I'm not ashamed to admit that "illuminating failure" has been a recurrent theme in my life. I find that if you aim yourself directly at the thing that you desire, then you will make the right mistakes. And the difference between a "right" mistake and a "wrong" one, is that the right mistake is never of omission. The right mistake represents the results of a test of everything you believe. The right mistake provides you with enough observational material that you can decide whether to modify your approach to the next five minutes or your approach to your entire life.

I have modified my approach to my entire life in response to a particularly illuminating mistake I made called An Untitled Interaction.

An Untitled Interaction was, as the name suggests, intended to be an interactive story, delivered online using the "nScription engine", a set of software routines that I coded up for just this purpose. But the story concept was too ambitious for the fledgling technology. The deeper into it I wrote, the more time-consuming it became to reconcile the alternate storylines with each other—a problem that grew exponentially until the project simply died of obesity and old age. But not before I'd learned a critical lesson from the experience. My painstakingly meticulous approach to writing, being particularly unsuited to this kind of project, will have to be abandoned going forward.

It's a conclusion that I naturally couldn't accept without some resistance. Make that, lifelong resistance. But failing so spectacularly the first time out of the gate with this new engine, has driven the point home pretty effectively. And it's probably saved me a slew of excruciatingly difficult near-misses before eventually coming to the same inevitable understanding about what has to change.

Directed, lit, and shot by myself on Digital Video, An Untitled Interaction still serves as a example of the solid production values that can be achieved on even a frayed shoestring budget...


An Untitled Interaction