The End Result

Almost everything we consume is a final product.  You are given something that has been built from bits and pieces through a process that can take a very long time.  When you see the final product you see it for what it is, not what it was.  You see the product in its final form, not the iterations that came before.  When I wrote about pilot episodes to TV shows I said about the fact that they represent a rare opportunity to see something the way it was before it was developed and polished.  I also said that pilots in this vein have been dying off as the expectation of a polished production has increased to the point where the pilot is now expected to be a final product.

When you read a book, you often explore the thought processes of characters as they appear and wonder what motivates them and you have a desire to know more.  The secondary content is becoming as important as the primary.  Supplementary publications that take the world created in the book and expand upon it have proven popular.  Despite this growing trend, even that supplementary content is expected to be a final product.  People are interested in the development process to a point.  They want content that they can actually consume.  Using the example of a book, seeing the iterations thereof would make very little sense.  Things that are cannon in the final product would not have been in the iterations as they would often have relied on plot points or details that were eventually removed.  Entire characters can end up being removed in the editing process.

Whilst it may be interesting to see some of these iterations, for other mediums and for other creative works, like cooking for example, often the iterations we go through can't be consumed at all, and serve only as something to look at and think about.  The Mona Lisa is perhaps one of the most famous artworks in the world, but would you visit a museum other than the Louvre to see previous versions of the painting that were abandoned?  It is often the case that the canvass of a famous artwork once examined in detail with the aid of computer imagery can reveal earlier versions of those masterpieces.  There comes a question of whether or not your curiosity overrides the desire of the creator.  Those great masters who painted those works of art clearly were not happy with the iterations that they washed over, so do you actually have a right to see them?

There's a balance to be found here somewhere, somehow, between wanting to know of the work involved and the time it takes to get from point A to point B and desire of the creator for you to consume only the best version.  There is of course the argument that seeing iterations that demonstrate mistakes would allow us to see the creators as being more human in nature, to introduce flaws to our images of them to make them much more believable and their status that much more attainable.  By extension this would also negate the immediate reaction we often have when we see the final product and think "I could do that" or "That looks easy enough" because we do not see the work that went into it, and the practice that was involved in honing that craft.  Ask yourself how many paintings were created by your favourite artist that never saw the light of day?  Not only those that were washed over, but those that were destroyed, those that served only as a means of practising their craft.  No artist no matter how great created a masterpiece every single time they painted, neither were they born with that ability, it took time and effort and above all else practice to reach that point, but you don't see that, you see the the end result.