He's certainly the king of how so many aspects of the creative process have been pared down to their absolute barely functioning minimums, related to how little attention is given to specific aspects nowadays, leaving decades of experience on the floor
I'm not dinging on Rian Johnson, who is making some pretty great movies, but I'm going to call out Storyboarding, a beautiful art we have decades of callbacks to, reduced to a patch of scribbles, ensuring that really only the person drawing them understands the meaning.
Look at some of these. Apocalypse Now (Dean Tavoularis), Sound of Music (Maurice Zuberano), Inception (Gabriel Hardman), Psycho (Saul Friggin' Bass)
Today's a special day. The very, very last of the GET LAMP packages shipped out. These were the remaining unshipped international orders. I lost money on every one. Here is why.
When I started doing documentaries, half of all orders were international and so I learned quick how to fill out forms and charge a little more for postage because it doubled potential sales. That was 2005 to now.
Things have changed.
I used to fill out a small customs form and pay $4-$9 to ship a GET LAMP box.
Now, I had to fill out this monster, and the price is $16-$20. 8 ounce box. Plus the $2 per shipping envelope I use, plus the cost of the packages/DVDs, and my gas and time... they're not profitable.
Some quick notes on digitizing an awful lot of things, including these VHS tapes.
I consulted with about a dozen people about all the 'right' ways to do this, trying to avoid making a stupid mistake or missing a detail. In all, we ended up revisiting the codec settings, the application, the hardware, the way to tell if threre's other issues.. It's boring.
But it's ALL boring. Anybody can digitize one or two things. A few can do a dozen. Very few can do 50 and almost nobody can do 500, without compensation. Compensate people digitizing things they don't have a vested interest in being digitized. (I am being compensated.)
Today is an exciting day for me. A temporary bug in one of my scripts that didn't account for a specific situation put anything with the words "Frank Zappa" in it into a single collection.
Every item. That mentions Frank Zappa.
2,112 items.
I may livestream the process. I'm carefully returning them where they originally lived in the archive's stacks.
There are people doing stuff like this every day in other libraries and archives, after a conversation that begins "Wait, did you..." and ends with 'Oh no."
Luckily, this is all digital. No Frank Zappas were harmed in this situation and all of them can be enjoyed instantly while I fix them.