First of all, thank you IFP for the invitation to write monthly articles for your blog. It’s a very flattering and exciting opportunity, and I mean to give it my all.

For those who were not at the two talks I did for the IFP, my name is Caspar Newbolt and I co-founded Version Industries. To give you some context in terms of any comments I make towards films throughout this post and any future posts, I am currently in the process of developing four low to medium-budget film-related projects, alongside my more regular design duties at Version Industries. Three of these are music videos and one is a short film. I have shot, directed and edited three music videos and one documentary to date and have provided my company’s design services to three IFP film directors. I am also currently working on a record cover for a film soundtrack – the re-scoring of the 1970s science-fiction film Silent Running by 65daysofstatic.

…

I’d like to start my IFP blog series by talking about the underrated commodity that is trust. It is perhaps the most valuable psychological element within the collaborative creative process, and so I believe very much worth talking about within the context of this blog. What’s most interesting about it is how it pervades the various parts of what we all do in different ways. Whether it be trust in the way you can emotionally captivate people with your work, trust in the collaborations you form as part of your work process, or trust in the way your projects aren’t given a chance to perform on their own terms. There are other ways of course, but these I believe are key at least to the way I work and the experiences I’ve had thus far. The following examples, anecdotes and rants I hope will illustrate these points clearly.

…

In terms of the work I do for Version Industries, I have a healthy obsession with narrative and pathos, and feel that one should inherently lead to the other if you’re going to win the trust of your audience, whatever the medium. For this very reason I try wherever possible to tell a story with each project, be it a website, a record cover, a poster or a music video. I don’t mean a ‘story’ in the ‘fashion magazine’ sense, I mean a story with characters, scenes, events and climaxes. Now of course it doesn’t have to be a sad story to be a good story, but without a sense of pathos somewhere along the line, you won’t glean any real loyalty for your work. Take the funniest film you’ve ever seen and there’ll be a moment of sadness sitting right at the heart of it, and whether you like it or not it’s that moment that grounds everything else. Why? Because sadness feels more true than happiness. We might only recollect the happy memories and we certainly don’t have much memory of pain, but it’s a fact that it’s the sad moments that help us lower our defenses, bring us together and help us trust each other. Trust being fundamental if you are an artist trying to earn the respect of your peers and garner support from your audience. It’s trust that leads them to follow your progress and consequently support for your next piece of work, be that financially or other.

Two projects of this kind that we’ve just completed are record covers, one for the Nashville, Tennessee electronic musician Makeup and Vanity Set and the other for the Manchester, England electronic musician Polinski. Each project involved setting up a narrative behind the music and then illustrating that as best we could in the artwork. Makeup and Vanity Set only had one image produced by us, Polinski consisted of a series of panels much like a triptych. Both stories contained the element of loss and the drive to search, find and get back that which was gone – pathos and narrative. I’d recently lost someone very dear to me and these on-going projects provided me, to a certain extent, with a cathartic outlet for this. You can see both covers below.

…

In terms of collaborations, as mentioned above I do a lot of pro-bono work for projects of my own choosing. These projects are generally for bands, but the bands I’m into are typically of a cinematic or conceptual nature. The projects are more of a collaboration and each have turned into good friendships. If you want to produce the best work you can, you must work with people you can call friends and, furthermore, who are on the same wavelength as you artistically. This way you are always expressing yourself creatively in the most honest and open-hearted way, and they are giving you the platform to do this on. You then get to the point where you’re talking to them every day online or offline and the process is no longer about deadlines. It’s more about a stream of ideas, references and concepts that never ends, and a body of work that evolves as each of you grow, live life and tackle each new obstacle together. Again, it’s all about trust.

All the film makers I look up to and respect have a very singular vision that’s come to be in part as a the result of a very trusting, long-lasting friendship. Whether it be Darren Aronofsky and Clint Mansell, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti or John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, we all smile when we think of the powerful pieces they’ve put together.

…

Finally, in an ideal world we’d hope the people financing, promoting and pushing our work would believe in us enough to let the work speak for itself. A lack of trust is the reason product placement in film has become more and more aggressive. If the consumers believed anything the advertisers said, they might spend less time avoiding what they had to say. If the film studios believed in the film makers and their script, they might not be so insistent on re-writing the film as a commercial.  Instead ads breed like bacteria, form like a mould on every surface and continue to find new ways to invade our waking moments. David Lynch put it better than any of us really.

The moment you lose trust in someone or something is a very precarious and dangerous occasion and it is sadly not something people fear enough. As the old saying goes – if you haven’t got anything good to say, then don’t say anything – lest you lose their trust and sacrifice your integrity in the process. The author and screenwriter William Goldman took what seemed a very defeatist stance when he stated his great rule of (studio and independent) film making: nobody knows anything. By this he of course meant that despite having a great script, great actors, a great director and every other good thing you can have going for a film – how it turns out and how it’s received can still not be guaranteed. Now he’s a great writer and has a vast amount of experience to back this statement up, but we all know there are more examples than you can count on two hands of cases of directors and writers who’ve put out a pretty consistent body of work throughout their careers. Stanley Kubrick being the first that comes to mind – a case which makes me think that Goldman was perhaps a little to financially minded in his statement. After all no one accurately remembers how well a film did in history, they just remember how much they enjoyed it.

…

So a level of trust certainly pervades everything we do artistically and there are touchstones certainly to ensuring a trustworthy relationship or set of particularly creative circumstances.

Managing expectations well is one of these. You need to govern well the scale and cost of the project, but never the ambition or scope. This way no one is paying a lot for a project that is taking a risk, but everyone is making sure that project happens because it’s an exciting risk and therefore a highly motivating endeavor. As we all know, expensive does not equal good. It never has and it never will.

Taste is the other major factor here. Some people have good taste and some don’t. Taste is fundamental to making great art and is what should be the focus of producers, investors paving your way. By this I mean you should be finding producers and investors that have good taste, and they in turn should be looking for good musicians, writers and directors who have the same. Only together will you be able to trust each other to make great art, and only together will everyone be satisfied.

Trust makes good art, earning trust takes management and good taste.