Faster Is Not Intrinsically Better

There’s an infectious idea in tech that has subsequently infected so many other adjacent industries. That faster is better, faster is more efficient, faster is the only way to work. “Must Go Faster” and "Go Fast and Break things" are the mantras of business tech bros, not artists. As artists and creative people, this is just a plain and simple false dichotomy, some will call it a false binary. Going faster is not the perpetual goal of a creative mind, it’s the goal of business optimization (and its efficacy there is debatable as well).

Without boredom, without pause, without time, art becomes sterilized. Artistic endeavors can be reduced to their lowest common denominator. When artistic efforts are treated as steps in an assembly-line to be optimized, the actual artistic component of the effort is compressed out like a vice closing-in and squeezing the life out.

In film-making activities, it’s important to be organized, it’s important to know the processes and the techniques used to accomplish the goal. It requires coordination and collaboration and teamwork which inherently requires an analytic and organizational approach to the process of creation, but when these steps are over-emphasized as the singular bullet list of activities to guarantee a result and should therefore be optimized for efficiency to the goal, the work becomes little more than an output from an input.

Output could also be called content, output is the extruded result from an LLM or image-generator. Optimizing for efficiency only in artistic pursuits is reductive to the mean. It’s the same sheen, the identical gloss, the total devoidness of intent, and the soulless nature of the final product takes hold and the only measure of success is clicks, comments, and retention of “attention” and engagement measured down to the millisecond in an effort to “go viral”, to succeed, to be seen, to get paid.

In a commercial world where formulas are king and the clients are on a deadline to a specific end result, then sure — optimize the hell out of it. Get it done, get paid. Experiment on somebody else’s dime if they’ll allow it, but there are no shortcuts to time, intent, and effort. Why not take the time on your own ideas and projects to make them great, to dig in and dig deep and work to discover something new in your storytelling.

Discovery and curiosity are non-formulaic. They are explorative actions and exploration requires time. Do not optimize down your own efforts and ideas. Faster is not intrinsically better.

There is an idea called the “triple constraint”. Some might call it “project management triangle”. However you refer to it, the idea is the same. There are three items at each corner of the triangle and you can only have two. In filmmaking and artistic endeavors those points are variants of “Fast”, “Good”, and “Cheap”. If you want something “Cheap” and “Fast”, then it probably won’t be “Good”. If you want something “Good” and “Cheap”, then it won’t be “Fast”. If you understand these constraints, then you can choose wisely to suits the needs of each individual project.

Whatever your patterns, whatever your needs, take a moment to consider your goals and dive in. If you want to try a bunch of new stuff then fast and cheap are the way, get it done, explore quickly and iterate through some quick ideas, at some point you’ll likely need to shift those goals to prioritize quality over quantity. What that means is unique to each individual, but it’s imperative to keep track of that scale and adjust accordingly.

Now, go forth and create something great! Creation is a purely human act and is not something that can be automated.