A little over a year ago, I was studying film at Utah Valley University. I had a pleasant experience in their program but I am now grateful to be studying at BYU; I feel it is a stronger and more rewarding program. Notwithstanding, I had a painful yet meaningful experience with one of the professor's at UVU. Our final project was to write and produce a ten minute film. Our teams were made up of small groups so we shared in some responsibilities. One of my responsibilities was to write the script.
The story I wrote was very personal to me and as a result I poured my heart and soul into this script. I fell prey to a weakness that many writers experience, and that is hesitating to show your work to anyone until it is complete or perfected. Me, being inexperienced and somewhat prideful had thought I had perfected my script by the time we were required to bring it to class and read it before the professor. I had made a few revisions of my own prior to this time but I had never let anyone else read it. After reading the script, I was expecting the professor to praise it and green light the film for production. Oh how I was disappointed! In front of the entire class he projected his digital copy of the script and tore it to shreds! I had never seen so much red marking on paper in my life! At this moment, I felt much like the author of this article when someone honestly critiques their work. I hated this professor's guts. I kept thinking to myself, "What does he know? He is completely wrong! He's just trying to find any excuse he can to criticize my work because he hates me. It's all personal to him. I know I'm right and I know he's wrong!"
After I regained my composure a few hours later, I lowered my pride and read my script with the professor's remarks in mind. A painful but marvelous experience began to take place: I came to the realization that he was right. I began the arduous and creatively liberating journey of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting my script. I shared my script with a few key people that I respect and trust and through this collected effort, the professor finally approved the script. I believe I had gone through about fifteen major rewrites of that script. I love to compare the final script to the first draft -- there is a huge difference! It was an amazing and humbling experience for me.
In order to be great at any craft, I have learned that you must be humble. I got used to my professor consistently beating me down, giving me constructive criticism, and telling me "try again", that on the final draft, I was ready for him to give me ten more things to fix. How thrilled I was when he not only said the script was finished and ready to shoot, but his appraisal of the script. His high compliments of my work on this script meant the world to me, especially coming from someone who gave an honest and sometimes harsh critique of my work.
Finding people you can trust to criticize your work is always a bit painful, but the rewards are far superior.
I feel that personal experiences like the one you shared are rather unavoidable whenever we decide to take our art form to a more professional level. It begins when we start to take ourselves seriously, which is the only way that anyone else will. In film I feel like we bare our chests and consequently get stabbed more than any other art form. People read poetry or see a painting or hear music, and mostly they just compliment and nod their heads. They know they don't know enough about the art form to make a valuable critique.
ReplyDeleteYet somehow, everyone seems to be a professor of film. Everyone has seen so many films, and they're all so familiar with the art form that they are all overflowing with criticisms and comments. I think writing also tends to be this way as well, as with your experience.