Yes, I’m STILL gonna talk about “The Inside Outtakes”
Who do you think I am? A sane individual? I don’t care if it came out months ago
“The Inside Outtakes” helped me realize that even those creatives that I envy the most build their progress out of the most important tool to success, failure.
Most outtakes or blooper reels demonstrate a form of failure, such as the failure to perform the lines without laughing, the forgetting of a line, or the breaking of character for other reasons. Of course, failure is natural in these circumstances, and easily fixable. Sticking to the script and getting through ones lines often helps fix any problem, and while that can be very difficult, it can also be a very easy, quick fix, especially when you have a skilled actor (of which I am not).
So, why are “The Inside Outtakes” special? How are they different? Why did they help me realize a point that seems so obvious — that people fail before they succeed — in a way that other outtakes never have? As a creative, it’s been obvious that I will fail as a part of my work, but the amount of ‘failure’ that I will go through before I get it right is not something I have ever been comfortable with.
Let’s use an example. I’m a procrastinator. I avoid doing a lot of my work until almost right before it’s due. Sure, this is because I’m an avoidant person and I dislike feeling stress until I have to, but I think that it’s also because I don’t like the process of revising anything. I don’t want to finish something and then look at my work critically, decide whether I made any major mistakes. I like to write all the ideas that come out of my head and then turn it in. That sometimes is to my detriment, obviously. I don’t want to be critical of myself, to search for perfection. I want to be satisfied with the product I produce.
In a sense, there is something admirable to that mindset (depending on ones point of view). However, I think that the primary motivating factor behind that frame of mind is the desire to shield myself from an ever-present voice within my head, that of my self-critic, who often ‘speaks’ harshly and without reason. Most of the time, my self-criticism can make me feel like I can’t do anything right. Because of this, it’s often hard for me to look back at my work and be satisfied with it at all, so I quite often just don’t look at it. I don’t want to see myself ‘failing’, because some expectation in my mind tells me that I must be perfect, and that it’s not natural for me to produce something ‘imperfect’.
So, looking at my ‘failure’ is not something that I often like doing. Funny enough, in filmmaking, I have loved the editing process, but maybe it’s because to me, it feels like the editing process is the writing of the story, putting the pieces together in the order that they’re meant to be and making sure that they work in the way that they’re supposed to. However, the film editing process can sometimes cause the same emotions of distress, as it asks me to face the failure of each edit, the ways in which it didn’t work, and the ways in which it could be improved. Of course, this means that when edit a video, I experience some of that same procrastination as I would when writing a paper.
When I edit, one of the most infuriating things that I have to deal with is the feeling that the footage I have won’t work together. Maybe, there is a point that I wanted to demonstrate that I can’t demonstrate with the footage I have, or maybe there is a continuity error. There could be a list of problems, but my point is, sometimes there are problems with your work that become really difficult to fix in the edit (if you’re without professional experience, like me). Then, if you can, you have to go back and film more footage, trying to convey what you meant to convey again, or taking something out of the frame that should’ve been out of it the first time you filmed. When this has happened to me, it’s been extremely difficult to fix. Renting out camera equipment from my school is a hassle, and the time to rent it is limited. Failure to execute on first filming then becomes a real problem, incentivizing me to ‘fail less’. I’m already a perfectionist, and now if I don’t ‘succeed’ at every step of the filmmaking process, I set myself up for failure.
“The Inside Outtakes” stand out to me because they demonstrate Bo’s process, in particular emphasizing the various versions of songs that made it into the special, but also versions of those songs that didn’t. What is most evident about this process is the vast amount of footage that he did NOT use in “Inside”. He had to deal with that feeling of “failure”, that feeling that the take that he had just made was not the right one, almost every time he recorded a take of anything. Of course, everyone has to go through this when creating something. But, what is so interesting about Bo’s outtakes specifically is that he has an HOUR LONG video of his outtakes. Think about the amount of times in which he said “No this doesn’t work” or “I don’t like this” or “I need to do a better take”. Think about the vast amount of ideas that weren’t pursued or recorded. Think about the editing process, where he had to look at songs that he worked EXTREMELY hard on, and then say “No, it doesn’t make sense to include this song”. In that process, there is so much creation, but inherently also so much failure, failure to create something that will be presentable.
Not to mention the simple fact that this was filmed during a pandemic, in a setting in which Bo had little to no creative supervision/people to tell him no. It’s a vast amount of creative control, which can both be freeing but also stifiling to an artist. After all, we’re often our harshest critics. That’s why it might seem so monumental to me. When someone else is critiquing you, you have the ability to block it out, receive it and change, or internalize it. When you critique your own work, it seems far more likely that you run the risk of internalizing your own criticism (and therefore losing your creative spark). The times that you fail to do something in the way you wanted to do it become reflections of your ability to complete your work in a satisfactory way. You worry that you’re not talented enough/creative enough to be able to produce something satisfactory. You self-destruct.
Again…let me emphasize, Bo is BY NO MEANS the only person to have done this. This is a process that many creatives go through, and one that is somewhat familiar to my own. But with work that truly inspires me and speaks to me, I am often quite inspired with the process of how it was made. And this ‘solo effort’ from Bo really hit strong during the pandemic. Not only did I NOT have to stuff away my creative side away while we were all alone, but i could NURTURE it. And I could nurture my creative growth with little to no help from anybody else, which, at that time, was appealing. Now, having experienced the creative process more extensively than I had at that time, I understand how much of a group undertaking it can and should often be, which now makes what Bo and his team produced all the more impressive to me.
Putting out your own work can often be extremely stressful. When you create something, you always have to be prepared for some people dislike it. When it comes to films or other creative endeavors that take extensive amounts of time to create, you need to be prepared to fail, both in the process of making something, and also in the eyes of those who receive what you create.
On basically every piece that I write for Medium, I let it sit in the drafts for a while. However, this doesn’t mean that I’m tinkering it a ton. I find creative bursts every now and then, sometimes every few months, and I use those bursts to finish work that I started months ago. Writing this piece has been one of those times. I started this piece the week “The Inside Outtakes” came out, and I’ve not gotten around to finishing it. I think that part of the reason that I often don’t come back to it and work on it consistently is because I really don’t like sitting in this place of ‘incompletion’ where I have no idea how I’m going to move forward with what I’m writing. I don’t like sitting around with a half-done work that feels like a failure because it’s unfinished. I don’t like writing things and then deleting them because they don’t fit. I don’t like editing my own work. In reference to my own creative process here on Medium, I think that I can derive something from “The Inside Outtakes”, though. And that is to embrace whatever ‘failure’ is and most importantly, to VALUE IT. Bo’s releasing of “The Inside Outtakes”, of course benefits him financially and as an artist, but I think that valuing and keeping your ‘outtakes’, what you choose not to put into your creative work, is just as important as presenting your work to others.
There is no creative work without outtakes, and there is no creative process without some editing. For me, this means I will be more motivated to sit with incompletion, to sit with a feeling of ‘failure’, to know that the stage of incompletion and unknowingness is part of the process, to value that, and to trudge on despite it.
