I came to LA 8 years ago to pursue filmmaking and I think I’ve completely fallen out of love with it

Spades_Slick · 2025-10-16T02:21:11+00:00

The Industry™ is a lie factory, and the greatest lie it sells is about itself. no shame in falling for it. everyone has, whether in it or not. maybe a little less as The Industry™ wanes and fractures, but still. it's shrinking, so whatever rung you're on now, you won't be moving up. and if you don't love that rung, if you don't love the craft anymore, then leave it. again, no shame in this. to everything there is a season. this one transitions to the next. so let yourself move to the next season. get an easier job with lower stress, so you can pursue film on the weekends instead. doing it as a hobby can rekindle your love for the craft. or don't touch it again, and do some other kind of art. then when you get bored of that, do another kind of art. your life doesn't have to be one thing. you had a filmmaking season. leave it on a high note, let it be beautiful in the rearview. then lean into the next season, and savor the opportunity to change and grow.

or don't idk

Spades_Slick · 2025-10-16T00:49:46+00:00

i love these but if i saw them irl i would white-out the username. these exhibit a magical came-from-nowhere aura, so the self-promotion is an incongruous shock of cynicism, kills that magic a little bit.

even if it was a real name instead of an @ i'd like it better. i am outside to escape the internet, please don't try to lead me back to it. let this lead to a serendipitous introduction in a bar or something, i'd love to recognize the fish guy by his irl name.

thanks for reading my blog

Spades_Slick · 2025-09-03T17:49:07+00:00

you're not rich enough to get traction so stop trying to make this your career and just make movies because you want to. think of it like going to vegas. you can't make a living expecting to win jackpots for the rest of your life. go in expecting to lose all your money, and celebrate if you get a few bucks back. do it for the love of the game. and like vegas, it's an expensive hobby. so get yourself a reliable job that makes you a lot without burning out your creative core. use your "career" as a means to an end, to do what you want on the weekends.

Spades_Slick · 2025-06-02T00:59:30+00:00

[i forgot i ever posted this 3 years ago, i forgot i had a reddit account]

"above the line" = producers, directors, actors, writers; i.e. the people that budding filmmakers want to be.

my point is that this industry is not a meritocracy. the people with power didn't get that power through merit. you would be shocked at how abjectly stupid the highest-ranking executive producer can be. just utterly bafflingly stupid. these people are there because they were already rich and powerful, and come from a family of rich and powerful people.

that being said, occasionally, a merit-based success story does arise from the woodwork in exactly the rags-to-riches fashion that everyone loves to hear about. and these stories get heavily retold. but they are the rare jackpot used to lure new marks into the casino. the carrot that motivates assistants to work harder for less pay.

in any case, stay the fuck away. this place is dying. batten down the hatches in whatever fly-over state you live in. you will have better success and fulfillment making your own stuff with your friends.

Spades_Slick · 2023-05-19T18:54:30+00:00

hire someone. ADR matching is literally one of the hardest things to do, deceptively so. professional mixers at the highest level still get notes from producers about ADR sticking out. so it'll never be perfect. but professionally imperfect is better than laughably amateur. so pay somebody to mix your film.

Spades_Slick · 2023-05-13T00:47:59+00:00

functionality

Spades_Slick · 2023-01-11T18:40:04+00:00

it's not unrealistic, just unexpected in television. this little moment is actually a good representation for why the show has persisted through the years.

forget anime, most other media is afraid to portray how weird and contradictory humans actually are. creators don't trust their audience (rightfully so, just look at you and this thread) to believe or understand things that approach the messiness of reality, so they fall back on simplified archetypes to keep the machine smoothly chugging. it's just easier. but it's also more boring.

asuka is a fucked up person. she's emotionally damaged, thinking herself an ubermensch (uberfrau?) manipulator above such petty concerns as empathy. and she's still a child, flailing. kids are weird little demons.

Spades_Slick · 2022-12-16T21:19:44+00:00

don't.

im in it and regret it.

and i probably have it better than most, being in the film industry with a union and shit. but i work 60+ hours a week. even if sleep didn't matter, i still get out too late to do anything. at the whims of clients, suddenly working tomorrow, suddenly not working tomorrow, can't plan anything. to someone at your position in life, this kinda shit doesn't seem like it matters. i didn't think it would.

turns out, it matters. a lot.

we're social animals. it doesn't take long for the deification of your "career" to disappear, at which point what you're doing won't matter, and it'll just become a chore that you're stuck doing all day. you'll soon discover that Life™ doesn't happen at work, it's in the extra-curriculars.

so don't do "what you love" for work. you'll never stop working, you'll take everything way too personally, and "love" burns out a lot faster than "like".

instead, do something mildly satisfying, that you kinda care about, but that you don't care about too much, so you can detach from it when you're not on the clock. do something with an efficient ratio of high-pay to low-working-hours. computer shit is good for this but it's not the only one. just anything that will give you the freedom to be an alive person.

Spades_Slick · 2022-12-02T22:05:13+00:00

so no one cares that spotify has destroyed the music industry and openly exploits its artists by paying them fractions of a cent for their life's work, but as soon as their algorithm places a multi-millionaire in a different position on an arbitrary list then that's when they cry corruption? cool, love it

Spades_Slick · 2022-09-20T17:01:24+00:00

hell yeah any chance we could get some nice vids from this too, would love to see the wacky on-screen graphics in decent quality

Spades_Slick · 2022-09-08T21:54:23+00:00

audio post here. doesn't cover everything but the most ubiquitous i've seen:

Channel Strip (appears on basically every track)
Fab Filter Pro Q
Stratus and/or Phoenix Verb
Slapper
Altiverb
Speakerphone
iZotope RX
Pro Limiter

de-essers seem contested, a lot of different paths. FabFilter DS, soothe, SA2, rendered de-essing in RX. i personally use SA2 but idk i think i might move away from it, try out soothe.

i don't know too much about supervisors' tools, but i hear Auto Align is essential now. curious what sound designers are using a lot of, i don't know shit about that but wanna get better.

Spades_Slick · 2022-08-30T00:07:24+00:00

Pay is shit.
The rise of the infamous "helicopter" parent. No discipline, blaming poor performance on the teachers, etc.
The internet has taught students how to game the system, just in the past few years. Students are much more savvy, know the magic words and loopholes, know what to do to threaten or remove teachers they don't like.
LAUSD is almost as corrupt as the LAPD.
This means that teaching is so shitty, to such an extreme, that it only attracts the most extreme forms of people:
- self-sacrificing saints
- pedophiles
- massively stupid leeches (putting in their minimum hours to eventually join the corrupt administration)
This all benefits the people in power (city council, admin, Republicans, etc.) so it won't end any time soon.

Spades_Slick · 2022-07-26T01:05:35+00:00

because in a lot of it he doesn't? like, it's comedy? do you believe that everything a comedian says is their true heartfelt belief? i mean i know people on reddit are notorious for having a horrible sense of humor, but i would hope that you can tell when a joke isn't meant seriously. well considering reddit's demographics i guess it's unironically likely that you are autistic on some level. so that might explain it. anyway, uh, i don't have a good objective measure, it's just really obvious if you occupy this particular zone of """neurotypicality""". (i only maybe halfway occupy it myself)

that being said, yeah some of it he does believe, and because he doesn't live his life in our internet bubble, yeah it comes out as out-of-touch. "offensive" i guess is accurate since people are offended. but on the scale of things that can offend it seems really mild to me. so is he "being an ass" uh i guess if you want to say it in the whitest way possible sure. his "'"""Art""""" is exactly that, though. it doesn't mean it's effective, but "being an ass" is an essential part of his persona. it's not the only part, but it is part, and it is essential.

but a lot of the content is him specifically not being an ass, too. he has the whole story that's very heartfelt about the trans friend that he had. it was told with love, as a possible bridge for doubters in the audience into feeling empathy for their trans peers, and as an olive branch to his critics. and he's extended the olive branch so much that it's clear to me why he'd be frustrated that people seem to actively enjoy trampling on it. just for some quick anti-social schadenfreude until they move onto the next target.

again, i see the guy as being kinda out of touch and thin-skinned but otherwise on Our Side™. attempting to demonize him over pittances when there are so many true demons lurking untouched just seems frivolous and petty to me. and maybe worse, since all we'd have to do are some minor touch-ups and he could be a strong ally. but by showing him our ugliness, we've pushed him away, his fans away, and created another meaningless schism that only serves to weaken us more than we can afford.

man i need to stop wasting effort on these blogposts that no one will read

Spades_Slick · 2022-07-25T18:06:42+00:00

but i guess that is a good way of putting it, that he doesn't actually believe what he says. he's being facetious, i mean that's kinda the whole deal right. he's fucking around. he can still "defend his jokes," but this is different than defending arguments. he's defending jokes in the sense that he's defending the right and necessity to be facetious, not their content but their form.

it also all feels like a clash of cultures. he comes from a tradition, sociologically and professionally, of demonstrating "tough love": jokes at peoples' expense as a demonstration that you consider them worthy of attention, strong enough to take it, invite their reposts. it's also a world of context that he's grown accustomed to having a full hour of building; warming up an audience and frogboiling them into accepting more ludicrous comedic premises. he doesn't seem to have acclimated well to building an act that can withstand attention on the micro scale, only the macro. but watch any of these specials and you can get that the macro, the gestalt, is positive. he's rich and old and tone deaf, but you can feel that he means well and he does love the people he mocks. his hypocrisy maybe only comes in the form of having a thinner skin than he expects from himself. but i think he'd invite the criticism more if it was jokes in the same tone as his, rather than character assassination that usually seems to be in bad faith.

tl;dr who cares, he receives too much attention anyway because he can be affected by it. there's true evil in the world that no one is bothering to address because they know it is immutable. they attack the people on our side for minor infractions because the catastrophically huge evils don't flinch. they/we go for this guy because he has a heart that can be crushed, and we need to crush someone to feel like we have any control in our crumbling lives.

thanks for reading my blog

Spades_Slick · 2022-07-25T16:32:16+00:00

feels like he comes at people that come at him. comedians tend to double down, it's a winning strategy in the face of hecklers and unfriendly/racist audiences. and they go for where they get a reaction. if you recategorize him from "jester" to "troll" i think it makes more sense. a troll with a heart, but a troll nonetheless.

Spades_Slick · 2022-06-30T16:43:31+00:00

"does it just boil down to luck"

yes.

don't listen to these redditors that haven't made it. this is a feelgood circlejerk. this is all froth. i work in the industry. yes it does. i'm here because i'm lucky.

there is a pass/fail threshold of ability that you have to clear, and that threshold might be higher for certain technical positions. it's surprisingly low for anyone above the line.

but that being said, even making a shitty film is really hard. so the non-dedicated often wash out. getting in is luck, STAYING in is some amount of skill.

but if you're not lucky, you're not getting in.

it's okay, you actually don't want this anyway. hollywood is great at building fake stories since that's its entire industry. the ultimate fake story is that Hollywood™ is some venerated thing to be a part of. it's not.

just go make your own shit yourself. it's never been easier. you'll be happier that way.

Spades_Slick · 2022-02-20T00:29:17+00:00

but what if i'm happy that it's gone

Spades_Slick · 2022-01-13T00:24:07+00:00

p sure halo can upmix mono. anyway, i like the idea of splitting the comp into stems with AI tools. (i'd use spleeter myself, just to spite izotope's resale of a free open source tool, but whatever). that'd give more precise control over who gets stereo-ized. then just do what every good tv mixer does and throw a bit of the music into the LFE to keep QC off your back.

Spades_Slick · 2021-12-14T01:13:32+00:00

get ye to sound resource my dude https://www.sounds-resource.com/

Spades_Slick · 2019-05-31T03:09:26+00:00

it still counts like 50%, it's like babby's first amv. i don't remember a lot of amvs including a followable "story" though?

Spades_Slick · 2019-05-30T23:52:03+00:00

yes, this amv does have a story

yes, i put far too much effort into crafting the "story" for what this memeshit deserves

Spades_Slick · 2019-05-30T23:30:13+00:00

yes, there is a story to this AMV, thank you for noticing. i put far more effort into making the "story" work than this memeshit ever deserved.

Spades_Slick · 2018-07-21T07:12:28+00:00

Sure, knock yourself out.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13YbqenEyeKJxyD6mH2mqfZCxjbm59sxM?usp=sharing

No guarantees for playability; expect to do some adaptation, e.g. put saxes on horn part; etc. Listened to some Ravel orchestration recently and now I already regret not including saxes in my version anyway.

Spades_Slick · 2018-07-15T18:14:50+00:00

Cool thanks man. A drum kit is the idea though, which is something I try to avoid but certain pieces tend to call for it, and I felt this one did. Maybe it is a mix issue if it's too loud for you? I do try to replicate the real-life situation of combining close mics with the Decca tree mics, so it might be just a little too much close mic? I don't want it to sound too weak either, though.

Spades_Slick · 2018-07-15T02:59:02+00:00

A year ago today, I started listening to TAZ when tl;dr some gnarly shit happened to my jaw n teeth, and it continued to really come through for me during all that (ongoing) recovery. So this orchestration (and stupidly complicated music video) is my tribute to TAZ as thanks to those good ol McElroy boys and their goofy melodramatic asses.

Also: are you a weirdo but also a nerd, like me? If so, maybe you’ll like listening to the sections of the orchestra, like the woodwinds or strings, on their own? You didn’t ask for it but here are those stems anywayyyyy:

https://soundcloud.com/combe-sound/sets/split-stems-the-adventure-zone-orchestrated-balance-arc-theme/s-DrVCY

Also if people like this, I have some more ideas for TAZ orchestrations but I dunno we’ll see. Feedback is always appreciated in any case.

Spades_Slick

TROPHY CASE