Speed & Creativity

Art doesn't like to wait. It likes to just pour itself out onto whatever medium is in front of you. When you feel something and the vision is clear in your mind the last thing you want is to charge batteries.

Making films is a very time consuming process, and all the more time consuming when we let it. I have a love hate relationship with production for one major reason: Gear. I have to often fight the temptation to be bitter toward gimbals and batteries and wireless transmissions and all of it. The reason is because it's all created in the name of efficiency, but often enough we end up fighting the endless amount of cables and signals and settings instead.

Ultimately I have no problem with gear, in fact I think it's incredible, as long as it's really helping you. And that's the real question. Is this thing you bought really helping you do better work? Or did you buy it because the work you're doing isn't satisfying so you find the fun in playing with cool toys... which of course doesn't satisfy and doesn't last very long at all, and then on to the next purchase with more cables and more technical support and more little things that annoy you about it even though you like most things.

Don't be sucker'd by the enormous business created around holding your camera in one place. There's an endless swarm of people who are willing to sell you their thing.

The point is, is it really helping you do better work? Because creativity doesn't like to wait.

Risk

For a while now I've almost been tempted to brand all of what we do as 'Risk'. For the vast majority almost everything we've ever done that's really succeeded started with a conversation where we said, "What if we did something really crazy?" Now, crazy doesn't mean the same thing in every situation, like for instance, in a music video I once directed, taking a big risk meant having the whole thing open up with a super slow four and a half minute long shot. In the world of music videos for rock bands that was a big departure from the norm, and a big reason why we did it. It's also worth pointing out that we didn't just do it to be different. It lended to the story in a way that a lot of faster shots simply wouldn't have. It reinforced our messaging.

The point here is extremely well captured in a quote from Seth Godin in his amazing book The Dip, where he says, "Playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do." I think one good addition to that is as long as it's still saying what you want it to. Don't just do something different for the sake of different if it's a total departure from your messaging and your audience.

It's those works of art that half of us love and half of us hate... those are the ones that we all talk about, and that we ultimately remember.

Everything else is just a wash downstream in the flood of everything else.

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Also, check out our newest work here.

The Hard Work of Creativity

The creative process is like one wild goose chase after another. We've learned to embrace it. I was recently reminded of the famous quote from Stephen King, “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

Great ideas are king and we fight hard for them. They feel easy when you watch them play out in their final glory but when you're making this work and your perspective of the end is dim and you don't know how to bridge the gap it can feel like reaching into the darkness and hoping you feel something you can grab ahold of. Doing good work is time consuming and hard and it's only made harder when you don't embrace the fact that this is the creative process. 

The sooner you get "comfortable" with the unknown, the sooner you'll stop wandering off the road that leads to your best work.

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Also, check out our newest work here.

The Real Work (Who We Are)

We spend a lot of our own time and money to do our own work. Work we love. Spec work. Often when we tell someone we’re doing something on spec they have a couple different responses, one is to feel bad for us because they assume we don’t have paying clients. The other is to be half inspired because we’re doing what we love, but of course (they assume) you have to do all the other boring work to pay the bills. One seems to pity us and the other somewhat assumes we’re too idealistic to actually be viable. Both ideas misunderstand us.

We aren’t doing these projects because we can’t find paying clients and these projects for us aren’t a side endeavor while we take leave from the slavery of the real work. For us this is the real work. And we’re in the driver seat. These projects are a beacon, a signal, a message out to a world of creatives and entrepreneurs and influencers to say, “This is who we are, this is what we believe.” And we don’t expect us to resonate with everyone, but that’s not the point. The point is to find the few we do resonate with, those who share the vision, who share the hunger for risk and beauty and innovation, who believe what we believe. We’re looking for you. We’re not in the business of trying to convince someone to take risks and to trust us as artists. We’re out to build relationships with the few who already do.

So when you see us pouring our own sweat and blood into the work we care about, it’s because this is who we are and this is what we believe. We're not afraid of failure, we're afraid to succeed doing work that doesn't really matter... If you don’t get it that’s ok, these just aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

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If you know someone who would enjoy this post I hope you'll pass on a link. Thanks.

Also, check out our newest work here.