Kya Lou’s visit brought a clear and essential reminder: filmmaking is a practice built on experimentation, play, and—crucially—failure [Slide 1]. This is not ornamental to the work; it is the work. 

The best filmmaking advice I got was uncomplicated: there are no rules. It came from mentor, educator, filmmaker, and friend, Jeanne Liotta [Slide 2]. Another significant lesson from her, delivered with the same directness: figure out how to pay your bills and make your work. These two truths from Jeanne—freedom from rules and the practical necessity of sustaining myself—offered a clarity that trimmed away the excess noise that surrounds filmmaking as a practice and discipline.  

Ceramicist, writer, and educator, M.C. Richards wrote about the necessity of working with clay in a spirit of openness, allowing the process itself to teach you what it needs to become [Slide 3]. Failure is inevitable and generative. Clay begins to take shape and form when you let go of the idea that you already know what the work will be. 

The call for curiosity is voiced so often across so many disciplines that it risks becoming hollow. Like the experimentation vital for filmmaking and ceramics, the echoing of this reminder remains essential. Universities can often make the mistake of teaching filmmaking as a process that must be mastered through control from the beginning where every step is meant to reduce uncertainty.

But uncertainty might be the point.  

Film is not only the execution of an idea; it is the discovery of one. Discovery happens through play and experimentation. It occurs through failure, not in spite of it—especially when we set aside the itinerant paternal industry model and turn our attention to more present and enduring stewards of curiosity and experimentation. 

What makes this approach to filmmaking so unnecessarily complicated is that students are navigating a fragmented institutional system, layered with invisible, undefinable, and absent industry pressures that suggests there’s a “right” way to make a film, a correct workflow, a proper path. These pressures can make experimentation and play feel risky, like something indulgent or inefficient.

It isn’t.

If anything, refusing to experiment is the greater risk. It leads to work that's stuck proving its knowledge of all the rules and staying creatively inert. Experimentation, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of making something that feels alive, something that couldn’t have been predicted in advance.

For Production Students: You do not have to begin with a script if that’s not how you think. You do not have to follow a prescribed sequence of steps. You do not have to know what your film is before you start making it. But you have to engage with the process—actively, repeatedly, and with curiosity. 

Failure is not a detour from filmmaking. It’s an essential part of the process by which films get made.