Creatives Building a Business and Community

It seems appropriate that I got ahold of both of these works of art around the same time. They both go into creativity and building a business along with a community.

First off, thank goodness for Gregory Kolsto's book The Art of Oddly Correct.

"...Oddly Correct is a coffee roasting company located in sunny Kansas City, MO. We've been roasting and serving coffee in our neighborhood for over ten years as of writing these words."

I'd come across Oddly Correct over the last couple of years in the course of my rubber stamp hunts. I'd had a job in Kansas City and made sure to stop by. They don't use rubber stamps, but Kolsto does run their coffee bags through a linocut process using an early 1900s block printing press and hand-carved blocks. There's a 2014 spruge.com article that goes into more detail about his block printing process if you're interested.

The book itself is full of some of the art that's come out of Kolsto's experience running the Kansas City coffee shop over the years. For more about Oddly Correct and a peek at his printing process, check out the video below.

My obsession with rubber stamps and coffee shop art had me instantly nerding out with his block printing process, but in addition to the prints, the book itself was chocked full of inspiration for other art kids interested in furthering their work while also building a business and a community.

"You don't need the best gear to get started. You just need to start."

"When we started, we never had the best brewing gear or the finest building materials. We endeavored to be as honest as we could with what we had... We wanted to be a small but mighty company."

 

Second, it's worth your time to go watch the new Jim Henson documentary over at Disney Plus.

There was quite a bit I didn't know about Jim Henson, specifically his advertising background and how he took advantage of those paychecks to make his experimental films. Good grief I'm glad to have benefited from his creativity via shows like Sesame Street, The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, Dark Crystal, etc. Thanks to David Bizzaro for the heads up about the film.

Excuses, excuses

It's getting real that I'm only four weeks away from completing my MBA. My communications class currently has us working on a business proposal and pitch using ChatGPT. My strategy class has us in groups competing with each other's simulated businesses. It's all incredibly interesting and essentially the culmination of the work we've been doing throughout our graduate business program. Still, I'm constantly thinking about lighting, composition, and sharing interesting stories and ideas via short documentaries and photos.

With that in mind, this past week I came across a few short films that certainly kept my attention.

There are a few photographers I'm following on YouTube who I think are doing some interesting work. One of them is a Canadian named Kyle McDougall. He's a film photog and former cinematographer and director who's currently living in the UK. This week he flexed those filmmaker muscles with this short and gorgeous documentary about a buddy of his named Nicholas J.R. White.

Another short doc I ran across this week was a piece about zines and zine culture. What felt great about this one is how appropriately handmade it felt, which no doubt felt like a zine itself. Bonus points too for their smash-and-grab usage of some great punk music.

The last thing I'll leave you with this week comes from another YouTuber I recently stumbled on. This channel shares the work of other well-known photographers and attempts to imitate their approaches as a means of learning new techniques. There are plenty of interesting examples on the channel, but I was especially drawn to this one about photographer Olga Karlovac's work.

There's only four more weeks of being able to use the "I wish I could go out and make something interesting but I'm still in grad school" excuse and I'ma ride that thing into the ground. It's much easier to do that than go out and make something interesting myself.

At least for now...

Phoning in Last Week's Highlights

In the time that I'd be normally working on a weekly blog post, I was instead getting my tail handed to me in finalizing last year's tax prep and the homework for my last two MBA classes. So that looks like me sorta phoning this one in and sharing some of highlights of last week.

Anne and I got to watch American Symphony, the documentary film by director Matthew Heineman that follows musician Jon Batiste and his wife Suleika Jaouad as he's having an incredible period in his professional career and she's once again battling leukemia. Filmmaker Magazine has an interview with the film's director and the wild lengths they went to in creating the work. If you've not already seen the film, make sure you do.

This past week was bursting at the seams now that I'm back in full-on MBA mode as well as Anne and the boys being back in school as well. They've had an unusual amount of "snow days" in getting started with their spring semester, so that's certainly smashing into the idea of me working from home. I'm also training for the OKC Memorial half-marathon, which is the first one of those I've done in quite a while. The weather hasn't been kind considering the deep freeze we're thawing from this week, so I've been dodging ice, sub-30° temps, and generally rough conditions. On Saturday I got in a six mile run, which is the furthest distance I've done in years. This morning I got in a short run before starting the day and felt like a sack of potatoes trying to be a real boy.

There's also a couple podcasts from this past week that I'd pass along. The episode about The Hybrid Worker Malaise from The Daily by the New York Times was an interesting one, especially considering how I've worked from home since 2011. There were quite a few issues discussed that I've personally had to work through myself.

There was also the "Surviving Our Lowest Lows" episode from The No Film School Podcast. Filmmaking isn't for the faint of heart and it felt like the two episode contributors had been reading my mail.

The third one I'll leave you with was from the Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast episode "Making Peace with Your Midlife, Mid-career Self". I'm in my early forties and certainly never made it into the cool kids club during Vimeo's golden age. There was also something in this episode about exercise and "how much more expensive a six-pack is" now.

If you've not noticed a theme, it's the first of the year, seasonal depression is a real thing, and from personal experience, I know things get better. Hence me training for a half-marathon this April.

I'll leave you with this last one just drilling graduate business school and the recent flood of MBAs. If nothing else, I'm totally at peace with not taking myself too seriously. Crazy thanks Good Work.

Strikes, Skaters, and Street Photogs

This starts week six of the fall semester's first class module. It's early still on Monday morning as I'm writing this and I should already be starting on classwork for the week, but here I am trying to force some kind of graduate student, family- and work-life balance. Honestly, I should be pushing for more of a focus on my work considering how little attention it's been getting since starting my MBA. With that in mind, here are a few hot takes from recently.

Huge news came out last night about a tentative deal being reached concerning the WGA strike. The New York Times reports that the screenwriters guild reached a deal with studios and that they got most of what they wanted.

“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members.

Conspicuously not doing a victory lap was the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios. “The W.G.A. and A.M.P.T.P. have reached a tentative agreement” was its only comment. - nytimes.com

While this is great news, the industry is still being impacted by the SAG-AFTRA strike and there's not much happening on that front.

On a personal level, I can't point specifically to how these strikes have hit me directly, but by simply being in the industry I know they have. Friends of mine are on those picket lines in New York and Los Angeles, and the impact on the crew that haven't been working during this time has been rough. I had a phone call a couple weeks ago with the CPA we still work with in New York and he mentioned how this has been a terrible, terrible year for his clients in the entertainment and production industry – me and my family included.

Tying this nonsense back to my MBA work, I'm six weeks deep into a Negotiations course. We've yet to discuss these entertainment industry strikes, but I'm hoping our professor at least mentions it in tonight's class. My other class this module has focused on Marketing Management. That class in particular has been busting my chops about how little attention I've been giving to the customer-facing aspects of my own small business efforts. So with that in mind...

A couple weeks ago I snuck off to the Skate the Plaza event here in Oklahoma City. I'll mention upfront how it's obviously low-hanging fruit to snag photos at events like this. There were tons of people there and probably as many photogs as skaters all hoping to do something interesting and impress the right people. Still, super stoked about the few images I did make in the process. Again, I've been insanely focused on grad school knowing it'll help me on the business end of my creative work, but in doing so I've unfortunately neglected the actual creative work itself. At this point, I'm just happy to get some time in behind a camera.

The last hot take for this post is a documentary series on street photographers released this week, Wrong Side of the Lens. I actually reached out to the series creator, Josh Ethan Johnson, almost immediately after just seeing the trailer. Later that night St. Anne the Wife and I watched nearly the entire series and realized just how much bigger of a deal it is than I first expected.

Super excited to see a project like this, especially in how it was released on YouTube instead of one of the major streaming platforms considering how good it is. It's got my mashup of creative passions, fierce independence, and business school superpowers going nuts and hopeful for the future.

 

Updated: Jan. 31, 2024
Bit of an update on Wrong Side of the Lens. I've had a chance to connect with Josh Ethan Johnson on his project several times over the last few months and he seems like a good dude doing some interesting work. He's launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise some production capital for future seasons of the project that I'd certainly love to see. Here's his fundraising video and that GoFundMe link so you can help support the art kids making the work you enjoy.

VICE's Queer Sports: International Gay Rodeo Association

Oh man, I've been waiting for this one to come out for what feels like forever. Getting to work on this piece rocked my world in all the best ways. Back in late October 2022, I got to cam op a couple days on this nonsense just outside the Oklahoma City area.

Rodeos are very much a part of growing up in my part of the world. My parents owned and ran a feed store about an hour south of Dallas when I was born. My mom taught in small country schools where elementary students had dip can rings worn into their back pockets. My dad has stories of being a rodeo clown. Had my parents not trekked back to the Oklahoma City area not long after I was born, I'm certain I'd have grown up much differently.

This thing though. This International Gay Rodeo Association experience last fall fought back against a load of the stereotypes surrounding the world of rodeo and conservative America. I'm glad they're doing great things.

Client: VICE News
Director: Alex Smith
DP: McKinleigh Lair
Camera Op: Tanner Herriott
Sound: Kelly Hallmark
PA: Whitney Goodwin

Finishing Out the Winter Break

The spring semester starts up this week and I'm hoping this blog doesn't go dark again for months at a time. I've already printed out my 15 minute schedule breakdown for next week, but as I'm writing this I'm keeping it under my laptop thinking that'll somehow let me squeeze out the last bit of my winter break.

This past Saturday night St. Anne the Wife and I ditched the kiddos and snuck out to Stillwater, OK, for a screening of the Relentless Ride documentary. The film follows a group of ultra-endurance athletes competing in the 2021 Arkansas High Country Race, a self-supported 1,037-mile bike-packing event in northwest Arkansas.

Back in December 2021 I got to go out to Connecticut with Adam Harbottle from KOMBI Creative to film some interviews and pick-ups with one of the riders in the film, Spencer Ralston. Adam and I got to spend a few days with Spencer and his family and we stayed at their home out in southeast Connecticut. For sure one of the more interesting documentary projects I got to work on that year. Crazy excited for the team behind this film and I wish them the best of luck with the project.

This week I'll be out in Michigan filming a project with an MBA cohort of mine. In addtion to this project, we both start our spring semester this week: Tuesday night I've got a Managerial Accounting class and on Wednesday night she and I both have an Investment class. With it being our first week of the semester, we don't have much due, but I'll for sure be lugging around two big finance textbooks in addition to my production equipment.

This morning I joked with Anne about how I felt like I was with my tribe last night at that documentary screening. I'd assume most of the people there were cyclists, but the film kids fit right in. At the same time, I'm stoked to be getting back to my grad work and nerding out over finance and business related topics. Still no clue as to how all this nonsense will mix together, but I'm here for it.

Besides all this nonsense, I got to read a handful of books over the break that'd been piling up on my nightstand over the fall semester:

I'd started with what I'd thought would be the antidote to a crazy busy semester with Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing. I'd heard about it awhile back, finally got to read it, but can't say I'd read it again.

Easily my favorite book over the break was Jenny Slate's Little Weirds. It's a collection of essays she's written that convinced me we'd be friends. The opening essay is about how she'd love to be thought of as French – a French woman – but more specifically a Parisian Croissant.

"Let me be your morning treat with your coffee. Disregard the fear that I am too rich to be an ordinary meal... Treasury me for my layers and layers of fragility and richness. Name me after a shape the moon makes. Have me in a hotel while you are on vacation. Look at me and say, "Oh, I really shouldn't," just because you want to have me so very much." - Jenny Slate

Then came The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt. A classmate of mine recommended it a few months ago and I'd for sure recommend it myself.

At the moment I'm nearly through reading In the Dust of this Planet by Eugene Thacker. Another one that's been buried in my list of books to read after I'd heard about it on an old Radiolab episode. Kinda surprised how long it took to find, but I snagged a copy from the basement of Strand on a trip to NYC in December. For sure not the typical book I'd read, but dang it's been a wild ride so far.

Curb Stomp'd (but diggin' it...for the most part)

You wanna talk about depreciation schedules or amortization? Maybe basket purchases, asset turnover ratios, and how to dispose of those assets at the end of their service life? We could also get into Student's t-distributions and linear regression models if you're interested.

Literally no clue why any of you are still here (hi mom).

The last couple months my world has basically been a tossed salad of math, spreadsheets, reading assignments, and a couple stale croutons of creative work. There's also a side of Cub Scouts with Housefire No.2, and for dessert, an upcoming trip to Amsterdam for my rubber stamp documentary.

There's also our household getting absolutely wrecked earlier this month when we had to put down Clara the Dog. St. Anne the Wife and I got her in 2010 for our first wedding anniversary and over the last 12 years that English Bulldog was no question a member of our family. We knew Clara was getting towards the sunset of life, but her last few weeks went south quickly. We're incredibly lucky to have had such a great companion all these years and I'm glad we had the time with her that we did.

Regarding my school work, I'm freakin' floored with what I'm learning. Turns out the accountants and CPAs I've worked with over the years are true heroes and I'm absolutely not cut from that same cloth. There's also those statistical super powers and their potential I'm trying to comprehend that've basically made my head explode – in addition to literal headaches. One of our in-class examples last week worked through the actual correlation between political campaign results and the relationship to campaign spending. Freakin' fascinating.

Is this intentional mental torture getting me more creative work? No, not by a long shot. Is it making me think differently about how I approach what I do from a business standpoint? Unquestionably, and that's why I'm here.

We're more than half-way through our first eight week module and I'm stoked about my grades being as high as they are. On average, I've been spending nearly 40 hours a week studying and most the time I feel like I'm barely hanging on. Seeing as how flexible my freelance schedule typically is, I can't imagine how my cohorts are dealing with this nonsense in addition to the demands of a full-time job, let alone a family or personal life. I've got a shoot this week that'll have me missing one of my classes, and then mid-Oct I'll be seven time zones away during my finals week. I guess I'll let you know how that goes.

Speaking of seven time zones away, I'm off to Amsterdam to meet with some of the people behind Royal Posthumus. They're a company I'd learned about that played a major role in rubber stamp art as well as usse stamps to fight the Nazis during World War Two. I've been wanting to head over to do these interviews for what feels like forever at this point.

There's a bit of time during the week when I'm not getting curb stomped by my own choices and responsibilities. That's when both Housefires are bed and Anne and I have time to chill out and watch the internet. Chef's Table: Pizza is basically crack to me as a filmmaker who's interested in people and food. Atlanta, well, thank goodness for something interesting and original. And for something incredibly heavy but necessary, Anne and I started watching The U.S. and the Holocaust from documentary filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein (and a ton of others). It premiered last weekend and I'm sure it'll take us awhile to make it through the six-plus hour film, but good grief this should be required viewing for all Americans.

Anne and I started watching The U.S. and the Holocaust from documentary filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein (and a ton of others). It premiered last weekend and I'm sure it'll take us awhile to make it through the six-plus hour film, but good grief this should be required viewing for all Americans.

I Blame the Leadership

Finally finished up this two week documentary shoot in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Well, Broken Arrow to be exact. We were working 12 hour days, six days a week. The timecards I'd filled out had us working something near 70 hours each week. Thank goodness for direct deposit and clients actually paying in a timely manner.

We're not supposed to share project details at this point, but I'll go out of my way to mention how great an experience it was. We absolutely got worked like dogs, but from my perspective, I felt like the leadership and production teams went out of their way to try and make us feel supported and empowered to do out best work. Treating production crew well shouldn't be the exception. I can't say enough about how rare that is in my professional experience.

I've been on these types of longer, intense documentary jobs in the past and in the days leading up to this one I was overly anxious due to countless bad experiences. Making this kind of creative nonsense is incredibly resource intensive and I can't tell you how often I'm on jobs with clients and producers who seem to go out of their way to cut corners. I'd only had a few phone calls and emails with my direct supervisor and I'd never heard of the rest of the crew.

On our prep day before the shoot, I literally cried seeing the mountain of gear cases that'd come in from a well known New York rental house. The leadership actually built in the time we needed – and paid us our full-rate – to build out our camera packages and trouble shoot the inevitable hiccups that come with that amount of gear. By the end of the two week show, we had nine cameras all sending video feeds to multiple locations on set in addition to the sound and story teams. Dealing with that amount nonsense plus everything else isn't something that just happens on its own.

There were some major take aways from this project. First, it seems like everyone on set already had some solid production experience and brought that expertise with them. I blame the leadership for putting a solid crew together. Second, we all seemed to connect and work well together, like we all were all working towards a similar goal. Again, I blame the leadership. They made the hiring decisions and brought in crew from all over the country (NYC, LA, Albuquerque, Atlanta, Dallas, OKC/Tulsa, etc.). Third, there was also a strategic move – in my opinion – in bringing us in early and doing a big meal before the shoot. There were like 24-30 of us crashing a fancy Italian place in Tulsa and they spent a good deal of money on that meal, but that early time together gave us a chance to connect before we were thrown into the fire. We lost a few crew members during two week shoot due to Covid infections and other commitments, but I honestly think that initial crew meal was key in setting the tone. Some of the team already knew each other, but most of us were new and barely knew anyone. Throughout the rest of the show, we went out of our way to spend time together outside of the 12-14 hour work days.

Again, treating production crew well shouldn't be the exception. At one point we mutinied against the catering brought in for our daily production meals. There were also some communication hiccups along the way, but we all worked together to figure things out and do the thing. At the end of the show and after I'd taken off my EasyRig and walkie-talkie for the last time, I cried as I walked to my car and drove back to the hotel knowing it was the last time I'd be working with this specific team of people. Again, I point to the leadership for making this such a good experience, worts and all.

No clue when the documentary project will come out, but I'll keep you in the loop.

 

UPDATED Feb. 2024

Did want to toss out a bit of an update with this here blog post. The actual film has yet to come out, but in the course of my MBA I've now had multiple classes cover this TED Talk from Margaret Heffernan: "Why it's Time to Forget the Pecking Order at Work."

Via the video's YouTube description:

Organizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,” where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It's a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out: “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.”

Each time I've seen this video I can't help but think about this Summer 2022 documentary team and how the leadership intentionally built in time for us as crew members to connect. It's tough to accomplish that on the typically short freelance jobs I'm on where we're usually on set for only a day, maybe two or three at most. Given the chance though, it's in the leadership's best interest to adopt this kind of mindset.

ESPN's Draft Academy 2018

I always trip out seeing something I shot end up seeing the light of day. Back in February, I was contacted by Evolve Studio about filming with one of the players featured in ESPN's Draft Academy 2018 season while he was in Oklahoma City.

DA_frame_1558.jpg

Alabama defensive back Minkah Fitzpatrick was in town to accept the Jim Thorpe Award for the 2017 season and we ended up filming with him for two and a half days. I honestly couldn't say enough nice things about Minkah, the on-site ESPN producer Kristen Lappas, and Evolve Studio. There were some strict "no social media" guidelines and Evolve owned all the footage so I don't have any fancy framegrabs to show short of what is shown in the episode.

ESPN series Draft Academy follows six of the top NFL prospects as they prepare for Draft Day and is exclusively on ESPN+. I've not seen all the episodes at this point, but it looks like the footage from my time with Minkah is in Episode 2: Body & Mind.