Principles of Intuitive Film

1. Tune in
   1. What do you feel a quiet gravity towards? What arrests you? Find what you’re drawn to.
   2. Take a chance on things that do not make any sense at all, but are still pulling you. What lives at the edge of that thread?
   3. Do not question why you are attracted to an object or moment or feeling. Let it wash over you and collect it. Find out where and when it happens. You will discover why later.
   4. By releasing the need to define or differentiate because you just are, and by really being in the present moment, we can discover ourselves and our human universals.
2. Go towards
   1. Follow the spark.
   2. Include what draws you in, and let it draw you in further.
   3. Go towards what involves and invokes your senses and feelings.
   4. Follow the small quiet voice.
   5. Over time, by filming without second-guessing about what we are filming, we will be able to reflect back, drawn to and then look back at it to see the patterns.
   6. As we gather material, let intuition, our bodies and our senses guide towards what is meaningful.
3. Return to the mystery
   1. Remember how we perceived as children? We might sit under a tree, watching light going through leaves, sparkles on a lake, or a bug in the grass. During these times, we were fully engaging in the moment. We were in state of pure sensory perception and feeling.
   2. Find what is unexplainable, that feeling of nostalgia or memory of history or remembering that you do not know what is.
   3. Remembering through the movement, curiosity, sound, collaboration, instinct, flow Returning to a more natural state of wonder.
4. Follow aliveness
   1. Follow life! There is life in water, in trees, in mountains, in play.
   2. In Erotic play, what we’re doing is following aliveness, allowing it to build and build.
5. Release the Egoic State
   1. As we begin to collect and create sensory moments, we should not question ourselves or the urge to follow them.
   2. Watch for questions like:
   3. What is this for?
   4. Why am I doing this?
   5. What is the meaning of this?
   6. How will this make money?
   7. Am I doing this right? I don’t have the talent to do this.
   8. This is the ego speaking and preventing us from going into flow.
   9. The Ego thinks of doing. The being is just being. When we focus on verses doing, we are in a state of awareness of the present. When we are in our senses, there is a feeling of interconnectedness and spaciousness. Time dissolves.
   10. Hyper Presencing is a way of bringing consciousness to the present moment
   11. Over time, by filming without second-guessing about what we are filming, we will be able to reflect back, drawn to and then look back at it to see the patterns.
   12. We can use feeling and creativity to bypass the ego. Use the body to filter what has meaning. Invite the senses to act as a guide.
   13. Watch and let pass through the need to shift into the egoic, judgemental, questing self.
6. Dissolve the camera
   1. Use the senses to focus in on the moment.
   2. The detail, the sound, the texture.
   3. Your camera is a Pass through device, The intention is to dissolve. The feeling is to dissolve.
   4. When done well, the camera is just the vessel to transfer that sensory feeling to another person.
   5. Use the frame to explore how to reveal these small moments from a sensory perspective.
   6. If you are feeling stuck, use an older technology, like film where you can be closer to the recording material. A slower piece of technology requires us to be more present with it. When there is a limited supply of film we must deeply consider what we are exposing. We become more deeply involved in the present because of limitations.
   7. It’s not about the quality of the gear. It’s about how you feel when you use it.
7. Reflect over time
   1. Do not judge what you have captured, delete or toss it away out of disgust.
   2. What you have captured is a reflection of something that will make sense later. And only when reviewed after we have gone through changes and distance. It’s not for us to understand. It is a touchstone of who we are, and a market of perceptual growth with each review.
   3. Over time, patterns will emerge. Thoughts and ideas will become more clear. Especially the more we do it.
   4. Consider your footage. Notice what you are aware of, and how your awareness changes / deepens over time.
   5. Over time, a larger landscape of feelings and components will emerge. They may not be overt at first, or unable to be put into words. This process is the work.