Just Start: With a BOX OF SCRAPS

In a CAVE!

Of every line of dialogue written for 17 years worth of Marvel films, I can’t think of one that’s endured longer, or resonated with people harder, than Obadiah Stane yelling at a scientist in the very first Iron Man:

“Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave!” *Dramatic pause* “With a box of scraps!”

The Russos understood how pivotal this moment was, too: at the end of Avengers: Endgame, after the credits, you can hear the sound of someone hammering on metal, a callback to Tony Stark building his first suit in the original Iron Man film.

I think there’s something about the Box Of Scraps idea that resonates with us, and it’s why Tony Stark works as a character: we’d all like to be the sort of person who can be thrown into adversity with minimal tools or outside assistance and comes out with something amazing. But I think there might be more to it than that: I kind of believe that starting out with nothing but a box of scraps might be the best way to do good work. Here’s why.

You make yourself technical
If you start out on YouTube by paying an editor to edit your stuff, you never have to learn to edit: you just throw a load of A-roll at someone and trust them to worry about the transitions and cuts. If you start on your own, you develop your own understanding of what’s possible, what you like, and what you’d like to get better at. Robert Rodriguez puts it best, in this (excellent) 10-minute film school video: “Too many creative people don’t want to learn how to be technical, so what happens? they become dependent on technical people. Become technical, you can learn that. If you’re creative and technical, you’re unstoppable.” If you’re interested in editing video, take notes on videos you find cool and search for how to use the effects you like. If you want to be a writer, don’t use ChatGPT for your drafts: figure out how you can say what you want to say, even if it takes longer (it will). Being technical is difficult: it’s why it sets you apart.

You avoid choice paralysis
Rodriguez again: “How do you make a cheap movie? – Look around you, what do you have around you? Take stock in what you have. Your father owns a liquor store – make a movie about a liquor store. When I did El Mariachi I had a turtle, I had a guitar case, I had a small town and I said I’ll make a movie around that.” If you have unlimited options, you end up paralysed: if you have to make something with the resources you have access to, it focuses your attention a lot. Kevin Smith has made a lot of good films, but I’m not sure any are better than Clerks, which he shot at the convenience store where he worked because he couldn’t afford to do anything else.

You get more creative
One of the people I’ve found inspiring for years is Karen X Cheng, who first went viral with a video called “Girl learns to dance in a year”, and now works as an advertising creative, finding inventive ways to capture amazing camera shots with selfie sticks, wheeled chairs and string. As a result, she’s doing stuff I’ve never seen before: but with a sort of unpolished feel to it that looks more magical than an obviously CGI shot. When you don’t have any budget to blow, you work with what you have, and sometimes the results are amazing.

You learn what you need
When I first started playing piano, I did it on a 63-key Yamaha that was (luckily) lying around my dad’s house, propped up on an old clothes hamper — I had that piano for almost nine months before I upgraded to my current Roland FP10, and by then I knew exactly what I was looking for. When I first started working out properly, I did it with a duffel bag full of duct-taped together sandwich bags and a cheap pullup bar: when I joined a gym, I knew what I wanted to do. And when I started a YouTube channel, I did it on a cheap phone with no lights or microphone, editing in iMovie: when I’d made about 50 videos, I knew enough to upgrade to a Rode mic and DaVinci Resolve (I still use the terrible phone camera most of the time). If you buy the best stuff to get started, there’s a good chance you buy the wrong stuff.

Look: I’ve thought a bit about how to present this post, because I don’t want it to come across as a happy-clappy, everyone-has-the-same-24-hours hustle culture thing: having the money, or time, or mental bandwidth to focus on creative projects is a huge advantage. But if you don’t have much to work with, or you’re waiting until you’ve got the right kit or the right environment, just start. Hopefully you’re not in a cave.

Have a great weekend!

Joel x

Stuff I’ve done

Is Dua Lipa the best literary interviewer? -The Guardian
I happened on Dua Lipa’s podcast interviews a while ago, then I binge-listened to a whole load of them, because she’s so good at the form. The Guardian, very nicely, let me write about why.

Stuff I like

📖 Book - Middlemarch by George Eliot
Middlemaaaarch! This has taken me an age to read — it’s 700 pages long! — but it’s so good, with these quotable little gems sprinkled across its whole length, that I really didn’t mind: it felt like checking in on my pals Dorothea and Lydgate in a massively entertaining soap operate. The insights about how we humans operate are so on point, and the humour is so tight, and the sad bits are so emotional, that the only reminder that it’s 150 years old is the sentence structure: you’d never get away with it now. Incredible!

🎞️ Film - Civil War

About a week after reading Natalia Antonova talking about how awful genuine societal disorder would be for pretty much everyone, I watched this — and, yeah, I think it’s pretty good at getting the point across. Alex Garland is incredible at creating memorable visuals, and the sheer amount of insane imagery in this film is worth watching it for: but it’s also pretty thought-provoking. I feel like, at the time of release, a lot of people criticised Garland for not making a political stand with it — explaining specifically that Fascist Man Bad or even why the conflict started. For me, that completely misses the point: it’s a film about how fragile the social contract is, and how bad things could get, very quickly, if it unravels.

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