johnplanet:

The missing item from the Something Like 47 Things post.

40. The story of “rocking later” goes here.

The story goes, Carl wanted to make a CD that rocked. But Carl said he couldn’t rock because he didn’t have a Brownanator YYZ 2000. It would get him that “rocking” sound. So instead of practicing and writing and well, rocking, he watched a lot of TV, sometimes he went to the used CD store, or just hanging out where he complained to all his buds about how his job sucked and his girl friend didn’t. He wouldn’t need to work he boasted “when he got the Brownanator! Rocking would commence! And all kinds of girls would be willing to, um, uhh, huh, huh, huh, ya know?!!”

Finally someday become today. His BYYZ2K was on his door step. The manual warning about turning up to 11 was tossed aside. Carl just plugged it in and plugged himself in. The Brownanator glowed red and there was a hum. He played his first chords. An E chord, which of course, surprise, it didn’t rock. He didn’t rock. But it wasn’t the Brownanator’s fault. Carl hadn’t practiced his craft by rocking everyday. Disappointed, he blamed it on the YYZ2K and then said, “ya know, the YYZ3K is coming out soon…it has those new cool blue LEDs!”

This is the mind set that I call “rocking later.” It’s when you get caught up in the tools, the need for tools, relying on the tools, with a mind set that you cannot do something until you have that specific tool.

It was suggested in a forum that I contribute, that the people learning to write movies should use a writing tool called FinalDraft. Which replied by saying, “It is more important to write, using any tool! Don’t crutch writing on some tool.”

Writing a script should not be about some specific software program. It should be about the writing. Not the tool. I know that there are ’standards’ that Horrywoo scripts need to conform to, but when learning the craft of putting what’s in your head onto paper we can forget ‘those standards.’ We can learn to format later. Write, right now. Use TextEdit for gosh sakes.

This is a perfect example forcing the “rocking later” model on those that want to learn. Which is to say that “I can’t write a script until I get this tool called Final Draft Pro so until then I won’t write….” Right. We can learned a ton about editing video with iMovie or QuickTime Pro. We don’t need Final Cut Pro to learn. FCP becomes our standard eventually but we don’t need it when we are learning to make movies.

Then someone asks…. “dude, what’s that AnyTool you mentioned in the beginning?!?”

Shut up.