Why your brain is smarter than you

A quick story about my technical incompetence.

A long while back, I was trying to connect my VHS recorder and TV to my hi-fi. (It's worrying that two of those terms might be a mystery to the younger reader.)

I'd plugged everything together and paused to be impressed by what was on the TV.

It was a scene from the British countryside, with sheep in the fields and the occasional small semi-rural house, with the sound of the evening TV news talking about some crime in London.

I imagined how those people in the countryside compared their quiet lives to the concerns of the metropolis's citizens.

Nicely directed, I thought...

...until I realised I'd wired everything up wrongly.

I was listening to the sound of my local TV news while watching a completely different documentary about farmers on another channel.

Two things came from this.

Firstly, decades later, I used this technique when I was working on the Netflix series Sunderland 'Til I Die. Local radio talk shows chatted over drone shots of the tower blocks of Sunderland—the sound of what was going on in those homes was incredibly evocative.

Secondly, the problem is how we - human beings - always try and find meaning in chaos.

When you direct a piece of work and haven't thought deeply about every image you use, question you ask, and sequence your film, your audience will do it for you.

And their interpretation is noise.

It's the meaning they think your film is trying to deliver versus what you intend it to say.

Go to www.thedocfix.com to learn how you have to begin to think.

You can't predict how every audience member will react, whether they are insulted or impressed by your decisions, deeply confused or understand your ideas clearly.

But the danger is that if you are driven only by instinct, then you are constantly reacting in the moment to what's in front of you. Stephen Spielberg, or someone very like him, said there's only one place to put the camera - and that's the right place.

In the heat of the moment, you are your only guide to that place, having thought about what you are trying to say before you are out there with your camera.

All the best - Nigel