Andrew’s thoughts & observations
A stream of thoughts and ideas, messy & unclean
The client behind the “biggest creative project I’ve attempted” rang me today with news that the project is going to be put on hold for 8-10 months.
Sad news, but it adds room for other smaller projects which is good. It also allows for further skill development.
In other news I got to play with some new software today, very techy, but in a some way it’s a creative outlet, configuring server setting & getting locked out of the box!
Today a video project that I worked on a few weeks back went public. My first long form video project in years (the run time is 22 minutes). The band that was featured in it wanted to know how I wanted to be created. I hadn’t even thought about crediting myself.
I’m sure I’m the worst person at self promotion. I just want the work to speak for itself, and if people are interested enough in it, they’ll find who created it. But maybe I should have at least put my name at the end for 3 seconds. (Although I’m currently having an identity crisses around branding…)
It’s been up for a few hours and has about 100 views which is cool, especially given the long form nature of it.
The second project is a technical one, where I’m doing some basic, but interesting reverse proxying of a website. But the technical side is easy, trying to integrate it with a software provider is the tricky part. It’s really weighing me down in a mental sense trying to solve this problem.
In other news DigiDirect has 10% off over the next few days :)…I might do some shopping.
The Robcast Episode 100 with Rob and Elizabeth Gilbert is rather interesting and insightful on so many levels.
One topic that they had a bit of a riff on was the idea of creating something, just because. Rob created a character with his kids called Dicky …
He went all out, got some stories together, a bunch of illustrations and a pitch for publishers and was flat out rejected. So Dickie ended up in a file in the garage.
Elizibeth had just been playing with poetry, which turned into lyrics, which turned into recording a song. For what? The fun of it basically.
Guess what, nobody died in the process.
It is so liberating that these people who have quote made it quote, still have the freedom to play and experiment with ideas, and better yet, they don’t always turn out to be mega successful works, like their previous work.
I was recently at a meeting and a mother had to bring her daughters to it and they say in the corner on a small table made at children height and just created with pens and pencils and things for the hour. Why? Because it’s fun! Arrr to learn to get back to the point of doing stuff for the fun of it.
That reminds me, I really should get that new box of LEGO out and built it.
Look at that, 6 weeks has rolled around since I started this blog.
A quick recap on my top posts. These all have an important element for me, whether it was the content or the story, a growth felt in my writing style, or a growth in my thinking.
This might not work….
A confession
Painting, piano & sailing
Let’s have a conversation around digital minimalism
Grieving with Hope
I feel more at ease in a room full of pole dancers, than a church
Tiredness
Awesome Jar
Hope to catch a glimpse of how loved you are brother
Thanks for being on the journey. I plan to keep the journey going.
How has blogging every day changed my thinking process?
A daily blog has forced me to stop at the end of the day and reflect on all that has happened, to take count of what new things I’ve learnt, or noticed & then forced me to try and turn those thoughts into words on a page. This is something that I hadn’t practiced for years (& some would argue if I really wanted to practice them, I should attend a university).
It’s also interesting to see how a thought changes as I process it through the writing. Sometimes the place I start from, is a very different place to where I end up after having to think and process the idea in detail.
Unfortunately fun Friday was a little dull today. Nothing awesome to put in the awesome jar unfortunately.
Instead I spent the day fixing up loose ends on various projects.
The problem with being a thinker and someone who comes up with a small stream of ideas, is sometimes the last idea isn’t ipfinished before the new one is started, it’s even worse when that creeps over from personal projects, into professional projects.
I discovered that I’m not the only one who thinks this way.
But that will have to be a post for another day.
It’s done. I created a 5 1/2 min vlog video in under 48hrs. While I’ve been toying with the idea and filming things since February, today was the first time I actually pulled the trigger and sat down & forced myself to edit something together.
I know that this isn’t sustainable to do a daily vlog of the likes of Casey Neistat, but I can probably start with one a week. Although something has to give, unfortunately it will probably be the daily blog post 🙁
Strangely enough, it wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought to post a vlog. Maybe I just wanted to get it over with, I’m not sure.
I’ll just have to see where this creative path takes me.
This morning I checked my email for the first time since mid day yesterday. Sitting there was an email from a name that I know, but I don’t recall ever exchanging via email. Turns out that he had seen some of my design work and wanted some assistance in that area.
I couldn’t really believe my eyes. Someone had taken the time to track down my contact (not overly hard) & was requesting a design service. A service that I don’t actually advertise doing. (Ok it turns out I do have a single page on my “main” website, which I put up in hopes of getting accepted by a printing press for an account. Not sure if it was required or not, but I got the account after another company turned me away. But the site itself definitely doesn’t scream “hire me to design things, like this amazing website” – given sarcasm can be hard to detect at the best of times, it’ll be best for me to clarify, my website is pretty rubbish, I threw it together in a weekend about 4 years ago & haven’t touched it since. Luckily my skills that improved over this time).
The next challenge….answering the question “how much would you charge?”. I have no idea, I generally get contracted to do a large site, and the web design is a side component, this was the other way round, “here’s a design project, plus a landing page for web”.
It has taken me all day to think of a reply for the email. There’s always an inner battle for me around quoting. I want to quote for the best possible outcome for both parties. Ideally you want to quote the clients budget, plus $10. But sometimes you have no idea what their budget is. (Chase Jarvis and Gary V talk about it in an interview). There is nothing worse than to quote too low, and then get stuck doing 100 revisions. In my mind I fell it’s like a taxi meter in reverse. The quote gets accepted and that’s like adding credit to the taxi meter and then as work is done the meter winds down, and the first revision it starts to go into the negative space, and by the 20th email of changes the meter is half of the quote. Sometimes you can go back to the client (particularly if there is some paper work) and say “hey this is getting ridiculous” other times I just wear it. Unfortunately what I find can start to happen is that bitterness creeps in around the project and the client. Which then can start to have a negative effect on the work. It’s a vicious cycle.
But at last I bite the bullet, sent off a figure with some options. Let’s see what they say when they come back. At the end of the day, it goes back to this weeks theme of pointing your toes in the direction you want to go.
I have never fully understood stories. I knew that they were there, and that some people felt touched by them, but I didn’t really understand stories.
I heard a sermon once by a guy who shared some stories about his local neighbourhood, they weren’t amazing awesome hyped stories, instead they were good stories. He and his family live amoung a rough neighbourhood and they live amoung the people that they are trying to help and support. I can’t remember exactly what his stories were about, but I do remember the concept of good stories.
Lately I’ve been listening and exploring story telling. I’m not sure what has triggered my interest in stories, whether it is in part, this project of daily blogging which requires me to be open and listen closely throughout the day, or just getting more mature (whatever that means). Two days ago I blogged about episode 99 of the Rob Cast, a story that was quite moving, I recently watched a movie on Netflix called “The Eichmann Show”, if you haven’t seen it, go watch it, but be prepared to be shocked if it you don’t know the story. Following this, I gave the film “A Girl Like Her”, a documentary style film about the bullying of a young girl and the story telling of both sides of the story.
These stories have been having an impact on me. I’m loving the beauty of the telling a story with a camera, and makes me want to pursue the path of becoming a film maker. I need a project around this.
Yesterday I wrote about starting my biggest creative project to date. Here is my review on the day of photographing. Just a heads up, it’s pretty dry & lifeless, you might want to skip along to another post.
What worked?
What didn’t work?
What did I learn?
The next phase will be post and editing into the final concept before it goes to print.
Today I started working on my biggest creative project yet.
Today saw the public start of the biggest creative project I’ve ever undertaken. It turns out big projects, actually have a lot of planning behind them. I was inspired for the concept of this project back in April while getting lost down the rabbit holes known as Pinterest. I saw a magazine cover and thought that I’ll file that one away.
Last Sunday I got word that we were a go for this project, and the concept was approved on Monday. The downside is that I need to get the artwork to the printers in two weeks time. So today was the only time that really suited the photography side of things.
To put the project in perspective, it’s a church based topic that runs for term 3 called “Better Together”, and what better way to inspire and rally a community around a theme, than to put the faces of the community on the promotional material. The vision was to do a Humans of New York crossed with a fashion photoshot, photoshot. Lights, camera, action, the works.
I realised early on that I didn’t want to be the one pressing the shutter all day. Instead, I wanted a team of people, a camera operator, an assistant, an admin assistant handling release forms, a recruiter to gather and inspire people. I knew it was impossible to fore fill all of those roles at once, I would just fail at all and the project would fall down around my ears. Instead I wanted to have the role of “Art Director” and manage the project from a high level and make sure that it’s heading towards the creative vision. I set out to recruit people, and to get people to recruit others. Now to be honest this didn’t exactly go to plan, how I’d like it to have gone. First thing this morning hit and I felt so lonely, like it was just me and a camera. I had failed to successfully recruit the other talent required to pull off this job, although we are jumping ahead.
If multiple people were going to be involved in this project, I better be sure of the artistic direction and know exactly what photos we want, complete with poses, expressions, props, etc. So I wrote a document to plan out the direction of where I was taking the project, and what we needed to make it work. This included camera angles, how much of the frame should be filled by the subject, the facial expression of the subject, etc. In the end I had 3 photos of each subject that I wanted to take.
After all this planning, and preparing, finally came the day to take a photo. After spending an hour setting up the basic “2 light” setup, I was ready to take the first picture. But hang on, it’s not working very well. Panic started to set in, I’m running out of time and the plan in my head, and the little experimentation that I did is starting to fall down. I’m a failure before I even started. Turns out, it was just a couple of technical issues that compounded together to throw me off what was happening.
In the end, the day felt like a real success, over 1100 frames taken. I’m yet to filter that down, into something more manageable. The goal is to create a collage of faces.
Thanks to the fokes who helped out today, Sally, Buzz, Kev, Katie & Sarah. Your assistance allowed me to focus on the other tasks at hand, instead of trying to juggle everything. Cheers guys and girls!
To be continued….
