Somebody offered me $3k for a "process reel" of a piece I carve by hand. I said no and I'm still annoyed about it.
Fella from an agency emailed me. Wanted to shoot a short video of me roughing out a limestone block, said it would help me "reach the collector demographic." Three thousand dollars, he'd bring the crew, I wouldn't have to do anything but work.
I told him no. He seemed confused, like I'd turned down free money.
Here's the thing. Chasing a chisel around a block for two days is not content. It's loud, it's slow, and half of it is me standing there deciding where the next cut goes. That's the part that matters and it's the part nobody wants to watch. What he wanted was the eighty seconds where the dust flies and the shape shows up. Which is real. It's just not the work.
My daughter says I'm leaving money on the table. Maybe. But I've watched what happens to guys who start performing the making instead of doing it. They get quick, they get cute, they start reaching for the angle instead of the stone. I've been at this thirty-odd years and I'm not going to start taking direction from somebody who's never held a mallet.
Anyway the block is still there. Half roughed. I'll finish it when it tells me what it wants.
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Three grand to stand in your own studio and be directed. That's the bit people don't clock, you'd have handed over the room for the day and it's never just the day, is it, it's the two days of work plus the week after of the head trying to get back into your own rhythm.
I do lino rather than stone so the noise is different but the rest is identical. The decision-making IS the work. Anyone who's carved anything knows the standing-and-thinking part isn't dead time you're waiting out, it's the whole bleedin thing. Film that and it's boring, which means film what's left and you've filmed the wrong bit.
I had a fella want to do the same with a hare block a while back, wanted me to "look intense" while cutting. Told him I look like a man doing the dishes when I cut, because that's what it is, it's just work.
He'll have found someone else inside the fortnight, mind. That's the bit that'd annoy me too, not him, just knowing the reel exists somewhere with a chisel in it and no hands.