…this will hopefully lead to even better ideas or moments and if nothing else will augment the appreciation the directors have for our work when they see the depth of the thought processes we go through. Of course sometimes our ideas were actually just not very good so its important to forget any ego/attachment to the idea and drop it too when that is the case. I’ve had directors question a design moment or idea and ask for it to be dropped but after asking them to just let me explain my thought process behind it or the intention of it they have thought it was a great idea and it has stayed in…or we then developed it more from there on…and of course at times we just dropped it anyways. But at least they were aware of the full intention before discarding it. Anyways, liking these little Sunday posts :)