The idea
I make too many versions.
Not because I enjoy being indecisive, but because I usually need to see the wrong answers before I trust the right one.
This film came from that habit.
It starts with too much happening at once — numbers, fragments, competing directions, type pulling itself apart. There are several ways the piece could go, and for a while I let all of them exist.
Because that is usually what the beginning of a project actually feels like.
You don’t start with clarity.
You make things.
You break them.
You follow an idea farther than it deserves.
Sometimes you spend hours discovering that something should never have survived the first ten minutes.
And eventually, one direction starts to feel inevitable.
Trying everything is part of it
The line in the film —
“trying every idea just to see what survives”
— is probably the closest thing it has to a thesis.
I didn’t want iteration to look like a tidy row of polished alternatives. Most of the time it isn’t tidy.
The opening therefore stays deliberately unstable. Scale keeps shifting. Numbers lose their orientation. Words separate and reconnect. Small marks appear with no obvious hierarchy.
The frame is looking for its own logic.
As the film progresses, that changes.
Things stop competing.
The compositions get larger and simpler. The palette settles into black, warm off-white, violet and small hits of mint. Motion becomes less about showing another trick and more about moving the thought forward.
Then I started removing things
The chessboard section is the turn.
Up to that point the film is mostly concerned with possibility: what else could this become?
From there the question changes to:
what can disappear without weakening the idea?
Pieces are removed.
Space opens.
The language becomes quieter.
I wanted subtraction to feel active rather than empty — like editing a sentence until the words that remain suddenly carry more weight.
That is why the film doesn’t resolve by becoming bigger or more spectacular.
It resolves by needing less.
Clarity comes after the mess
My favourite line in the piece is:
Clarity isn’t the absence of confusion. It’s what remains after it.
That became the rule for the second half.
I didn’t want the film to pretend that good work appears fully formed. The cleaner final frames only mean something because you have already watched the piece go through the mess that preceded them.
Even the hand gesture near the end is deliberately simple. By then, another complicated visual would have contradicted the film.
The movement can finally stop performing.
Building one continuous thought
Although the visual forms change throughout the film, I didn’t want it to feel like a motion-design showreel where one unrelated scene replaces another.
Elements keep inheriting something from the previous moment — a direction, a line, a scale change, a piece of geometry, a colour or a movement.
That continuity mattered more to me than making every five seconds look like a completely different trick.
The goal was for the film to feel as though it was thinking its way toward its own ending.
What I took from it
I started this as an exercise in motion.
It ended up being much closer to how I actually work.
I explore widely at the beginning. I make versions I know may never be used. I keep things alive longer than I probably should. Then, once the direction becomes clear, I get increasingly ruthless about what stays.
The strange thing is that the final answer can look obvious.
It rarely felt obvious while getting there.
And that is where the last line came from:
MAKE LESS.
MEAN MORE.