The Final Hours
The Emotional Rollercoaster of Completing "The Isolation Diaries" Documentary
Today’s Podcast introduces “The Isolation Diaries” documentary and the tough reality of getting vast projects over the finishing line.
After 4 years of work, it screens for the first time tonight in Il Kino.
It’s taken every ounce I have of faith, energy and commitment.
Wrestling to finish the film, I thought about skipping this week’s episode. However, after so many messages of support, I really wanted to include all of you who aren’t in Berlin.
So, while I exported the film last night, I recorded this episode…in a bit of a manic state!
If you’d like to get a little taste of the film itself, check out the YouTube (link below)
In this episode, I share:
Using a public release as a tactic to complete a project
Tackling a documentary in a Snapchat world
Spiritual lessons from Isolation
Release plans
Documentary extracts
I hope there's some inspiration and ideas in here for all of you wrestling with your own projects, whether creative or in business.
Thank you always,
Jim
P.S. Below is the podcast transcription for those who prefer to read.
TICKETS FOR TONIGHTS SCREENING
The film starts at 8.20 In Il Kino at 8.20 pm.
Film | Q&A | After Show Party
The Rollercoaster of Completing "The Isolation Diaries"
Sitting down to write the script for this Podcast, I am a week away from the first cinema screening of my documentary, “The Isolation Diaries”.
By the time you hear this, it will be 12 hours until the lights in Il Kino fade and the first scene emerges out of the darkness.
I still have so much to do on the film; logically, it makes no sense that I am trying to keep up with my Podcast schedule.
But I want to do so for three reasons.
First, I am in a deeply pressurised state this week. I want to lean into this because insights will emerge from sharing my process as it unfolds. I hope these might be useful for any of you trying to complete projects or, for that matter, at the starting line of one.
The second reason is that the Podcast is an opportunity to speak with you more deeply about the creative process and the thinking behind my release plans. For those working hard to move creative projects forward or launch your own products or businesses, I hope you might find some fresh ideas and inspiration in your journey. Oh, and for that matter, there are many new ways I am reinterpreting how I approach the release of a creative project in light of the advice of the experts I have spoken with on this podcast.
The third reason to keep up with the Podcast is that I enjoy challenging the notion of what a Podcast should be. As you will have heard in my first two solo episodes, I’m introducing music and sound effects and trying to develop a creative approach. Today, I will continue this experimentation and drop a few audio segments from the documentary. It’ll be a patchwork episode, but I think it's a lot of fun. Beware, the audio is windy sometimes, as much of the film was filmed during a particularly stormy Scottish window.
i. WHAT IS THE DOCUMENTARY ABOUT?
Someone asked me yesterday what the film is about.
The most challenging aspect of the documentary was that I never intended to shoot one.
The creative process was totally different from the first five documentaries I shot, which had a clear mission before filming began.
For example:
“The White Arrow” maps the tale of a musician crossing the breadth of Russia on the Trans Siberian Express.
“The March of Hope” explores the lives of refugees arriving in a divided Europe.
“A Conversation With America” investigates the rise of Populism in the US during the rise of Trump and the earthquake of the 2016 election.
“The Isolation Diaries”, on the other hand, never intended to exist.
And I really mean that. The one thing I never intended to do was to make a documentary.
Why? Well, first, the pandemic raised so many questions in me about modern life. Where was the space for the human spirit in a technologically obsessed and success-driven world?
The question of “being vs doing” dominated my mind during lockdown. My life in the creative arts had just been a struggle, and, like so many others, I had compensated by fighting. But fighting means so often keeping oneself busy to move forward.
I’d enjoyed the challenge of life in the arts, but the unwieldy ethos of work work work had replaced the openness of spirit which led to it.
When the pandemic hit, I was six months in from a devastating breakup, and in the isolation of the first lockdown, I felt like I had returned to zero. Somehow, the outer trauma of society mirrored my inner trauma. And though my attitude to pain had always been to fight my way through it, I realised there was no healing except through the courage to be inside the pain itself.
Simply put, the way out of the pain was only to go through the pain. During this time, I started writing the songs and diaries that formed the basis of “The Isolation Diaries”.
However, when the world opened up, the strangest thing happened. I wanted no “returning to normal”. I wanted no return at all. And more so, I wasn’t sure what I would return to even if I wanted to.
My only certainty was the need to delve deeper into mortality, suffering, love, and being, questions awakened by the pandemic.
I knew this meant trying to return to “the thing itself”, known variously as the Godhead, Tao, Logos, Brahman, the True Self or Atman. And it meant throwing out the modern separator tools, whether the phone, Netflix, or a dam video camera.
So I bought my camper van, Donna, and set out deeper into Isolation. But the more I immersed myself in the experience, the more I moved beyond my pain and into a deeper, more profound connection and exchange with life than I’d ever known.
The strange thing is that within that process, I opened up a vast space inside myself, mirroring the vastness I witnessed outside, whether in The Alps, Meteora or the Scottish wilderness. In this space, I started experiencing the deepest conversation with life I’d ever known. At some point, I realised that part of my journey was expressing that inner conversation in some artistic form.
“The Isolation Diaries” is the conversation of that conversation. It’s a man trying to map, record, and express an unfolding spiritual journey.
The documentary has been hard to edit because this story is not about the arrival somewhere but about the journey of getting there.
So it means there’s a lot of scratching around, looking for answers and pursuing that meaning.
The film is not about a journey upwards to a greater oneness but rather the process of being broken down into a version beyond yourself.
Carl Jung introduced the idea of the collective unconscious, the idea that there is a universal realm of archetypes, imagery and symbols which connect all human beings.
But how can we access this?
It seemed the modern world was designed to look everywhere but at what truly deepens our understanding of existence, life, and each other.
I wanted to take an axe to my conscious self and mine into this room in the basement of our being.
Or rather, I felt so broken that I didn’t have a choice.
If there was a path to heaven, I knew it could only be reached by travelling through Hades.
It sounds absurd to talk about these things in our increasingly pragmatic world.
Yet, at some stage, we have to make a stand for our spiritual life.
And maybe, just maybe, to do that means we must have the courage to enter the theatre of the absurd.
One of my favourite quotations by Dostoevsky is, “Sometimes, a man must be willing to become a clown so that the great idea may not die”.
Yet one has to ask oneself:
“What is the great idea?”.
Well, with “The Isolation Diaries”, I wanted to commit to finding out. And so, for all its flaws, that is what the film is about.
ii. CREATIVE PROCESS
When I started writing “The Isolation Diaries” during the pandemic, I had no idea that the project would expand to such a degree that it would outlast the pandemic itself.
In all honestly, it’s something that I have wrestled with deeply.
Why would I stay so committed to a project that shadows a time when the rest of the world has fled?
The reality is that the pandemic raised questions we’ve been quick to forget.
There was a short time before we knew what this virus was and when there was a genuine terror.
That terror meant we had to confront mortality and the questions it raises.
What should we do with our lives?
Is there a dream we’ve repressed?
Are we making the best of the time we have?
How much, for that matter, do we have left?
Maybe it was due to my painful circumstances in the build-up to the pandemic, but some things, once seen, we can’t un-see.
I realised that if I was ever going to have a time when I dedicated myself to my spiritual search, it must be now.
For this reason, I answered the call of two dreams I’d set aside for twenty years.
First, I bought a camper van, Donna.
Second, I started writing.
iii. DEADLINES
A paradox with the project was that I decided to throw out a timeframe.
No deadlines. No rush. No expectation.
In our turbo-charged world, the very idea seems revolutionary.
If you scroll through Twitter for a second, you’ll be bombarded with platitudes shouting at you to set deadlines. Or, flick on YouTube, and you’re assaulted by hustle culture screaming at you to get back to work, to be a beast, to grind it out.
I’ve never much liked being told what to do.
So, I decided to go in the opposite direction to the rest of the world and its need to shout at one another continually.
Everything in this project comes out of the decision not to rush. It has changed my perception of time and my understanding of creativity.
Since the project began, there have been -
4 years 1 Pandemic 1500 diary entries 7 Countries 2 Heartbreaks 1 Scottish winter 3 Hurricanes 26 Songs 1 Campervan 0 Investment 1 Film
With throwing out a time frame, there has been a blessing and there has been a curse.
The blessing has been that the creative work is entirely unforced.
I wrote because I needed to write.
And the songs arrived at critical moments like signposts.
It means that the project has been born from an experience of that rarest thing: air.
The by-product is that I’ve not worked within my own time frame but that of the project itself.
Its unfolding nature has made “The Isolation Diaries” far vaster in scope than I ever intended.
It just goes to show that it is our projects that are in charge of us and not the other way around.
Yes, we can force things. But given the sheer amount of junk released every day, one should ask, at what cost?
This is less often considered.
That a deadline, while a form of progress, also leaves something behind too.
One of my great lessons from the project is that a different type of magic exists when we have the courage to give ourselves time.
All this said though, recently, I have become tormented by the project. I realised that it was ever-expanding just at the point when I felt ready to move on to the next stage of my life.
For this reason, I placed the hard deadline for tonight’s screening on myself.
Suddenly, from feeling inside time and using it as the greatest asset of the project, I felt my future potential Self constricted by it.
This came with danger.
I have written about Albatross Projects on my Substack, those never-ending projects that become so vast or heavy we never finish them.
I realised “The Isolation Diaries” faced this perilous fate.
So, since one of my guiding creative principles is not to hoard stuff, it was time to get this project over the line.
This is where I now find myself, in the creative hellfire of trying to complete the three pillars of the project.
The first is tonight’s documentary.
The second is to complete the artwork for vinyl and send it to the pressing plant.
The third is to work out what to do with the diary entries themselves. It may be that they are too personal ever to release. But either way, it is decision time.
iv. KEEPING FAITH
So, guys, it’s now Wednesday of release week, and I’m wrestling every day to get the film over the finish line.
On Monday, I titled the film, including song titles, credits, and geographical notes.
On Tuesday, I went into full beast mode and subtitled the film between 7 am and 12 pm.
As you know from this Podcast, I have deep reservations about Grind Culture. Having said that, though, there are times when we need to get our project over the line, and that means doing what we need to do.
Anyone who has subtitled a feature film knows what a thankless task it is. It usually takes at least a week, but motivated by Saturday’s release and the fear of the deadline, I went into hyper-concentrated mode and nailed it in a day.
One of the useful things about making yourself accountable to a public release is that it crushes resistance.
The effect this has on the mind is very interesting.
The reality of any project is that we always avoid doing the most tedious tasks. The great thing about a horror deadline is how it concentrates the mind.
The strange thing is that I’ve saved myself a week of work by setting this deadline.
Without it, I would have subtitled the film in a spirit of resistance. Instead, I cracked it in a 17-hour blitz. I tell you, even if no one comes down to the screening, at least I will have got the dam subtitles done and saved myself a week of my life in the process.
Another boon from the pressure of deadlines is the mind shift I feel with regard to problems.
It’s so very easy with our projects to react emotionally to problems.
But as we all know, the reality of life is that problems do come up.
With the deadline, I simply have no time to respond emotionally to problems.
Instead, they are just a part of my workflow.
So whenever one comes up, my thought is only:
How do I fix this in the most efficient manner?
It has been interesting noticing the shift in my own mindset as a result of the deadline. I am reasonably robust when it comes to managing my creative path. But I am definitely noticing a different sturdiness in my mental attitude since getting the cinema date in the diary.
I'm considering adopting this mindset for 2024 and want to share a thought from Alex Hormozi.
I watched a great presentation on YouTube about his attitude to podcasting and YouTube. In it, he said
“You need to be able to do the doing without seeing the result of your doing.”
In a world that treasures the fast fix, I think this is a great mantra for the year ahead.
You have to remember that the positive action you make has an effect, no matter how small. The only question really is if you have the courage to make these small steps over and over. Most of us get derailed because we lose faith that these steps will ever lead to our destination.
I think it’s helpful to think of this invisible effort instead as a portfolio of your spirit. Keep filling it up.
Remember that no matter how hard you find it, you are investing in yourself.
Don’t get derailed by the invisible.
If there is one thing I have learned from the creative process while working on “The Isolation Diaries,” it is that life is a desperate act of faith.
So much of the time, we are putting ourselves through an inquisition of the spirit.
Questioning if what we are doing will ever dam well show up as a reward.
But all our work compounds; it’s just that the compounding doesn’t manifest in a way we can quantify metrically.
This is why so many of us give up on our dreams.
In an agnostic, metrically driven world, we have lost sight of the fact that our forward momentum is very hard to measure in the course of a day.
But stick to the path as a spiritual commitment over a long period, and life finds a way to move you forward.
Funnily enough, I’ve already had this in miniature with the podcast. In November, the downloads quadrupled out of the blue, and we charted in the Apple Podcast Charts in Germany and even went top 100 in South Africa.
On the surface, it would be possible to say, “Hey Jim, you’ve just got really lucky with a Podcast that’s only on Episode 12”. But what that person wouldn’t see is that I am 20 years into a journey which has built this foundation.
Every gig where I stood at the merchandise stall till the last person left the building, every documentary journey, wondering why I’d arrived in a place the world forgot even existed, contributed.
It is our unseen actions, made with nothing but the faith that we will put the best of ourselves into the world; it is these actions which compose our story and which, at the last, drive our life forward.
As Hormozi said:
“You need to be able to do the doing without seeing the result of your doing.”
v. RELEASE IDEAS
I want to finish the podcast by exploring some of the release ideas I am considering. This is all very early days, but I want to share in case it helps, inspires or gives food for thought to any of you toying with how to release something.
So, with the documentary, tonight’s screening has been about setting a hard deadline to finish it.
I’ve had a lot of support online as I’ve worked on the Isolation Diaries. This has been in part because I’ve been exploring both its philosophical questions and creative process in public.
It’s also been very helpful to test ideas, and I’ve treated my Instagram as a type of online magazine, documenting the challenges I’ve faced and the discoveries I’ve made along the way.
Some of the Reels I created even became prototypes for the documentary itself. One hit a million plays, and though it’s fun when something goes viral, more importantly, it shows me what is resonating.
So, for 2024, I want to encourage all you artists out there who are wrestling with the role of social media in your professional life to work on a mind shift.
With regard to social media, stop trying to create social media. Instead, document your journey.
One of the problems blocking you is that you want perfection in your posts. But your posts are not the artwork themselves. They are your online sketchbook, your fanzine.
Use social media instead as somewhere where you can curate and test your ideas. It’s not about posting the Mona Lisa; it’s about posting what you’re going through while you paint her.
It seems daunting, especially to put oneself on the line.
But an unexpected kickback I’ve had from returning to social media during “The Isolation Diaries” has been learning that the braver I am about sharing my struggles, the more my interest has grown.
The result of this is that I’ve made a much more personal and daring film.
In all honesty, it gives me butterflies as I write this because the documentary explores a human being in a deeply vulnerable state.
But I’ve been able to take the step to do this because of the support I’ve received.
In a world where we’re taught to project success and our indestructibility, it transpires that people are after something our technologically driven society too often forgets: to be human.
Click on the Picture for YouTube:
6 Creative Takeaways:
Leverage Deadlines: Turn the pressure into productive focus.
Audience Engagement: Use social media to get active feedback on your work
Test Stuff: Treat social media as an online magazine
Emotional Courage: Authenticity connects you to your audience in an AI-driven world; don't hide your emotions.
Let Projects Evolve: Allow creative works to naturally expand - then constrict radically
Persist Creatively: Remember the majority of success is made by invisible investments
How the heck did you have time to write this as well as getting your film over the line? 📽️🏇🏁 Respect Jamie, really?🫡 Well done you! 👏👏🤩