The Art of Listening
How do you master the art of listening? Can you choose to listen with patience, non-judgment, receptivity, and an open mind? In this episode of Cosmic Consciousness, host Shannon Pardini and guest Michael Coleman share a conversation around their mutual connection within the process of filmmaking and following your intuition and foresight, as you feel into the future you want to co-create with source. Michael shares his journey of documentary filmmaking, creating “The Art of Listening,” his first feature-length documentary. Join Shannon and Michael in today’s episode and master the art of listening.
Shannon Pardini:
Hello, soul family. I am Shannon Pardini, your host of Cosmic Consciousness: Coding the New Human for the New Earth. I am super excited today to share this moment with a very dear friend of mine. I am talking with Michael Coleman on the topic of the art of listening. And to tell you a little bit about Michael, Michael Coleman is an award-winning director and cinematographer and for over 15 years has focused on the making of films about audio, music, and the creatives who bring them to life.
After graduating college with a degree in filmmaking and sound engineering, Michael started his career with legendary music producer Jack Douglas. As Jack’s assistant, he joined the world-renowned rock band Aerosmith, documenting their 2004 blues album released Honkin’ on Bobo. In 2009, Michael launched the Soundworks Collection, an exclusive and intimate video series focusing on individuals and teams behind the scenes, bringing to life some of the world’s most exciting projects.
This video series has featured interviews with directors Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, Mel Gibson, Matt Reeves, and many other leaders in the film industry. In 2017, Michael directed his debut feature documentary, The Art of Listening, which I want you all to get the chance to check out if you can. The Art of Listening, which is about the journey music takes to reach a listener’s ear from the intent of an instrument maker and composer to the producers and engineers who capture and preserve an artist’s voice.
Michael, I am welcoming you here at Cosmic Consciousness. I’m so happy to have you. Why don’t you go ahead and share a little bit with our audience about yourself, a few thoughts on our topic of The Art of Listening before we take a quick break?
Michael Coleman:
Awesome. Thanks so much. So grateful to be here and obviously to share this space with you, Shannon. We’ve known each other for longer than I think we could both recall. I feel like our relationship blossomed out of our love for filmmaking and for storytelling and the Bay Area. I feel like every time I have an opportunity to talk with you, I’m so grateful. I walk away feeling better than I did when I went into it. Even if I feel great, I feel better going out.
I’m really excited to talk with you today. I mean, my story is like you eloquently shared. I’m from the Bay Area. I’ve been here my whole life. I kind of pursued a career path, which I didn’t really quite understand. I didn’t really know what I wanted specifically to do. I just knew that I was really inspired and motivated by all things audio and music. And then filmmaking was a parallel that I kind of was keeping an eye on, but I never pursued in a way that I thought would become a career path to me.
As I got older and as I’ve continued to get older, I’ve realized that my choices and the reasons that I started to understand why I do the type of work that I do it’s mainly because I love human interaction and I love helping others tell their stories. I think when people describe their children, they say, “Oh, they have an old soul,” and I didn’t really fully understand what even that meant probably until later in life when I actually did understand that, which was as a teen and getting into my career, I’d be very comfortable hanging out with people that were probably twice or three times my age.
I never really fully understood why. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying probably being a kid, but I think there’s something about the knowledge and kind of the experience or maybe just the perspective that other people had that I was so curious about. I don’t fully know what I wanted to do, but I just knew that I liked hanging out with other people that had similar interests or that had kind of a similar perspective on life in the sense of kind of this adventure.
The unknown to me has always been an aspect of my career, my life. I like to look ahead, but I also like to kind of just look at what’s right in front of me and kind of spontaneous jump into things that I otherwise probably would have thought that I would have done. I think that’s why my career has… If you look at all the clients and the projects that I do, it’s so vast. On one spectrum, as you mentioned, I started my career working with Aerosmith and producer Jack Douglas.
And then on the other end, I’m working very often with winemakers like the Mondavi Family here in Napa, or folks like the San Francisco Giants or the Warriors, or going and doing stuff with local musicians here in the Bay Area like Metallica and Journey and Alanis Morissette. I like people, but the funny thing is, I’m a pretty introvert. I don’t really need other people to kind of fuel my creative passion. I can be very happy being alone and just working on my projects or working on other people’s projects and being very satisfied.
There’s a weird balance that my career has taken. I fundamentally am reacting to kind of the world around me and the requests that people have with me in terms of how they want to collaborate with me and how they want to incorporate me into their projects. And then it’s also the other side of the coin, which is me pursuing my own projects, my own passions, and very much just being very satisfied with spending time and energy doing things that aren’t really for anyone else.
Really they’re just for me, but yet I share them in a very public way, which is a kind of the outcome of what the Soundworks Collection video series has been, which I started officially in 2009. I’ve always kept my eye on it. It’s a way for me to tell the types of stories that I otherwise thought that I wouldn’t have access to. One of the most recent ones that I just shot this past week in LA was with the director Denis Villeneuve, who’s the director of Dune, and his sound team.
It’s a piece that I’ll be putting together with Warner Brothers, and it’s about the sound of the movie Dune, which is, for me, I just love collaborating with other artists and hearing their journey and then having an opportunity to help kind of tell another side of that story through my own voice. That’s my story, I guess.
Shannon Pardini:
I love it. Your story just keeps expanding and growing. Just the people you get to be creative with onset, I want to dive more into this and into the creations that you’re looking forward to doing solo projects ahead. We’re going to take a quick break. Michael, if people want to check out your material, where can they find your content?
Michael Coleman:
Colemanfilm.com is my personal website and pretty much all the social media, Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, Coleman Film. Kind of very straightforward and simple, but there’s actually a story behind even why Coleman Film, but yeah, colemanfilm.com.
Shannon Pardini:
We’ll jump into that. That’s how we’ll start our conversation. All right. We’re going to take a quick break. We are talking with the lovely and dear Michael Coleman and our topic is on the art of listening. We will be right back. And if you want to tune into more podcasts like this, if you’re interested, go to activateevolution.com. We’ll be right back.
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