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You never know where your next lesson is going to come from. A recent one of mine came from a hand dryer.
At Traveller’s Tales last week we got some new dryers in the toilets. Besides being powerful enough to show more bone than an X-ray, they have the curious property of shining a bright blue shaft of light on your hands while you’re drying them.
After posing a query as to the purpose of this light to a colleague, he asked me, with wisdom perhaps beyond his years, “would you rather the light was not there?”
And the strange truth is that while I know the light does not impact on the function or performance of the machine, I really wouldn’t want it to not be there!
Sometimes things are just right or wrong, regardless of the presence or absence of logic. In writing my short film I have wrestled again and again with the inclusion of a particular secondary character. All I really needed to ask myself was, “would I rather the character was not there?” The answer, it turns out, is no.
2 comments - Why not leave one?:
Very insightful! And I believe I know the particular dryers you're speaking of, and I agree about the light. :)
Sometimes, though, we get hooked on a character/story/scene that maybe SHOULDN'T be there, but we still would rather it did. So I guess it's a balancing act to be sure you're putting in the right stuff.
Very true. I guess at the end of the day you just have to trust your gut on some things.
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