TITLE: STOP Chasing Trends! Hitchcock Principle
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh60AVlZrq4

[music] Most art I see nowadays is easy to digest microwavable art. But if you think about the artists that we love, most of the art they make is really dense. It has a lot of layers to it and we come back and revisit their art over and over and over again. Today I want to show you a concept called content density. Content density is more about attention to detail and how much time you spend on a project than it is about how you market or how much money you put into a project. With density, it doesn't have to be a destination. You can build a doorway. They search for the item. They fill in the gaps. It's just your job to put them there. I just know in my own mind that we all have a different idea of all the words we're using. >> Uh, you know, so I don't really have too much u really can't take it too seriously because we like if I say the word house like we're both going to see a different house. Sensory detail, the things that you can not just hear, but you want people to see something. You want people to smell something. So even using terms like cigars on a song give gives you like a sensory detail. I really wanted to do a song that felt like a painting by Annie Lee. >> Let's think about someone like Kendrick Lamar. There's so many breakdowns online about Kendrick Lamar's work. If you think about his album covers, there's been breakdowns based solely on his album covers alone, hidden messages, how they connect. I think the biggest difference between him and Drake is that Kendrick is has more layers to his artistry. Always finding something new, Easter eggs. There's so many things there for you to pull from that sometimes even the audience might find things that [music] wasn't even Kendrick's intention. And when you compare him to Drake, you just don't get that from Drake. You get great music from Drake, but it's not the same level of content density. It's not something that you'll take in the lab [music] and you'll deconstruct to see what the parts are made of. And I think in the long term, those are the people we remember. It's like, you know, one of your uncles gives you a a Stevie Wonder album and [music] he says, "Study this." Even Hitchcock way back then understood content density. >> Can you explain what a mcguffin is? >> Yes. A mguffin you see in most films about spies. It is the thing that the spies are after. In the days of Roger Kipling, it would be the plans of the fort on the Kyber Pass. >> Mhm. >> And the plans of an atom bomb. Anything you like. It's always called the thing that the characters on the screen worry about, but the audience don't care. Pulp fiction and the briefcase. That's a mcguffin. If you think about the movie Inception and the totem, you know, spinning the little top, that's a mcguffin. What was in the briefcase? Why is spinning top? The object being there is like a playful thing that you have between you and your audience. That's what content density is all about. There's a NBA basketball card and it's a card of Mark Jackson and it's a picture of him on the court and in the audience is the Melendez brothers. I don't think they meant to take a picture of the Melendez brothers. I don't even know at the time if it was before or after they killed their parents. Nevertheless, they're in the photo. It became famous because they were in the photo. Now, imagine if you took that photo and everything was blurry except for Mark Jackson. Sometimes it's not intentional, but everything you fit in the frame is fair game. One of my favorite films of all time is Parasite. And this is a spoiler alert if you've never seen the movie Parasite. They show water in two parts of the film. They're flooding in water and another part of the film they're wasting water to water the grass. juxtaposing that one scene to another. It's way better than relying on dialogue to tell you, "Hey, I'm poor or to tell you how poor I am or how much I'm struggling." There's a shot of them in the bathroom stealing Wi-Fi. They find a good spot to get Wi-Fi from. And if you look at the background and you see the toilet paper roll, you'll see one of the finished rolls laying on top of the toilet paper roll. I don't know if they did this intentionally or not. It almost bothered me that that empty toilet roll was on top of the other toilet paper. There's also another shot in the film where they're hanging his socks from the grill of a fan to dry. It's almost like to show you, you know, necessity is the mother of all invention. The crazy thing is the camera doesn't zoom in on it or anything like that. It doesn't scream for your attention, but when you rewatch it, it rewards you. You know, it really reminds me of If I Ruled the World by Nas. That was his lead single to It Was written. When you listen to the verses, he's really lyrical in that song. What gave him the room to be that complex was everything else around the song. Everything around the lyrics that made up the song was very simple. The beat was from Houdini and the song was called Friends. The concept of the song from Curtis Blow. Same concept, same song title. There's part of a hook that Lauren Hill sang that was also an interpolation from the Delonics. That's three different generations you're touching in one song. Content density is more about attention to detail. You might not have the money, but you're willing to spend more time. Time becomes your currency. If someone who has a big budget, they might look to cut corners, but that doesn't necessarily make their artistry better than yours. And we've seen people spend an immense amount of money on blockbuster films, and a lot of them flop. When you look at film companies like A24, you kind of get an idea like, oh, these guys, they really know how to use their creativity. And to me, it's because they care a little more about the content itself and the layers and they pay attention to the details. >> True. Today, embedded in the work that I do is all the evidence of its own making and anybody who wants to go back and uh I always said it's like dr dropping crumbs along a trail friends Hansel and Gretle style. Anyone who wants to pick up the crumbs can retrace the journey that I made. It's not necessary to do that, but if you care to, you really do understand how art gets made. >> Ryan Cougler to me is one of the brightest and one of the best um filmmakers right now at this time. Black Panther is a mixture of a bunch of I would say African history from different tribes from different parts of Africa kind of mixed in through the throughout the whole film. So because of that you can see little pieces here and there that make you dig deeper than just it being some superhero movie. Yes, your content can be too dense. In order to have balance, you'll be um simple in in certain places and really complex in others. Listen to this interview by Basot. The interviewer talks to him as if he's unsophisticated. But years later, we're still looking at his work and learning from his work. In simple block letters, Bosia has written Alexandria, Hector, and Aristophanes. Names which not only cannote glories of the past, but also remind us of school and our own inculturation. Some names have been crossed out or deliberately misspelled. And when we read the names, we can almost hear their sound. Bosia creates concrete poetry and his art has been reproduced in literary publications like the Paris Review. We asked Bosia about the words in his paintings. Where do the words come from? I >> um real life books, television. >> Yeah. And you you just skim them and uh start including >> No, I mean when I'm working I hear them, you know, and I just throw them down. >> Oh, yeah. Well, I mean things like Punic Wars. I remember that was in one of your >> Oh, that that was from a a guide book on Roman history >> and um you you had been uh reading it and uh >> Well, it was not it wasn't that long that natural history part of it. It's like, you know, history of Rome, five pages, you know. >> Yeah. And and so you snatched a few words from it. >> Yeah. I didn't snatched them, you know. >> They they caught your >> They caught my eye, you know, and I took them. Layers means density. Density means rewatchability. And rewatchability means growth.