Okay, my name is Salim. I’m from North Carolina and I’m here to talk about… Oh, wow, hey. It’s rarer than we get cheers lately. That’s really nice. I’m here to talk about strange limits and weird rules. Rules sometimes get kind of a bad reputation in creative fields. People think… They hear rules and they think of constraints and they think of people imposing rules on other people and they think of boxes that we got to think outside of. But rules can be kind of awesome. All those games that they were just talking about before, they’re just kind of collections of rules and lots of irrational rules. Parties are sets of rules. You get an invitation with a sheet of rules. It tells you what day to get there. People are really weird about you showing up a day early. There’s unwritten rules. Maybe you can be really loud, but if you sit in the corner reading a book on productivity, that’s just kind of not allowed for some reason. A lot of those rules that I said are irrational. Irrational rules are fantastic in the right conditions. There are certain places where we clearly want only rational rules to be followed. But it’s not an exaggeration for me to say that irrational rules have kind of started my career. They pulled it through a turn and kind of irrational declaration. So I’m going to talk about some of that and how that’s useful in unsticking me from places and hopefully we can figure out some ways to… That’s useful for other people in unsticking as well. For me, things turned. In 2011, I was moving back from Japan to the US. I had a day job and I was a little stuck in a way and I had a birthday on 11-11-11. And I turned 33, which is just kind of like a cool coincidence. My friends were like, oh, you should do something like that. So I told everybody I’m going to do 33 videos in a year, which with a full time job that was all inside, terrible idea. I didn’t sleep, but it was great. Actually, I made these videos as the list. I actually made 36 because at the end I got super paranoid and was like, I’m not going to hit 33, so I did a bunch of extra. And one of the things I realized with this is that consistent nonsense becomes projects. So the consistency is really key. If you meet a man with a bottle cap, he’s probably just looking for a recycling bin, but if he’s got like 10,000 bottle caps, he’s a bottle cap collector. If a kid runs a lap, a little random activity, if they do that every day and you time it for 18 years, they might be an Olympian. So these things add up. I’m going to share some rules that I learned while doing that 33 videos project. One that has really stuck with me is if it’s analog, make it digital, and if it’s digital, make it analog. Now, for me, analog is kind of shorthand for a process that a bystander could observe that people can see. So hammering a nail, analog, checking your email, even if you’re listening to music and kind of moving your head, you look the same as a beat maker making a beat, moving his head on a laptop. So it’s an unfilmable thing. So I try to make as many digital things analog as possible, and that’s the half of that rule that actually stuck with me the most. So a couple years ago, I joined a few people at the New York Times working on a project called Race Related, and one of the first projects was called Awkward Race Questions. And I stuck to my rule of using analog processes and made an additional rule that I was going to try and make everything for the project using objects in my house or the staples that was really close to my house. And so this was on, we were dealing with serious topics, but we needed to make them approachable. This is one about Islamophobia, an illustration. My name, Salim, means peace. So that’s actually 50, I think, little cards with iterations. It’s all tweened in the middle, no one ever notices, but there’s a lot of work that went into it. An illustration on being mixed South Asian and East Asian. The compass became the digital lap and Thrill posted in there. Somebody asked me how ethnic I was, which was a great question, which I loved. So this is my ethnicity dial that we used for that story. There was a really interesting discussion about people of color and that term itself and what it means and what it doesn’t include and what the subtleties are on that. So this was a little illustration for that. And we carried this over into our larger projects. Here’s one. For example, I met this fantastic executive in Silicon Valley. He takes great pride in being someone who actively tries to achieve gender balance on his teams, knowing that Silicon Valley and tech are skewed heavily male. So he looked at his professional social network, his Twitter, his LinkedIn. He found his network was far more skewed male than he expected. So there’s a place where he could actively work to shift that and that’s what he’s been doing since then. They have M&M’s and Staples, which is really great. So one of the things that was a project on implicit bias that now none of this doing things analog takes away from the background work. You still have to do the research. We talked to researchers of color at Harvard and NYU all over. And you still have to plot things out and make everything make sense. But I do think that making things analog makes things more approachable. And I wish people would use it more as a process even for really difficult topics. Another thing I like to have is off-camera secrets. Actors do this a lot. They’ll have some secret in their heart that they don’t tell anyone. Mariel Streep does this thing where she’ll decide that she’s not in love with one of the characters that everyone who’s watching the movie thinks she’s going to be in love with. And so it causes all this interesting subtle stuff to happen. So I try to have interesting things happening off-camera. So after doing all those loops of the New York Times, I was like, how can we make a loop in the real world without a digital loop, without faking it, you know? And one of the rules I try to follow is there must be some truly experimental element in everything I make. So this means like, to make it really experimental, I mean you can’t be totally sure that every part of it’s going to work. So I don’t always tell funders that. But here is our loop experiment. Watch the dance you just put out a frame. And he’s about to come back into frame. Our MC went out of frame. And really the dudes just sprinting behind me. They’re just sprinting. We’re walking with a camera and they’re just like running laps. But it does something extra to the performance. It kind of energizes it, right? So even when they go back to just walking and try to look all cool, they’re like trying to breathe really hard and stuff. So those kind of secrets, we talk a lot about story and structure, but those kind of secrets create like a rich background world. And as I’ve started thinking a lot about rules, I’ve met a lot of creatives around the world who have strict rules they use on projects. So I have a met a friend, Urius in Morocco, who always shoots with a fixed wide lens and no Photoshop. He has this amazing project that you all should check out. It’s called Casablanca and not the movie because none of Casablanca was actually filmed in Casablanca. And so it’s talking about Morocco and he’s really just using images to humanize it for people who haven’t been there. So this image would be very different if he’d allowed himself to use a zoom. He does no staging. So he’s just kind of like, he literally, it’s amazing following. He just walks around like this all the time and just finds these cool visual quirks. I have another friend whose work I’d like to introduce you to briefly. Her name is Juliana Villarosa. She goes by Juliana Vision. She did a project called Black and White in Color. And so she was frustrated by people making films using digital color cameras and then just turning it black and white as an afterthought, right? I mean, I’ve totally done that. So it’s kind of awkward talking with everybody. But like, but she wanted people to think more about the contrast and the images and what the world is in black and white. So all this is color objects, sorry, black and white object shot completely in color. What I love about this is she created an educational experience where the constraints actually reflect the lesson. So if you hear about the behind the scenes, you actually learn more about the way of thinking, right? I think this could be used for a lot of different things. I want to talk a little bit about ways that you can apply some of this in a world outside of just the arts, right? So for me, if I’m trying to think like, hey, how can I make a limit or rule that’s going to push me harder, sometimes I’ll take a tendency that I have or a situation that I’m in and just push it further, right? So for example, I talked to some people here who are working, trying to figure out ways to reach different demographics in their media, right? So one, and they’re not a part of that demographic. You might make a rule for yourself that the only movies you’re going to watch for the next six months are top films in the demographic you’re trying to reach and you can do that in the theater. If you do polling data, you might make a rule that you’re going to eat ice cream once a week with someone in the demographic you’re polling. So just ways to push yourself. Make it finite when in doubt because Juliana doesn’t want to shoot ants on rice for the rest of her life. So she made a boundary and that lets you play within a more definable space. When in doubt, choose fun. So if you’re going to be doing this for a while and you’ve got to push through the hard times to make this work, but you want to have a base of fun to come back to, these rules make worlds. And weird rules make weird worlds. And here by weird I just mean rich and distinct and we’re trying to make rich and distinct different worlds for people to experience, right? We so often hear this phrase think outside the box and I think it’s a really valuable metaphor. But what I would encourage people to do is the next time you want to twist your thinking a little bit, maybe just take a moment and think, how can I make this box smaller and stranger and see how that pushes you and see what it helps you create. So let’s build some worlds, y’all. Thank you so much.