Meet Lada Egorova | Filmmaker and Photographer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lada Egorova and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lada, do you have any habits that you feel contribute to your effectiveness?
Everyone has their own way of working and the things that works for them to stay productive, motivated. But building strong habits is definitely essential even when you are a creative. You can’t build your artistic career on waiting for inspiration to kick in. You have to create habits that will make your inspiration kick in.
Over the years, I read books, watched interviews, TED talks, podcasts about building habits, staying productive, avoiding procrastination. I tried different things some worked for me other didn’t.
Here are the habits that help me in my daily life to keep creating as an artistic and get closer to success in my artistic projects:
– do it everyday even if it’s only for 30 minutes. If you repeat an action everyday you will build a habit. You can start with only a few minutes a day and then increase to one hour and more if you can. I try to write every day at leats for 30 minutes. It can be one page of a script, a logline, a pitch, a few lines of story ideas. But since I’ve built that habit, starting to write has become automatic. I don’t even try to think if what I wrote was good. i just write. I don’t put barriers to my creativity. I write and later I will revise it. Now writing has become natural to me like eating lunch or brushing my teeth. It has become a habit.
– Plan your week, your year, your day and don’t be rigid about your plans. Between deadlines of projects, grants to apply, personal projects I want to develop on my free time, rest and work, you can easily get lost in your to do lists. I like to plan my year, what I usually do is I write the main projects or things I want to get done each month and I plan 3 months ahead. Then when one month is over I adjust, I try to see what goals I reached, what goals I have to reschedule to the next month. I also plan my week: for each day I write a thing I want to get done. Then every morning I write down the things I want to do that day. For this I have a specific method: there is one thing that is the “highlight” of the day. It is that one thing that I want to get done with today. Then I have a second highlight that I add if I finish the first one. Then I have a small to-do list of other things that I need to get done but more because they need to be done than because it’s something I’m passionate about (answer a specific email, go to the bank, finish a powerpoint)
Next to these things I add the timeframe I want to achieve them. Maybe I have some free time between 3pm and 5pm so that’s when I will focus on my highlight. For my second highlight I can put it for 7pm. The other things, some might be quicker so I might put them at 1pm or 7pm before doing my second highlight. Depending on how my day is going I adjust my plan of the day, I make a second draft that is adjusted depending on how the day is actually going. Maybe something came up and I have to move my highlight to later in the evening or earlier because I found some available time sooner. I would recommend to not hesitate adjusting your plan of the day, don’t be too rigid with your time frame and to-do list, you will learn how much you can get done and will get better at planning your days. Often we think we will get more things done than we actually do, we overestimate our time and at the end of the day when we see all the things left to do we feel disappointed because we haven’t done all of them. But the more you plan and adjust your days the more you’ll become accurate at estimating how much you can get done per day. Planning is vital if you want to stay on track, evolve as a business, don’t miss important deadlines for clients and your own projects.
– If it takes less than 5 minutes to be done, I do it immediately so that I’m finished with that taks and I avoid putting it for later forever.
– Plan your resting day. Don’t forget to schedule if possible at least one day or half a day per week where you fully rest. Don’t work on any work-related projects not even your own personal projects. Just rest your mind, go discover a new place in nature or in the city, hang out with friends and family, do a hobby you enjoy. Do not think of work, rest your mind and body.
– Meditating, I have not been consistant enough yet with it but I noticed how more focused and calm I am when I meditate in the morning for 5-10 minutes. I can see more clearly, I am less controlled by my emotions, I am more motivated.
– Stay away from your phone specifically social media and emails. I turned off my email notifications and I put a limit to stay only 30min per day on my social media apps. I realized how more focused, less anxious I am. I only check my emails twice a day instead of checking my phone everytime I get a notification. I also turned off my social media apps notifications and put a 30min limit to avoid wasting time scrolling endlessly. When I work, I put my phone out of sight so I do not have the temptation to take it and stop working to just scroll on my phone.

You build habits by being consistent, creating an environment that will be easier for you to follow these habits and by rewarding yourself when you’ve followed your habit.
I believe not every working/routine system works for everyone, and we only can find what suits us and our lifestyle by trying different things and seeing what fits us.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I was born in Russia and moved to France when I was a child. I experienced the change of cultures and languages. My art is strongly linked to this feeling of not being at home anywhere, being lost between two cultures and not feeling like you belong anywhere. As a child, I was very quiet and shy, I didn’t talk much and prefered to listen and observe things that were happening around me. It influenced my art as a photographer and filmmaker, I enjoy focusing on people who are alone, and I notice little moments of our everyday lives that many of us don’t have time to stop and observe. I enjoy giving importance to little things and people that go unnoticed because they’re more quiet or “normal” in our society. I love putting my lens on people who don’t try to get noticed but just go on with their daily-lives, doing little acts of kindness that go unnoticed by the rest of the world.

I got to where I am now professionally from learning by working on many various film and video projects. I have been on many film, music video and commercial sets. But my own career as a photographer, screenwriter and director was developed by my strong desire of creating art with what I had. I always hated having to wait for someone’s permission or to get money from someone to do a project. I’ve always preferred to create now with what I could get than wait forever.
It was not an easy path, being an artist is a tough route. You have to sacrifice a lot, work twice more than others if you want to do your passion projects beside your day-job. It’s time consuming, tiring, you get rejected a lot, your hopes get shattered every once in a while. But then you’re on set doing things you love, with other creative people who accepted to be part of your team, you get feedback from people who felt touched by your art and this makes it all worth it.

I’ve learned that you could wait all your life for the right opportunity or the right moment to come to make your project, but chances are you’ll wait forever. It’s better to create something now, even if it’s imperfect and not how you imagined it exactly because you don’t have the means that you wanted. But at least you created something, you have something to show and to learn from. In the art/film industry you have better chances to get noticed if people see you’ve done something even if it’s not perfect than if you haven’t done anything.
I also learned that motivation comes and goes, some days you are determined to make the greatest project you’ve ever done yet and to put all your energy into it; the next day you feel like you’re a failure, you want to give up. But if you build strong working habits, you’ll progress more in your career. Because no matter how motivated you are, you’ll show up and do the work. You can’t rely on your motivation to create art, rely on your creating/working habits and soon enough you’ll have a project done despite the ups and downs you had to go through.

If I wanted the world to know something about me, is that I always felt unlucky in my artistic life. I’ve been rejected so many times, missed so many opportunities, almost got something but at the last moment I didn’t. Many times I felt like giving up, I felt like I was cursed and that life was against me and my desire to become an artist and live from it. But I kept working hard, I would give up for a day or two and then come back to creating because it was like an addiction I couldn’t get rid off. Art was also a way to express things that I kept inside of me and never spoke about to anyone else.
Despite all these missed opportunities and rejections, and I still get rejected nowadays but I keep working hard. I’ve come to a point where rejection doesn’t affect me anymore. I take it in and then I go back to creating. Rejection builds your character, it pushes you out of your comfort zone and tests your desire. It makes you rethink of who you are as an artist, what art you want to make, why and who. The more rejected you are, the more you should become confident about your art and your identity as an artist so that for the next opportunity they’ll see that you are confident in what you create and who you are, that you know exactly what you want to achieve with your art and that you won’t stop at any obstacle. Let rejection build your confidence rather than shatter it. See it as an opportunity to define better who you are and what you create, how you stand out from other artists. Eventually, you’ll get noticed for it!

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Los Angeles is a vibrant, multi-cultural city that always has something going on no matter what you’re in the mood for. I would bring someone to visit the Getty museum, such a beautiful place, with an incredible architecture, a great view and wonderful art. We would then grab some food and coffee at Carrera Cafe in Melrose. Such a cute place with great food.
We’d then hang out in Venice on a Saturday evening, to watch the sunset and walk among the crowd and stores. The energy there is immaculate, between music, pop-up art, skaters, surfers, rollerskaters, it’s always a good time and a beautiful place to relax.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would like to give a shoutout to my filmmaking peers, everyone who helped me through motivational messages or by being part of one of my films or giving feedback on them. Without their support, advice, encouragement I would have probably given up many times.

Website: https://ladaegorova.wixsite.com/website

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lada.egorova_/?hl=fr

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/egorova-lada/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003888919534

Image Credits
Black and white picture: Avi other pictures: by me