Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Breaking It Down

Have you ever looked at what someone is doing and thought, I could never do that? You’d be surprised at what you can do

By André van Heerden, Communications Director

There are many talented and experienced people who can do a lot of impressive things. And most of the time it’s enlightening or entertaining to just sit back and admire them.

It’s disheartening though when you see something in your particular field and think, wow, maybe I’m in the wrong place.

I’ve always loved soccer and have played it for many years. When I was 16-years-old, I remember being told by an experienced coach, “You can now do everything that the pros can do. They just do it quicker.”

It confused me as at the time I thought he was incorrect. Surely there must be more for me to learn and perfect. The pros just seemed to be on a different level.

But then I watched particular players more carefully, especially those playing in the same positions that I did. And when I looked at them individually—when their responsibilities and actions were broken down and examined position by position and play by play—I realized that he was right.

They were doing all of the same things that I was doing—just quicker and more consistently.

As a movie lover, and as someone who has made movies, I often think about how certain films are made. There are some films that I love like The Peanut Butter Falcon and The Hundred Foot Journey that I think are great and that with the right cast and crew I could hope to make.

The filmmaking and scenes are straightforward, and there’s nothing complicated about the way it was produced. There are other films that I look at and think, I could never do that.

It may not be an artistic, or cool thing to admit, but I’ve always been impressed and even intimidated by the Transformer films. Yes, the movies are overblown, melodramatic, cliched, highly unrealistic, and skewered by critics, but wow, are they ever a spectacle! So much so that I often wonder, how did they do that? The concept is outlandish, but somehow the mechanical beings look and feel real.

But again, by breaking down a particular sequence into its many parts, the frenetic action and explosions and special effects become less intimidating. When each shot is seen just as one single shot, the impossibility of it suddenly seems more possible.

With the right crew and right budget and right amount of timing, yes, I could create that one single shot. One shot isn’t that intimidating. And if I could create that one shot, then I could create others. And if I could create others, I could create a scene.

A famous proverb goes like this: inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.

Yes, an entire novel seems really difficult to write. But if you can write a sentence then it stands to reason you could write a paragraph, page, or chapter.

Building the remarkable structures that CLAC members working in construction do looks completely daunting. Where and how do they even begin?

But by breaking it down into its various pieces and stages, and leaning on the expert tradespeople who have done this before, it becomes manageable.

I’m still in awe of people who excel at what they do. I just feel a little bit better about my own limitations when I can understand how it’s done. And even inspired to try something on my own.

Breaking It Down

You might be interested in