My Writing Process, by Dennis Santaniello

[Read about Digital Barf's guest bloggers here.]

Preface: I had no intention of writing any of this until I came to the realization that the most important thing you can do in life is share. Life’s so short, so precious, so mysterious that creating things is the only way of validating time spent.

I started thinking of the process of my writing. I write because it’s the easiest thing in the world for me. The biggest design pattern I follow is not to get from here to there. That’s not an issue with me. What I’m striving for, on a daily basis, is how to get to the Zone. Not Auto Zone or the Fun Zone. I’m talking about The Absolute, Infallible Zone of Creativity and Bliss. There is nothing more gratifying than to say to somebody, “Not now, Tinky, I’m in the fucking zone!” You know when you’re in the zone because time stops, things come together in new and exciting ways you couldn’t dream of, and your work is…well...working.

The zone is located on the path of righteousness, but it is blocked by the countless Detour signs of the Resistance. [1]

The following is my way of breaking through the Resistance: My design.

Fighting the Resistance

Getting into the zone comes at a price. You must fight a war: the daily, gnawing, agitating war against the Resistance. The Resistance comes in many forms, and it’s kinda like the New York Yankees. Its smug, its presence is all over the fucking place, and it knows it could beat you. The Resistance, put simply, is everything that prevents you from working. From the distracting phone calls, to crying babies on buses, to the miserable jerks who smell like cabbage, to your love ones who smell like Honey Dew, it seems that everyone is playing for the Resistance. But guess what, when you’re not working, you play for it too. And that’s when you lose.

Life always seems to get in the way, but if you want to work well, you’ve got to win. You’ve got to beat the living shit out of this snot nose, suffocating…. Thing. You’ve gotta have a battle plan. That’s where design comes into play. You’ve got to come up with a brilliant, offensive scheme to beat this bastard.

Defeating the Bastard

Good game planning is very important. Writing wise, it’s essential. For me, I take four hours of the day (usually between 6-10 pm) to write. These are four hours of fierce combat. I generally have an objective, sometimes the objectives change and in mid stream I have to adapt to its course. But when I’m engaged to commit myself to get to the zone, I go all out.

My game plan is simple and it’s the same everyday. I sit down. I have an objective of what I want to write and follow these three rules.

1) Be true to the original idea.
There is no substitute to this. What comes out of your head is so hard to put into the physical world, but when it matches and molds into the initial idea you had, you know you have something special. Being true to the original idea is crucial.

2) Listen to your characters
Before I start something, I sit down and my characters talk to me. When I’m writing, particularly when I’m writing dialogue, I’ve got to hear the characters and their problems. Like playing with action figures, I mouth the characters voice and let it out there in open air. It’s something I’ve done ever since I was a kid. Some people may call it schizophrenic. I call it paying attention. I’ve got to hear the intonation of their voice, their pauses, their rhythm, but most importantly their desires.

My characters are doing most of my work. I’m just a court stenographer.

3) Write to Write. Edit to Edit
When I write, I vomit anything and everything that comes to mind. I don’t care if it’s inane, great or mediocre, I spill out everything because I have to. As Hemmingway pointed out, “The first draft of anything is shit.”

Then when the puking is over, I look back to what’s there and I play the hybrid role of both conquistador and janitor, that is the editor. I find the gold and dump the rest. Sometimes there isn’t any gold. Just loads and loads of crap, but that’s not a problem because I’ll just explore another mine by writing another mine.

It took me a long time for me to figure this out but when I finally found it, I knew my foundation was complete. Before learning this, I was very analytical when I wrote ,and I wrote and edit at the same time. This was frustrating and exhausting because it was detrimental to my psyche and slow as hell.

Separating the actions to specific times frees up so much creativity and the zone gets closer and closer. Refining is important, but you must first have something to refine.

That’s my plan. That’s how I write. That’s my design. During college, I found it difficult to write anything but term papers and I felt terrible, but when I came up with the system I knew I had something special, because it got easier and easier to get in the zone, and consequently, my writing got better, ideas flowed like rivers and I got a lot fucking happier with life

They say 3 is a magic number. Well, if there are 3 great players on your basketball team, odds are you’re going to kick some major ass, and in my case when all 3 elements are working in unison, Resistance doesn’t have a chance. The game is won. The Zone is there in all of its orgasmic glory, and it’s like…it’s like an Opera.

The Real Thing to Learn


You are a golden God; not to the world, but to your work, and because you are a God, you must play by your own rules. Relax. Diffuse bullshit. Be scary.


[1] Read Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art”. Great book. Highly Recommended.

Design on the Streets, by James Mazza

[Read about Digital Barf's guest bloggers here.]

Let me start off by giving everyone a little bit of background about what I do, and then perhaps the rest of what follows will make sense. I am an Emergency Medical Technician in NJ. I work two different jobs as a simple EMT and volunteer my time as a Lieutenant in charge of all EMS and Rescue on Monday nights for a local town. I am also currently studying to be an RN. Now that we know who I am and what I do, let’s get to talking about how my job has absolutely nothing to do with design while having everything to do with design.

Being an EMT is not all “blood and guts” like most people think. In my estimation it is more like 70% psychological, simply being there, 20% real emergencies, heart attacks, allergic reactions, car accidents, etc, 5% absurd situations and 5 % BS. Depending on who you talk to these numbers likely change and for some dramatically; however, this is how I see it.

When we are in training we are taught the very basics, how to talk to people, carry them to the ambulance, provide first aid and oxygen treatments, perform CPR with the hope of saving a life. These skills are given to us with the express understanding that we will need to improvise and adapt to do things. Our template fresh out of school, a “design” if you will, is very basic and will help us to grow but it is only a start. The one thing about emergencies is that there is never two that are alike. There is always something different. There is always a new windy staircase that someone has to be carried down, or a strange way someone fell when they had their heart attack, or the way the steel on the car twisted after an accident makes getting to the people inside harder than it was an accident or two ago. Our “design” needs to be fluid and ever changing because we never know what we will see and as such cannot be set in stone.

Acting as a supervisor, I had an interesting experience recently that had nothing to do with emergency medicine and everything to do with control and design. With the heat wave, something broke in the electrical grid in my area of Jersey during the time I ride as an EMT/Supervisor as a volunteer. With the power out, two six story buildings containing almost all senior citizens, many of whom were handicapped and on oxygen, needed to be evacuated so that the people would be in a cooler environment where they would not be as likely to pass out or succumb to heat exhaustion/stroke. With no working elevators and only very faint emergency lighting, one can imagine how hard this task would be.

Upon arriving on the scene I immediately set to working with the two Police Officers on scene to begin a systematic search of all the floors, first checking on the people on oxygen and then the handicapped and so on. Members of the paid fire department where there, however they were not as helpful as they could have been, leaving it to myself and the two officers to run the whole show. This was the first time I had ever been thrust into such a large situation before and was expected to take charge of it. Sure, I had been here a few years ago when this same event had occurred, however then I was simply muscle to carry people down the stairs. This time I was expected to be calm, cool, in charge, and to get the people to a cooler climate. That’s a lot of responsibility for a 23 year old who isn’t getting paid for his time!

As part of my training I was required to take courses that would prepare me for Incident Command, a term coined after 9/11 as being necessary for all large incidents. This gave me a background of information to build on, although nothing can prepare you for the moment in which you need to draw upon that sort of training for the first time. Further compounding the problems was the fact that the town I volunteer for has the Paid Fire Department in charge of Emergency Management, which this task falls under in a time like this, however the person in charge of FD did not take charge leaving myself and two exemplary Patrolmen to handle the situation. Not until the Volunteer Fire Dept. members arrived did the FD become truly useful to us in this situation.

With guidance from the Police as to which rooms still needed to be searched, I sent the men and women under my command up to the floors to do a search room by room, floor by floor. We designed a search plan and who would take what floor and then we executed the plan. This incident started at about 10:40 at night and wasn’t over until 3 in the morning. While I did not have to physically work like the rest of the people I volunteer with on Monday nights, being in charge caused me a great deal of work to make sure I kept the information right and passed on the right information to the right people. This being the first time I had to operate in a situation like that, and based on the feedback I got from many people who were there telling me I did a fantastic job, I can only say that the design I was given in training must have paid off in a big way because things were handled without incident.

Some may question how being an EMT has anything to do with design, and rightfully so. I hope the above helps to expand the view on what design there can be, particularly when you see an Ambulance flying by you with lights on and siren wailing. More is going on than meets the eye usually and design plays one of the biggest factors.

Narrative Design in Filmmaking, by Iker Maidagan

[Read about Digital Barf's guest bloggers here.]

Some time ago, my friend Joey asked me if I’d like to write an article somehow relating design to animation. Back then I had just finished working on a pencil-test sequence for my animation class at SVA, so I could easily use it an example. Easily? Not quite.

The easy thing would be to bore the hell out of everybody by writing a subjective harangue on character design. But that’s just the shortsighted way of understanding design in terms of visual storytelling. Designing a character isn’t even an inherent step within the process of filmmaking. It can be applied to anything from mascots for the FIFA World Cup to LARPing. Therefore, I’m going to talk about editing and storyboarding; or how making choices about angles, shot composition and duration of frames can determine the meaning and set the mood of a movie despite the fact that most people take these things for granted. Because that is what designing a film is all about in the end.







Take a look at the sequence above. Nothing too fancy, we didn’t even have time to add some backgrounds and polish a few animations. There isn’t much of a story either; just two kids playing cowboys and Indians. Yet nothing is there by accident. That sequence is a minute long series of choices.

Think about the way it starts, a sudden cut that comes out of nowhere. Many movies have that sort of opening, like Oldboy or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It takes you right into the action and works especially well if your scene depicts something very dramatic or physically intense. It’s unexpected, it takes the audience off-guard, so they have to process the information really quickly. With Cowkids, we wanted to exaggerate everything about our main characters’ game, so a blunt opening was the way to go.

We also chose to start the movie with a traditional hip-level shot of our character’s hand reaching for his gun to establish that we were about to witness a duel. From there, a series of mirrored shots emphasize even more this particular scenario at the same time they present our characters. One thing we realized when going for the mirrored shots formula is that the girl would have to be a leftie if we wanted to repeat the first shot from a reverse angle. Directors like Sergio Leone avoided this problem on classics like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly by filming the gunbelt from the front. However, we wanted to keep both characters on frame, so the leftie choice won over new camera angle option.

Soon, both characters get separated and we show them performing ridiculous acrobatics. First, we see the boy jumping and rolling. Second, we see the girl completing a full circle on a swing before brandishing her weapon. And lastly, both run around the playground to avoid each other. By doing this we accomplish two goals: we hint that the girl is better than the boy, as her dodging tactics are more spectacular and creative. The audience will probably want her to win after that and, in fact, she does win the fight in the end. The second goal is to establish the playground as the setting, which is merely suggested at first and eventually confirmed with a wide shot of both characters running in circles within a limited space.

Later on, the boy tries to top the girl’s latest move by going down a slide to surprise her. She answers by jumping on a merry-go-round to become a moving target. We decided to show how close the boy was from actually hitting the girl by drawing her feet in the foreground, framing the figure of the boy as he opens fire. This is another traditional composition that you can find, although fitting entirely different situations, in movies like To Catch a Thief or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The slow motion simulated during the merry-go-round sequence emphasizes the girl’s advantage at this point, focusing on how she pulls out her pistol to deliver what may be the final shot. Slow motion can work in two ways: it draws attention and gives the moment a certain degree of magnificence. However, it only works if used scarcely, otherwise it becomes vulgar and redundant. For that reason we made sure it was seen just that one time.

Zoom ins and outs normally are a disgusting choice in live-action, but for some reason, they work just fine in animation. We used them a couple of times to emulate the more elegant tracking shots, most notably in the scene with the boy running towards the bouncing pony. Here, first we show the boy running alone and then we zoom out to reveal the pony. This gives some motion to the shot, something necessary to keep the pace in an action piece, while avoiding excessive cutting, which tends to be confusing.

The tire swing jump and collision between the two characters is something that evolved through time. Originally it was going to be shown in one shot, again, to avoid too many cuts. Unfortunately, the complexity of such shot proved to be too time consuming and it had to be divided into three. Even though the result looks fine in terms of animation, this was one of our most frustrating decisions because in the final movie is hard to tell that the girl loses her gun in the clash. That particular piece of information was relevant because it set up the outcome of the fight, when the girl is briefly at the mercy of the boy right before getting miraculously saved by the Indian toddler.

In terms of choices, the final destiny of the boy had more to do with sound than angles, composition or elaborate animations. We wanted him to fall in a dog park and make it look as if he was being eaten alive by the animals without showing it. Therefore, we just animated a few dogs pouncing over the fence and then played around with sound. As with the rest of the movie, the goal was to exaggerate, so instead of some recording of actual dog barks we resorted to Jaguars roaring. That way, our dogs sounded fierce enough and anyone would think that the poor kid never made it alive after his villainies.

As a closing note, I apologize if anyone thought that this post had nothing to do with design and felt misled. However, I still think that design is a very broad term and professionals from many fields use it in very different ways. Would a car designer think in the way a company logo designer thinks? And what about a videogame designer? What I offered here is what I see as the way filmmakers think whenever they face the challenge of designing a motion picture, no matter how big or small.

Guest Bloggers: Insight Into Design

Design is ubiquitous. From brushing our teeth to organizing our lives design plays a role in every process we partake in, and I'm fascinated by the different approaches people have for the things they do. Some of us approach tasks head on, while others are extremely analytical, and still others are an interesting mixture of both. Ultimately, a good piece of art, recipe, product, photo, or anything else we produce is defined by the string of decisions by the creator that led to the final product.

In my discussions one thing has become clear: our outlook on what we do, the method we approach tasks, and the systems we employ (physically and psychologically) directly affect our results and determine our success. Essentially, we succeed or fail before we even start.

I'm happy to introduce guest posts to Digital Barf. I've selected a few friends whom I truly admire for one reason or another and invited them to give us insight into their own process. Part of the email went something like this:

"While none of you are graphic designers, you're all creative in your own fields. This includes writing, cooking, music, drawing, painting, photography, teaching, engineering, business, and being an emergency medical technician. [What you write] can be about your process, a story you'd like to share, or anything else you feel relates to design. In a nutshell, I'd like for you to share your interpretation of design as applied to your field."

I'm excited to see what they come up with, and I hope you'll find their ideas as interesting as I do.

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Guest Posts:

Narrative Design in Filmmaking, by Iker Maidagan

Design on the Streets, by James Mazza

My Writing Process, by Dennis Santaniello