So long, Los Angeles

Sorry these Friday Film Notes have been so few and far between. But good news is on the horizon!

I’m recommitting myself to weekly emails here. For real. Every Friday morning. A hot fresh film-tastic piece of reading in your inbox. My god, I might have to make a burner email address to experience the joy myself of receiving such pearls of cinema wisdom, humor, and modesty.

Now, you may recall from previous issues that my goal was to create YouTube videos weekly as well. Which clearly, I have still not achieved. Why? I’ll tell you in a bit. (Actually, I have a few finished videos I can’t release yet for various reasons). But the point is, I’M DOING BOTH.

In the near future, expect to be seeing my face AND reading my rants weekly. I apologize in advance.

So the key to achieving this ramped up output comes down to a shift in my style and goals with my content here and on YouTube. Because even with improved systems and a more empowered couple of team members behind the scenes here – I’m still the bottleneck.

In fact, I suspect that this change in style is going to affect (or effect? I can never remember – and how ridiculous that they split that up into 2 words) my filmmaking as well. And if so, it’s something I’ll be talking about quite a bit.

So what is this big shift you ask?

You’ve been seeing it right here – more off the cuff, raw, reality and much less curation and calculation.

Don’t get me wrong, I was not pretending to be a different person in my old emails or videos. But a lot of the time you would be reading a third or fourth draft of an email. And the YouTube videos would sometimes be read entirely, word-for-word off a teleprompter.

This is great for clarity of thought, but it introduces other problems.

For one – I’m too slow and too careful. That means each video has to feel just right. No typos in the emails. A lot of me thinking “Ooh maybe this is too many words, better spend 20 minutes looking for a photo or GIF to add in.”

I think this approach can be great when you’re starting out or are learning the ropes of whatever you’re doing – after all, nobody wants to just make noise for the sake of making noise (one of my deepest fears with the channel and these emails).

But at this point, I feel confident that I know a lot about the craft of filmmaking, I’ve formed a lot of opinions about how it should and should not be done, I’ve helped hundreds of filmmakers transform their work and career trajectories, and so to be so careful and slow with my output is kind of wasteful. I could help way more people by speaking more off the cuff about the issues they’re facing.

So that’s the plan. Less looking back at what I’ve already written or shot, more putting things out there. Live streams are something I’m looking forward to trying out as well.

My fiancee Toni has a policy that when you’re sending someone a voice note, you can never play it back. You just hit send and assume it was perfect. That’s my new life strategy. In fact, I wrote this entire email in one straight shot in the span of about 5 minutes. I feel good about it.

The carryover to filmmaking is that the most valuable thing you can give to an audience is your unfiltered self. The most personal films are the most creative. And too often, we curate and edit our true point of view. What comes out the other end of that is watered down, homogenous drivel. Which means you might have a real shot in Hollywood! But we’re indie filmmakers here. If you don’t feel a little exposed and scared with a film, you probably didn’t dig deep enough.

So that’s where I would normally end this email, but I have some big news to share.

Big News

After a whopping 17 years (almost half my life), I’m leaving Los Angeles.

Toni and I are moving to Miami to be closer to both our families (mine are up in Virginia, a much shorter & direct flight) and for a change of pace and scenery.

LA has been a pressure cooker for most of the time I’ve lived here, and I think I came out of it stronger than I would have been, and definitely a better filmmaker with some of the people and experiences I was able to surround myself with over these years. But at a certain point, as a storyteller, you want to take a look at different people, different places, and find different stories. I firmly believe you don’t need to live here to be a “real” filmmaker. In fact, it’s a recipe for making less original work. See one of my favorite newsletters – The Small-Town Filmmaker’s Advantage.

Anyway, in about 10 days, we hit the road, with all 3 cats in tow. Crazy!

I’ll try to make a video about what coming to LA is like for aspiring filmmakers, sum up my experience, and document some of the cross-country drive.

But for now, we’re soaking up all the LA stuff we can.

I’d never done a studio tour, so we hit up the Warner Brothers tour a couple weeks ago. And somehow I’d never been to a Dodgers game (despite living 10 minutes from the stadium), so we fixed that too.

The next 2 weeks will be chaotic, but I’ll try to get in your inbox anyway. Expect typos.

Let’s make some movies.

-Kent

PS – I have a new short coming at you in a few days! Shot it in only a few hours. At least when I don’t post or email you know I’ve stayed busy.