Alex spent years feeling he was wasting his time, and now thinks he was filling a bucket that’s finally pouring out. One of the things pouring out is an acting workshop, which takes Matt back to acting school, where he spent most of his time managing his lines instead of acting. Improv was the only performing he loved, because it’s all listening and responding. Alex thinks improv is writing without the edit.

Matt says it feels like the old Alex is back, after years when making things for a living had him going through the motions. Alex also built a new website for the show, and Matt sees their differences fitting together in it. It holds every word we’ve said, so you can follow how our thinking has changed. On AI, we agree that image generation misses what a photograph is, something captured. Alex argues that writing a personal letter with AI skips the reason to write one, which is finding out what you feel. Near the end, a young customer at a friend’s shop thought the staff picks weren’t for sale, and we figure she’s never known a store where the staff point out the good stuff. -Ai

Mentioned in this episode: studiosessionspod.com, GeoCities, TCM’s The Plot Thickens: Stanley, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Office Space, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Claude, ChatGPT, Home Alone, Slap Shot, Jackie Chan’s Police Story.

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If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask

Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

Once a week, a cozy bar in Omaha has jazz, and on certain nights the room feels like magic. One of us wants to make a concert film there in the spirit of Jazz on a Summer's Day and The Last Waltz, on the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, an old Super 16 digital camera that records to one SD card. Between us we own three, and they're tougher than we expected: a 256 GB card holds about 90 minutes of raw CinemaDNG, and others have shot past an hour without overheating. The short film one of us wrote is pushed to spring, and the jazz film is how he means to keep moving until then.

Brian Eno came to treat his work as a practice rather than a job. One of us wants that, with his friends' names in the credits as the most permanent record he can leave. The other has old hang-ups about being on set and would rather help edit, as long as the edit doesn't swallow weeks of family life. We riff on the 6-hour cut of a 14-minute short. Talking over that script, one of us saw the other recognize his own younger self, which leads back to 2008, before the Canon 5D Mark II, when there was one narrow way in. Short films still earn nothing, we agree. It ends on Hollywood, where one of us reckons talent without attention is no currency.

Mentioned in this episode: Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, CinemaDNG, Brian Eno, the Canon 5D Mark II, the Black List.

-Ai

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If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask

Website: https://studiosessionspod.com

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We spend this episode bouncing between a barn in Malvern, Iowa and the question of where creative work actually comes from. It opens with the story of an 8x10 view camera pulled down from a stranger's rafters and handed over for free, then moves into what's been driving a recent stretch of creative momentum: too many scripts, a short film, a software project, and the discovery that having several unrelated things going at once beats grinding on one.

From there we get into the harder question: how do you take a photograph, write a scene, or make anything that doesn't just repeat something you've already seen online. We talk about pink-door photo clichés, Kubrick's early films, Basquiat working with the radio and television on in the background, and why Adam Sandler's comedies read differently once you know where they came from. That turns into a longer argument about genre dissolving, the sheer volume of culture now available compared to a bassist learning ragtime off a handful of records in the 1980s, and whether that flood helps or drowns out a personal voice.

We close on the physical stuff: CRTs selling for triple what we paid for them, a customer building a VHS wall, and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards as a way to get unstuck. There's also a detour into Apple tech-support logic and why the simplest fix is usually the right one to try first. -Ai

Support the show

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

Links To Everything:

Video Version of The Podcast: https://geni.us/StudioSessionsYT

Matt’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/MatthewOBrienYT

Matt’s 2nd Channel: https://geni.us/PhotoVideosYT

Alex’s YouTube Channel: https://geni.us/AlexCarterYT

Matt’s Instagram: https://geni.us/MatthewIG

Alex’s Instagram: https://geni.us/AlexIG