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Gregg Toland taught me this for Citizen Kane: keep the foreground AND background sharp. It forces the audience to choose where to look -- and that choice IS the story. We study lens selection, lighting for depth, and staging in three dimensions. Tip: When everything is in focus, composition becomes your only guide.

Orson Welles

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I've composed scores for many of my own films. Jazz is conversation -- you listen, you respond, you leave space. We work on basic piano improvisation over blues and jazz standards. No sheet music. Tip: The notes you DON'T play are just as important as the ones you do. Same in acting. Same in life.

Clint Eastwood

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My personal Riverside Shakespeare -- every play, every sonnet. Heavily annotated in pencil. Richard III has three colors of markup from three different productions. Hamlet has coffee stains from 1979. These margins contain forty years of wrestling with the greatest writer in the English language.

Al Pacino

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The complete American Century Cycle -- ten plays spanning ten decades of Black American experience. My copies are marked up with director's notes, blocking ideas, and questions I still haven't answered. Wilson wrote this nation's story better than anyone. Start with Fences, end with Radio Golf.

Denzel Washington

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Learn to decompose problems into repeatable steps. We start with simple sequences, add loops, add conditionals, and build up to something that could compute Bernoulli numbers -- the algorithm I wrote in 1843. Paper and pencil only. No computers. The machine is not the point. The pattern is the point.

A box of precision brass gears, cams, shafts, and springs. The same components I designed for the Analytical Engine. Build a clock, a music box, or a mechanical calculator. Or redesign them three times and never finish. Either way, the gears are beautiful.

6 practice locks from simple to complex. I was fascinated by locks -- the engineering is beautiful. Pin tumbler, wafer, disc detainer. Legal to own, useful to understand, excellent for developing mechanical intuition.

I'll teach you linear perspective, isometric projection, and how to draw machines that could actually be built. Bring a ruler, compass, and pencils. We draw by hand. No CAD. If you can't draw it, you don't understand it.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

🇮🇹 🌐 🇫🇷

I'll teach you what I proved in my master's thesis: switches are logic. AND, OR, NOT. Wire them together and you can compute anything. We build circuits on a breadboard. By the end, you'll have a working binary adder made of transistors. From there, it's just scale.

A dedicated chess machine inspired by Belle, the first computer to earn a master rating. Play against it. It will beat you. That's the point. Learn from losing.

BCD, regulator, octopus, pressure gauge, dive computer. I dive to get away from mailing lists. You should dive to get away from whatever is making you angry. Fits medium-large builds. Wetsuit not included.

Learn to say everything in four lines. We work on compression -- removing every word that isn't earning its place. Dashes are welcome. Capital Letters too. The goal is a poem so concentrated it detonates on contact.