“The difference between lateral and vertical thinking is that with vertical thinking logic is in control of the mind, whereas with lateral thinking logic is at the service of the mind.”
– Edward de Bono, The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1971:15
Lateral thinking played a crucial role in the formation of the Breaking Cinema podcast as I explained when I presented my final conception for the ten episodes of season 1 in the Episode Outlines document.
The following comes from the introduction to the Breaking Cinema Episode Outlines document…
Detailed outlines for the first ten episodes of the Breaking Cinema podcast now exist. While I am sure the episodes will be tweaked and changed throughout their production, what I have laid down in the outlines document should be considered as pretty strong indicators of the first ten episodes’ final finished forms, because a great deal of research and thinking has gone into the conception of these first ten episodes.
The episode outlines represent themes and ideas that I have been playing around with in my head and in my other project focuses for a number of years now. Certainly, this continual ideation-play-period accounts for why I want to get these ideas off my chest and out into the open for fuller discussions and explorations.
When I set out to write what has now become the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness overview document, I began the process by attempting to concisely sum up a number of key themes which I wanted the resulting podcast to explore.
I am now pleased to say that the following 20 key points of the project’s focus are well-and-truly active components of the DNA of the Breaking Cinema podcast and of the first ten episodes.
20 key points of the project’s focus…
- The bigger picture
- Constructive
- “Human beings are very complicated things. They live in several dimensions at once, not just one. And if they try to live just in one, they warp themselves horribly.”- Olaf Stapledon, Four Encounters, 1983
- Five-dimensional thinking a.k.a. lateral thinking
- Film history, analysis, criticism and appreciation can take care of themselves
- Holistic = transdisciplinary
- “The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data.” – Subliminal: The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us, 2014:50
- Willful blindness a.k.a. the art of ignoring reality
- Reflective
- “I am not a good man and I’m not bad man. You know what I am… I am… an idiot! With a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning.” – The Doctor, Doctor Who: Death in Heaven, 2014
- Homo sapiens are the best and the worst thing about the planet Earth
- “[In the future], the Internet will disappear… you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time.” – Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google
- Engaging with content is anything but passive
- “All of us want to bury our heads in the sand when taxes are due, when we have bad habits we know we should change, or when the cars starts to make that strange sound. Ignore it and it will go away – that’s what we think and hope. It’s more than just wishful thinking. In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn’t exist and that we don’t have to change. We are also trying hard to avoid conflict: if the threat’s not there, I don’t have to fight it. A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compel us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflicts we just don’t want to deal with.” – Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness, 2012:211
- Hybrid
- “Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female – female is nature’s default gender setting” – Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, 2006:36
- Creativity
- ‘Listen’ – if you re-arrange the letters it becomes ‘silent’
- “my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein, – more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 2003:49
- Us
It was a long process of getting from the above twenty concise ideas to the eventual and detailed episode outlines.
The time and depth of the conception of the podcast outlined in this Episode Outlines and Pulling Teeth and Breaking Blindness documents can be accounted for by the intricate process of lateral thinking I exerted in order to stimulate this eventual conception.
“Since Aristotle, logical thinking has been exalted as the one effective way in which to use the mind. Yet the very elusiveness of new ideas indicates that they do not necessarily come about as a result of logical thought processes. Some people are aware of another sort of thinking which is most easily recognised when it leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of. This book is an attempt to look at this sort of thinking and to show that it is quite distinct from logic and often more useful in generating new ideas. For the sake of convenience, the term ‘lateral thinking’ has been coined to describe this other sort of thinking: ‘vertical thinking’ is used to denote the conventional logical process.”
– Edward de Bono, The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1966:5
I am outlining lateral thinking here not just to clarify why I have spent so long developing the focus of the podcast, but also to indicate that lateral thinking is a process which is integral to the focus of the podcast, as indeed item 4 from the 20 key points of the podcast list should indicate.
The point of the podcast is not just to explore a wider media and psychological landscape, but to stimulate new ways of thinking within the listener.
And, for me, this stimulation effect is absolutely essential to orchestrating this project, because I have no desire to just present information, I wish to present ways in which that information can be constructively put to good use, I want Breaking Cinema to benefit the people who listen to it.
However, in order for the information of Breaking Cinema to have an impact on the listener, then the way in which that information is presented needs to be expansive, creative and untraditional.
Familiarity can always be found with vertical thinking; it is with lateral thinking that you can start to understand the unfamiliar.
Lateral thinking is a method, it’s not idle day-dreaming as a great deal of stubborn and purely vertical thinkers (narrow-minded thinkers) would have you believe.
Ultimately, it does give you access to a much richer result and this is precisely what I want to achieve in the first ten episodes of the podcast.
Logic is very much at the service of Breaking Cinema, but it is not in command of it.
Breaking Cinema is an exploration, not an absolution.
The podcast is called Breaking Cinema, but this does not mean that the focus is solely just on films and cinema, far from it!
In fact, it is the fact that the podcast is called Breaking Cinema that the focus is much broader and concerned with a wider media and psychological landscape of exploration.
Breaking Blindness would be a more accurate name for what I am trying to achieve with the podcast.
Certainly, from my point-of-view, the name Breaking Cinema signifies my move away from purely film-centric concerns.
I have done Film Studies, I have done it for many years and I have quite literally done it to death (the topic of the Episode 1: My First Education).
“An attitude of indifference has largely found its way into Film Studies, as it puts too much emphasis on the past, it is an academic subject that is increasingly feeling very dusty. It does not invest enough energy into progressive thinking or into examining the practical aspects of how film entities are constructed.”
– Me, Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, 2013:103-4
I want to move on from what I perceive as being the narrow concerns of the Film Studies field. The textual-and-critical-analysis approach of considering cinema – but almost always just focusing on the two-dimensional images on the screen – is just one piece of the puzzle, it’s not the entirety of it.
“A focus on the meaningful and sociological side of Media [and Film] Studies also means that we are required to discourage the self-indulgent and pointless textual analysis which was once central to the average Media [and Film] Studies textbook. Occasionally some commentators do manage to make interesting observations about the composition or meaning of a particular culturally significant text. But requiring our students to make pretentious statements about trivial aspects of unimportant bits of media content was always a silly idea, and bound to draw sharp and reasonable attacks from critics of the discipline. The defence that this activity is parallel to what they do in Literature Studies was correct, but it’s often a waste of time there too. Our students should at least have an ambition to be on the front line of creative activity – not following along behind, making comments to an audience of no one”
– David Gauntlett, Media Studies 2.0 And other battles around the future of media research, 2011
If you really want to talk about film and what it is within reality, then you need to talk about the reality that exists beyond a film – the bigger picture – not just the two-dimensional images on a screen that supposedly make up a film and comprise the essence of cinema.
I have never bought into that way of thinking about cinema and I continue to be frustrated by Film Studies practitioners who worship it like some flawless religion.
Certainly, to understand my approach towards Film Studies and the focus of the Breaking Cinema podcast is to understand the scientist’s approach towards religion…
Religion can be a very nice, comforting and even nostalgic idea, but the scientist wants to see if it actually holds any empirical validity within the external reality that gives you life day-after-day, because if we are just walking around in a constant state of religious delusionment, what important and troubling issues of reality could we be missing?
Likewise, Film Studies has a lot of nice theories (that have been stuck in repeat since the 1960s and 1970s), but…
- how do we know those theories are empirically valid?
- what are they missing?
- and how can they serve a constructive purpose for humanity?
And these questions will only be answered when the practitioners of Film Studies actually start exercising constructive criticism towards their beloved field of indomitable nostalgia.
Those practitioners need to break apart their beloved field in order to see of what it is actually made.
One of the key strengths that is often promoted within the Film Studies field is that it inherently nurtures critical thinkers.
Really?
Because I can say that I have seen an awful lot of these critical thinkers.
In fact, I find that the only practitioners who are ever really critical towards the discipline of Film Studies are individuals who have never actually studied it.
Generally, these are the people who claim that Film Studies is a “Mickey Mouse subject” and, a good deal of the time, I am inclined to agree with them.
If you are sensing an element of frustration in the tone of my writing then that is because I am getting pretty sick of constantly repeating myself and watching everything I say to fellow film-centrics just fly over their heads, which is a remarkable achievement for someone who is almost always shorter than the people he interacts with day-after-day.
I always endeavour to be an expansive thinker and I always work towards increasing my field of knowledge because I do not like living in ignorance. Contrary to popular belief, ignorance is not bliss; ignorance is a cancer, which does catch up with you.
That is my personal view, but I think it is one that is well founded.
Therefore, a film-centric’s rose tinted view of cinema as being purely the two-dimensional images on the screen a.k.a. the worship of the film-deity is most definitely something I am going to contest and, furthermore, it is something I can going to do my utmost to prove ineffective and expansively blinding… hence Breaking Cinema.
Fellow film-centrics, I am sorry, but just because I spent (officially) six years studying film does not mean that I unquestionably agree with it – that’s critical thinking for you!
When you are willing to put yourself, your passions and your own biased beliefs under the microscope – as I have done, as I continue to do with my own fascination with film and as I will be doing in the first ten episodes as outlines in this document – then you will become a critical thinker in the proper active sense.
In critical thinking NOTHING is sacred.
I am talking about bias here; you know that thing you think everyone else besides you possesses.
Well, guess what, you are biased and I am biased and every human being is biased in some way or another.
“I was biased, in favour of those just like me. Everyone is biased. But just as we are affronted when told that we’re likely marry and associate with those very similar to ourselves, so most people vehently reject the idea that they are biased: others may be, but not us. ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Is how the Bible puts it. Of course we consider the people who disagree with us to be the most biased of all.”
– Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, 2012:16
It is of our own biases that we need to be especially critical.
I will admit it, I am hugely biased against human beings who are not critical of their own biases, so sanity knows where that places me!
But as long as it keeps me thinking critically, I am happy… more-or-less.
However, criticism on its own is only one step in a larger process of growth.
The next step is to take those critical views and say, “Okay, how can I put these critical observations to a constructive use?”
That’s where Breaking Cinema comes in – it critiques in the endeavour of being creative.
Growth develops out of decay and discomfort, not the worship of a seemingly perfect religion.
“In the 1920s [Hans Seyle] had been baffled at why physicians always seemed to concentrate on the recognition of individual diseases and specific remedies for such isolated causes, while never paying any attention to the “syndrome of just being sick.” Those who are concerned with the program “content” [i.e. the films a.k.a. the 2D images on the screen] of media and not with the medium proper, appear to be in the position of physicians who ignore the “syndrome of just being sick”… The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed. The effect of radio is visual, the effect of the photo is auditory. Each new impact shifts the ratio among all the senses. What we seek today is either a means of controlling these shifts in the sense-ratios of the psychic and social outlook, or a means of avoiding them altogether. To have a disease without its symptoms is to be immune. No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.”
– Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1966:69-70
If Breaking Cinema needs to be a work of art to achieve the goal of moving beyond just focusing on the two-dimensional images on the screen in order to conceive of a larger media and psychological landscape and be hugely constructive in this endeavour, then a work of art it will have to be.
The focus of Breaking Cinema as a work of art is very different to its film-centric beginnings in its initial development period.
When I decided that I wanted to develop a podcast that would use the study of film as its starting point, I had been very keen to get others involved, so that we could eventually and collaboratively evolve the project beyond something that was just about films.
The test episodes of Breaking Cinema were just sit-down discussions based around a single starting point which would develop as we naturally discussed it in front of the microphone. And this first set of episodes were… okay, but the main issue I was having with them was the fact that we were just a group of guys sitting down and talking about films…
- It had been done many times before, so what were we really adding to the ongoing discussion of cinema?
- How were these discussions constructive? What possible constructive benefit did these monotonous discussions serve for the listener?
It was at this point that I decided I needed to really figure out what I wanted to do with the podcast and this is when I started to write what has now become the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness overview document. In the early stages of writing the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness document I came to the following four decisions…
- Disband with the format, style and approach of the test episodes.
- Adopt a hybrid storytelling documentary audio format.
- I will lead the project and there are no longer any co-hosts.
- But I do still want to involve many contributors and points of view.
The primary individuals who I had initially developed the Breaking Cinema podcast with were George Oram, Ralph Levi, Rich Pawley and Jack Casey – four fellow Film Studies graduates and therein lay the problem I was having with the test episodes.
Being film graduates – what else, other than film, are they going to talk about?
Although, truthfully, it was not George’s, Ralph’s, Rich’s and Jack’s fault, it was my fault for not being more expansive with who I selected to participate in the project.
Originally, I had intended to figure out the focus of the podcast with just George and Ralph, before inviting any other members aboard.
However, thanks to George’s misguided initiative, the project was soon joined by Rich and Jack, which did complicate the development period because I was now having to deal with multiple sets of people and getting everyone into the same place at the same time always proved to be difficult.
But this is not to say that I was not pleased for the enthusiasm and contributions that Rich and Jack brought to the project. I would just rather George had waited until the focus of the project had been set – as is outlined in this document – but you live and learn.
I come from the school of thought where you learn via doing, which is why I was keen on recording test episodes throughout the development period so as to encourage fresh and open-minded thinking by all of the project members, including myself (in addition to amassing a backlogue of potentially broadcastable episodes).
My incentive for the project was always of something that would offer a fresh approach in regards to thinking about film and media… and the bigger picture of which those two fields are now two strong components.
However, I struggled to get the other members of the project on board with this approach of stepping outside of the comfort zone of film and mainly because there was never a clearly defined approach for the podcast to take in order to achieve this bigger picture aim.
Ultimately, that is my fault, I am not denying that.
My incentive for inviting Ralph and George aboard was drawn from a discussion I had had with them on a train journey back from London in which we had discussed politics at great depth, with not one mention of film. Based on this discussion, I bit the bullet and felt I might get lucky with George and Ralph and maybe, just maybe, get them to start stepping out of the area of film in regards to how they studied and considered it in relation to the larger societal-and-technological reality we now live in.
But, as with Jack and Rich, their hearts are in film and that is what they want to talk about. No matter how many times I have tried to further open up each of the discussions we have had in the test episodes, the discussion always seemed to go running back to the subject of film.
I have repeatedly encouraged each of them to start their own means of expression and reflection on film, whether that is a blog or another podcast or a journal or some other venture, because it would be a shame for them to waste their knowledge and enthusiasm.
There are already plenty of podcasts and other online endeavours which are doing this and some of them do it to a pretty high standard (The Secret History of Hollywood and You Must Remember This being two very good examples). In short, film history, analysis, criticism and appreciation can take of themselves, because there are plenty of active practitioners out there taking care of the conservation of these fields and this will be especially true if four certain individuals were to start producing their own content to add to the cause.
However, Breaking Cinema is not a platform for that, it’s not what I want to do with the project.
The Breaking Cinema podcast is not five guys sitting in a mouldy living room talking about film, not any more.
Moving forward, this project needs open-minded exploration, not closed-minded compliance; it needs proactivity, not passivity, and I was not achieving that with George, Ralph, Jack and Rich in the test episode format.
Ultimately, I was keen on having co-hosts in the project, because collaboration generates a bigger picture of knowledge.
However, I can see now that George, Ralph, Jack and Rich are better suited as occasional contributors.
The fact of the matter is that in order to have one or more reliable co-hosts on the project, I need individuals who are willing to invest the same level of proactivity and open-mindedness as myself.
Therefore, I will continue to do what I have always done as I continue to crack on my own and reach out to other people when necessary.
As I have indicated in the episode outlines, I do intend on using some of the test episode material and I will probably find a way to use more of the test episode material than what is currently indicated in the episode outlines. However, I will request permission from the respective contributors if I do go on to use some of the test episode material.
Additionally, I will also make all of the test episodes available as YouTube videos and MP3s so as to allow George, Ralph, Rich and Jack to use them as examples of their work, if they so wish.
Ultimately, my plans for the project have fundamentally changed and I am prioritising quality over quantity.
Initially, as much as I had wanted to produce a high-quality, documentary podcast presentation, I decided against it, because producing weekly output to that level of quality would not have been logistically sustainable, so I opted for episode-by-episode sit-down discussions instead.
However, producing high quality episodes in blocks or seasons of 10 or so episodes is logistically sustainable, I have the technical know-how and an inherent understanding of the audio form drawn from many, many hours of podcast and audio drama content.
And, if I am being honest, producing a high quality and more expansive product feels me with a great deal more enthusiasm than I was experiencing with the test episode format. Certainly, if you listen through the test episodes, and listen very carefully, you can pick up on my boredom!
Sit-down discussions can generate some very stimulating points, but as a whole they can be incredibly dull and unstimulating to listen to. Therefore, I would rather extract the really strong points and use them in relation to other relevant and engaging material as part of a more polished and entertaining presentation.
A presentation that will be firmly entrenched within the storytelling format podcast genre – the storytelling podcast is really hot at the moment!
Something else about a storytelling format – stories are how you connect with your listener, not by forcing them to sit through an hour long lecture!
However, why am I so keen to do this project as a podcast, opposed to a series of YouTube video essays?
Simply put, the audio form engages your brain in a way that the audio-visual form struggles to.
“Telephone is a cool medium or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, there low in participation, and cool medium are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.”
– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1966:36
Based upon my own observations, I have found the audio podcast form to be better suited for encouraging original-and-creative thinking in the mind of the listener.
One of the reasons the audio form’s popularity has waned and why so many people struggle to get into podcasts and audio dramas (as indeed I did) is because the audio form requires you to work your brain a lot harder than if you were watching a film and having all of the details spoon-fed to you.
Listening to something in audio form is a much more of a collaborative experience than watching a film, precisely because you have to actively work your imagination to put images to the visuals.
I also think it makes you a better thinker and this is why I always swear by podcasts.
“Radio is provided with its cloak of invisibility, like any other medium. It comes to us ostensibly with person-to-person directness that is private and intimate, while in more urgent fact, it is really a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords. All technological extensions of ourselves must be numb and subliminal, else we could not endure the leverage exerted upon us by such extension. Even more than telephone or telegraph, radio is that extensions of the central nervous system, that aboriginal mass medium, the vernacular tongue? The crossing of these two most intimate and potent of human technologies could not possibly have failed to provide some extraordinary new shapes for human experience.”
– Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1966:263-4
Another observation I have drawn from the many podcasts and audio dramas that I have listened to over the past six years is that, opposed to when I am watching a film where my brain is constantly being bombarded and distracted by new imagery, the lack of content-visual information allows my brain more time and space in which to ponder points that have been raised in the content of the audio.
Ultimately, I think that the audio-form is better at training the listener to think for themselves in an original and creative manner.
And if I really want to create an entity that will enable the consumer to think more broadly and critically, as indeed I do with Breaking Cinema, then employing the audio form is a very good place to start.
That’s why I am so keen on a podcast.
Finally, now that the first ten episodes are thoroughly outlined, the Breaking Cinema podcast has a definite direction which means the project can now move forwards with actually creating this first batch of ten episodes.
Additionally, I now also have a ZOOM Hn4 Recorder in my possession which will simplify the whole process of creating the first ten episodes because it means that I can now record high quality audio on the go.
Some of the episode outlines are more detailed than others, but, meh, there is more than enough to be getting on with what is presented in this document. As the rest of the document is devoted to the first ten episodes, I do not want to dwell too much on them in this introduction.
However, I would like to present the essential focus of each episode…
Ep. 1 – The human being as a spectacle (My First Education)
Ep. 2 – Perverted spectacles (Triumph of the Willful Blindness and its Great Dictator)
Ep. 3 – Segmented spectacles (Pride and Prejudice and Smartphone Zombies)
Ep. 4 – Cinema spectacle (In an Auditorium Darkly: The Terror of the Eye-Phone)
Ep. 5 – The female as spectator and spectacle (Gamer Girls Galore)
Ep. 6 – Who is a spectator? (Spectators of the Spectacles)
Ep. 7 – What is a spectacle? (The Slow Motion Picture Entity)
Ep. 8 – How to go about making a spectacle (Microfilm in a Day)
Ep. 9 – How spectacles go about making us (The Media is the Mentality)
Ep. 10 – How to go about constructively breaking down spectacles (This is Breaking Cinema)
As you read the outlines, you will see that the content and presentation of each episode can vary greatly, but even so there is a common theme and thread which runs through all of the episodes – the spectator and the spectacle. If my award-winning BA (Hons) dissertation Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle was about speculating on the spectator and spectacle, then Breaking Cinema is about really getting to know them.
There is a great deal more information on the podcast in the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness overview document, but I decided to only include the episode outlines and a brief introduction to the focus and formation of podcast in this document. However, at the end of this episode overview document I have provided details on what is actually in the Pulling Teeth & Breaking Blindness document, which will be coming soon.
There is only one more thing to say in regards to the continuing development of the Breaking Cinema podcast…
“The further lateral thinking diverges from the rules of reason and vertical thinking, the more it must seem to approach madness. Is lateral thinking only a form of deliberate and temporary madness? [yes it is] Is low-probability thinking any different from the random associations of the schizophrenic? One of the most characteristic features of schizophrenia is the butterfly mind which flies from idea to idea. If one wants to escape temporarily from the obvious way of looking at things, why not use a psychedelic drug? The essential difference is that with lateral thinking the whole process is firmly controlled. If lateral thinking chooses to use chaos it is chaos by direction, not chaos through absence of direction. All the time the logical faculty is waiting to elaborate and eventually judge and select whatever new ideas are generated.”
– Edward de Bono, The Use of Lateral Thinking, 1966:15.
However, that way of thinking about lateral thinking can actually be quite over-burdening and confusing and counter-productive in regards to actually putting the process into practice, which is why I look at it in a different and simplified way, I look at it as if it were a lump of marble.
The truth is this, as long you keep feeding your brain new information, new sensory experiences, new interactions, new uncomfortable zones… you’ve already figured it out. The unconscious mind is a formidable processing machine which, by its very nature, correlates and sews and extrapolates and nits all manners of clusters of information together… and this is all information your brain picks up from the environment you expose it to, it is comparable to the natural processes of the Earth’s geology which over a period of time transforms dust into limestone and limestone into marble. Therefore, when you continually set your brain to work on a particular task, such as creating a podcast, your unconscious brain gradually cooks up a single lump of marble devoted to that task which your curious conscious mind sees and thinks, “I am going to start chipping away at that.”
It might be a big lump of marble or it might be a small lump of marble; it might take a long while or it might take a relatively short while, but either way, if your unconscious mind cooked it up, it’s your lump of marble, so you might as well start chipping away it. Even if you only have a paper clip to work with, keep chipping away at the marble. Sometimes it can feel like a great creative act, sometimes it can feel like an exhausting chore, sometimes you need to have some fun with it, sometimes you need to smash you head in against and sometimes you just need to get away from it for a while. It’s your lump of marble so keep chipping away at it – regardless of how long it takes, regardless of how stupid it might make you feel, regardless of how many other lumps of marble you also need to be chipping away at, because you have already figured it out, you just have to break it out of the mold. So keep chipping away at the marble until you find your way to carving the statuette inside and then, more and more so, through the persistence of spirit and perception of new stimuli, you will begin to see the shape of things to come.
Ultimately, the formation of the episode outlines is a part of the ongoing process of finding the Breaking Cinema statuette and certainly now I can see the shape of the podcast to come – this is the lateral thinking process at the heart of Breaking Cinema because this is the method in the madness.