Collaboration, Boot Camp Style (Bullet List)

I just got back from an amazing week. The long version I just posted. This is a list of conclusions drawn from it.

1. The People are Everything. It was partially luck and partially the foresight of Cari, Babs and Yari (Trillium Studios), but the group of people assembled in the Berkshires were smart, talented, easy-going and dedicated. Twelve people, seven days, (barely) two cabins, and not nearly enough sleep COULD have been a recipe for disaster. Instead, it was hard-working heaven on earth.
2. Isolation and Intensity. There are times in the life of an artist where the habit of a few hours of work every day on a project is the way to go. But there are other times, especially with collaboration, where you want folks to leave EVERYTHING at the door. We had NO cell phones, ONE landline, ONE barely-touched internet connection, NO town within walking distance, NO television, NO newspapers. We had each other, and the task at hand. The rhythm of our days was guided by work, and only work. And what we got done in a week (and the level at which we did it) was staggering. This isn't always possible, but it's clear to me that sometimes carving out five full days is better than carving out a month of Sundays.
3. Know Your Weak Spots, Play To Your Strengths. We had a lot of people in the room on this project...and we were doing something unusual in that we had TWO people directing the film. BUT one of those people is a film editor by day, the other a theater director. One worked with ALL the technical/visual aspects, the other with the actors. And they were in constant communication about where those things overlapped. Cari and I said, mid-week, that the thing about film directors is that they need a huge, divergent skill-set...a lot to ask of one person. In this case, we got that skill-set by using two people. So far, so good.
4. Know When To Speak Up, When to Shut Up. Okay, it's me, so I didn't always manage this one. But part of the week, for me, was the art of letting go, letting Marie and the actors find THEIR way through the words Erica and I had written for them. For the most part, I stayed on the sideline, and enjoyed what I was seeing. But sometimes I jumped in...and I knew I could...and I did it THROUGH Marie unless she gave me the go-ahead to go straight to an actor. The rest of the time, I got to just hang out with them, and tell them (truthfully) how fabulous they were.
5. Ask For What You Need. Assuming You Can Figure Out What You Need. One of the few "oops" moments of the week, for me, came late, when I realized that we could have made life easier for the actors if we'd given them a couple more full-script read-throughs TOGETHER and talked to them about the overall, underlying, "no matter what is going on, this is the bedrock of your relationship" tone of things. They got there anyway, but if we'd asked for a little more time up front, we would have saved a lot of time later.
6. If You Can Shoot In A Place That's Heaven On Earth, So Much The Better. 'Nuff said. :)