Over the past week or ten days we've had the equivalent of a brain dump from a client.
A couple times daily emails come in with four or five attachments.
Each attachment contains a document that is between five and 20 pages long.
I personally have gotten half a dozen calls telling me how pressing this project is.
It's a three minute video.
180 seconds.
Last night I went to the client with a Roman numeral outline.
The kind we learned to make when I was in 5th grade.
10 years old.
I broke all their information down into seven parts.
An intro, a goodbye, and the five key things they want covered.
In short, I condensed about 200 pages worth of "information" to a short list.
I said to them, "let's look at this like a math puzzle. We have seven things to do in 180 seconds. That's 26 seconds a topic. About as many words as you can get on a 3x5 card writing normally."
They laughed nervously.
Nobody works with 3x5 cards anymore.
We have "endless" sheets of paper because computer pages just keep coming.
I told them that creativity is often a reductive process.
Cutting out everything that doesn't matter.
As Roy Grace once said, "I take out the garbage."
They sat and stared at me.
I now know what a freak in the circus feels like.
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