#subconscious effort

[daveinediting]

My subconscious never really works the way I mean for it or want it to work. It's my subconscious. So it has its own who the hell knows agenda.

I can, however, give it opportunities to do my bidding. And yeah. Sometimes that actually works. 

For example, my main reason for reading a script right before going to sleep is to let my brain engage with it in that way it does when consciousness is no longer in the way.

So last night, actually 1AM "last night", I get the first draft of the short film I'm cutting this weekend... in story form, though, not script form. I then sit in a dark room with a flashlight and that story on a printed page and read through it over and over, making marks along the way where the story's impact is most intense.

And then I go to bed.

So I'm laying there, sleep not too far away and, to prime the pump a little, I recite the first line of the story in my mind, intending to continue as far as I can.

That sometimes works, by the way. But not this night. This night I'm barely that first sentence in when my brain gets distracted.

Distracted?

Yeah. Distracted by the sounds it thinks we should be hearing as the story unfolds.

To be clear: I'm only on the first sentence but my brain's skipping ahead and tagging areas of the story with sound design ideas.

And then we both fall asleep.

Near as I can tell.

In the morning, I look at the printed page of story I read before going to bed and notice a list at the bottom of the page.

A list of sounds.

You see, even as I marked the most intense moments or phrases or words of the story, I was already starting to think about sound design.

And I guess... when I went to bed, my brain was keen to work on what I already primed it to do.

Apparently.

So yeah.

We worked on sound design last night.

🙂

[daveinediting]

It feels like a bandwidth challenge for me. The heart of it, though, is what it takes to get my brain to do its thing, to play with puzzle pieces on its own, to create in my sleep.

I think what it boils down to is I can multitask my daytime conscious efforts... but I can’t multitask my subconscious ones. Those efforts must happen sequentially. One after the other.

This week especially I noticed the interplay in my mind between two projects on which I’m working at the same time. And the interplay I noticed was this:

There was none.

One of those projects definitely required maxing out my mental bandwidth. Not creatively... but it did demand serious critical thought. The experience was the equivalent of a complex, thousand-piece puzzle. With a deadline.

Once I got through the rough cut, though, my brain started playing at night with the other project which is actually a freeform kind of do-what-you-want editing assignment.

Seriously. I woke up the very next morning with music and sequence ideas for that second project.

That’s why I think it’s a bandwidth thing.

You see, what I know about my own creative process is that I can trigger a subconscious effort by, not necessarily sitting down to actively edit or write or compose...  I can jumpstart my subconscious into action by taking even a half hour during my waking hours to create, to research, and to consider pieces of the project on which I’m working.

Now, that effort may not bear fruit. Most of the time it doesn’t. It may, in fact, feel like banging my head against the wall. But somehow... it signals my subconscious after a day or two to do its thing.

Which, reliably, it does.

It’s interesting to realize, then, that when two or more projects demand my time, unless I consciously manage my creative process during the day my brain will fully engage the most difficult thing on which I’m working...

And provide no mental space or time for anything else.

:-(