It’s been a long and slow road, but its now a year since we filmed ‘Melbourne: A Guide to Living’, the sequel to ‘London: A Guide for the Naive‘, and hopefully only part two in a trilogy. The film is finished and will soon be submitted to different festivals.

Creative control is a beautiful thing. It’s been said that a film is written 3 times. Once by the writer, once by the director and finally by the editor. To be in control of each of those stages is fantastic and allows me to carry a project through from conception to completion in exactly the way I want it. It’s always still the case that the product you finish with is different to how you intended it, complete with added flourishes and unexpected shortcomings, but overall you’re left with an appreciation of the whole process and leave with lessons of how you’d do things next time. In a multi-collaborative project artists often complain that creative control was wrestled away from them and what’s left is a disheartening imitation of what they had first set out for.

However, it still has to be said that film is essentially a collaborative medium, and while maintaining such control of the whole process is great if you want things done exactly how you envisage them, it’s just too much work for one person to take on board and denies the possibility of something magical and entirely unimagined taking your film in a new direction.

Learning how to direct and produce films has been a great lesson and given expression to different aspects of my creativity, but one thing I’ve come to realise is that I’m essentially driven by the writing and ideas, and no sooner have I finished filming than my interest turns to getting on with the next script and pursuing the next idea. To get mired down in editing and promotion divides my attention and stunts the development of the craft I’m actually interested in focusing on.

I learnt not too long ago about the idea of the 80/20 or Pareto principle, a theory originally developed in relation to economics but soon taken on in many different fields and expanded into a general, if slightly rough, principle. The idea is that roughly speaking 80% of something’s effects, comes from just 20% of it’s causes. More can be read about it here on Wikipedia but it’s enough to say that for my purposes 80% of the time I spend, or it might be more fitting to say waste, in relation to a project comes from just 20% of the things I do for that project. Or to put it another way, editing and promoting a film takes 80% of my effort and time when it might take someone who actually knows how to do those things a fraction of that.

If you’re able to collaborate with the right people and combine your skills you’re able to increase your productivity exponentially. Just stick to the 80% of tasks you excel at and outsource the rest to someone else.

Besides, as Woody Allen says, if 80% of success is showing up, you just need to find someone else to do that other 20% and the job is done.

Melbourne: A Guide to Living will hopefully be going to a few festivals later in the year. If you’re interested in seeing a preview enter your email address in the bar at the top of the page.