📅 03-02-26

In this email, I'm sharing with you the script I've written for an upcoming video. This is my effort to show you the process behind the scenes of the channel.
I've also added a few thoughts at the end.

🎬 Action! 🎬

Setup

I thought I had learned to draw once I could do stuff like this.

But in reality I had only learned to copy...

When I tried to invent something of my own it always looked bad..

Frustratingly bad..

Dream

The reason for learning to draw was never to copy, I wanted to create my own own characters, and bring my own stories to life.

That’s always been the goal.

So I had to find a way to make drawing from imagination feel easier than copying.

Conflict

The enemy was clearly the reference.

I can’t remember exactly how stuff looks, I need a reference to look at. But once I have a reference I just default to copying it exactly as I see it.

It was just much easier to copy, and I could get away with it and then still compose a whole scene from different references and then construct an environment around them to make it believable.

How could I make drawing from imagination ever be easier than copying.

I had to change something.

Change

So I tried to invert the order.

I started with the space, copying one I found particularly cool, and then I tried adding objects and characters onto that space.

But it was nothing like I had expected.

I thought it would be the same as before. I’d be always defaulting to copying the references of the objects and characters.

But I couldn’t.

None of the references could be used exactly as they were.

Because they wouldn’t fit that space in that position or they would be in the wrong perspective.

So it was literally impossible to just copy the reference.

Result

The result was that for every 1 environment I copied, I then had to struggle and problem solve how to rotate and deconstruct the references of 10 other elements.

I was actually practicing how to use references correctly, to inform the design of something you are drawing without copying it.

I had never understood how to do that.

Reflection

It turns out that

Now with this method you are actually able to accumulate the right practice for making it easier and easier to manipulate forms in your mind and place them on paper to construct your own scenes.

Which is exactly what drawing from imagination is all about.

Eventually you will enrich your mental visual library with more and more details about the subjects that you’ve had to problem solve from many angles in many drawings, until you won’t need references for those things any more.

The End

🎬 Cut! 🎬

Okay, I hope you enjoyed it :)
​Now onto some backstage thoughts:

The more I meet and learn from other talented YouTubers the more I understand the importance of romanticising your life.

By that I mean finding stories to encapsulate your lived experience.

Stories are not what I thought they were. They are not accounts of things that happened. That's the news.

A story is a method, a recipe, for organising information in a way that can be easier to remember.

Many of you have purchased my Knowledge Vault. That's where I store the information that I learned, in a distilled way, so that they are easy to access.

But that doesn't make them easy to remember.

And if they are not easy to remember, they are not likely to impact your life.

A story is a much better vehicle to transport information that you want to actually use in your life.

The distilled information of the story above is:

How long will you remember this?

Instead, I am romanticising my lived experience, putting this information in a Story Structure and making a beautiful video from it to make it as easy as possible for this information to survive longer in our brains.

I hope you liked me explaining this process, and sharing my thoughts.

I'm keen to hear from you, just reply to this email - I read all replies :)

Have a strong week
🫶

Massa

P.s.

Try to see if you can spot the story structure, and what the key information is for last weeks video below.
It's always cool to spot this in the wild, you'll start to see it everywhere :)

​

P.p.s.

We just surpassed 50 creators added to the YouTube Gems website!!
Some very interesting sub <100k channels have been added recently.. I love curating such a special space, I learn so much.
So cool to see this grow.