Episode #49: Introducing The Inner Frame | Building a Meaningful Career & Life as a Filmmaker

But before I dive deeply into that, I do have a bit of a warning for all of my fellow filmmakers listening, and that is if the word structure immediately makes you think of rigid schedules or color-coded calendars, just hang with me for a few minutes because the kind of structure that is inherent in the inner frame, which I will get into, has very little to do with efficiency and everything to do with intention.

Over the past several months, I've been taking a big step back from a lot of the daily stuff that I've just been involved in in recent years and looking closely at what we've really been doing in the community the last four years.

And in many ways, it's all felt like one long conversation.

We've had hundreds of gatherings at this point.

We've done almost 50 episodes of the podcast.

I continue to coach filmmakers one-on-one.

We've done some workshops and I'm always having conversations with filmmaking friends behind the scenes.

And in many ways, this past four years has felt like research, just this long research project and not in like an academic sense by any means, but through just building relationships, having conversations and really listening to what people are looking for, what people are aching for.

And as I look back on all of these conversations, I consistently found myself asking the same question, and that is, what have all of these conversations really been revealing? And what surprised me wasn't how different everyone's stories were, it was how often the same questions kept resurfacing, whether that was about burnout, purpose, relationships, identity, ambition, uncertainty, and several more.

But the more the conversations changed, the questions beneath them rarely did.

And then I realized something else from there that over the past four years, we've had all these conversations, but we've never really had a shared structure for returning to them.

we've explored these ideas one gathering at a time, but we never really had a rhythm that intentionally connected them.

And this realization has led me to something that I am very excited to share today.