George and his entire “Reel Mobile” studio in 1980 Los Angeles.
OK, boys and girls, we’re going to talk about equipment now. Are you excited? Sure you are! Talking about equipment can be fun-but it can also be very, very dangerous, can’t it? We can lose track of our… our… anybody?
That’s right, Timmy, our Art.
Anything else?
That’s right, Omar, schedule.
Anything else?
Oh yeah, our fundamental humanity, that’s good, Suzie. But kids, if you know how to do it the Fat Man Way, talking about equipment can be perfectly safe-and really fun!
The first and only thing to remember is that equipment is not there to be a stepstool for you to climb on to allow you to go places you wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Any equipment that advertises that it allows you to “do things you never dreamed of” is warning you that it’s going to take over your life by making you learn the methods and workflows that the creators of that equipment think of as creativity. Ask yourself: Do you want to do things you never dreamed of? Have you ever? No, you haven’t, because you never dreamed of that.
For my part, and for the sake of my clients, I want to do the things I have dreamed of, and I’d really like to do it fairly quickly.
The equipment that I like does not act as a stool of any kind, pun intended. It acts as a doorway or a floodgate. It lets my ideas flow more quickly the more it gets the heck out of the way. The first place to start in getting the equipment out of the way is by literally getting it out of the way. We can help even poorly designed equipment to get out of our way if we don’t buy it.
Another
strategy
is to use a
really nice
room.
See the next entry in Shortcuts and Big Pictures: “Rooms, Racks, and Dumb-Asses.”
