‘For The Exposure'.

I see people being quite snarky about doing work for free, and with no expectation of anything in return, but I do this quite a lot. I’ve got no blanket rule about it - every request is assessed on its own merits, for there may be something I like about the job, I might like the people, the product, the brief - or all three. And, I might just fancy doing it!

Every year I get many such requests and I’d say I maybe accept one in four, something like that. If only this, such things are a chance to play with some materials off the clock, where it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit wonky or, ahem ‘experimental’, as there’s no client breathing down your neck fretting about how their crayon dollars are being spent. Which they do QUITE understandably, but from time to time, it’s quite freeing not to have that! I don’t need exposure (well, I do, but it’s part of my job to choose where and how that’s achieved) and no, I certainly can’t pay my lipstick bill with it, but it’s not all about that, and it’s certainly never my sole consideration.

This was a nice little one that came in when I was MEGA busy, but I really wanted to do it, so the poor lad had to wait, but I think he was pleased with the result.

Scrawlrbox is a nice idea - a modest monthly subscription which brings a surprise package of new art materials to your letterbox each month - and to kick it off, Chris the founder, Crowdfunded it with decorated boxes (the ones they send the art materials in) auctioned off to raise funds. Simple enough!

I agreed to do it (putting in my disclaimer about not being able to commit to a deadline), and the ‘Inkymole’ box was bought by Greg at Infringe Films, who make fictional films, documentaries and other productions for a wide variety of quite impressive clients.

Having recently completed our own film, Stupid Enough, I wanted to make a comment about how tricky it is, and how surprisingly easy at the same time. I knew I’d heard a quote somewhere about film-making being just ‘groping around in the dark’ so I did my homework, tracked it down and unearthed some more great quotes about film-making.

Here’s what the box looked like in the end - I did the inside too of course, and got to use all my pens and glittery things in a completely relaxed no-stress way! And yes, that IS a set of B&M neon and glitter gel pens, alongside the posh inks and limited edition nibs.

Schmiede - or, ‘Smithy’.

Stupid Enough, the results of our first foray into film-making, was shown at Schmiede in Hallein, Austria in September.

Schmiede translates literally as ‘Smithy’, and refers to the idea behind this still-new annual event: the idea of creative and excited people coming together for 10 days, to join forces, experiment, and collaborate on projects of their choosing, allowing the outcomes to forge themselves, steered by the net results of the participants’ contributions. A sort of sculpting, a new thing having been hewn from raw materials at the end.

Or to put it simply, to play!

We’d never been before, but our long-term colleague and original Myspace chum Lilo Krebernik

aka Dead Lemming (for whom I drew the ‘Atomic’ snowboard a few years ago, big inky skull face) invited us to show the film there after watching the little trailer we’d put together. It’d not yet been shown anywhere in full, so yeah, we thought, an audience of 200 international creatives, professional and amateur, keen and raring to go - why NOT chuck ourselves in right at the deep end eh? So having decided to drive there and back (all 2,000+ miles), we ran various index fingers along various European map pages, booked a ferry and the first couple of hotels, sent some little business cards to print, and started counting down.

(oh and I gel-glittered my nails, of course).

Held in a truly impressive abandoned salt mine on an island in the centre of Hallein, people are invited to apply to Schmiede once a year, and can be from any discipline. With no idea what to expect - we’re not that accustomed to just ‘joining in’ on a casual basis - we decided to hang around for a few days to chat and observe, since time was limited and we had no idea which, if any, of our skills would even be useful to the Schmieders (one of them definitely proved to be, but more of that later).

Introductions had taken place earlier that day, and our film was to be the opening event to kick off the ten days. Organiser Rüdiger and Lilo felt that the subject matter - talks with real creative successful people who’d done it their own way, and intended to offer reassurance, encouragement and inspiration - fitted Schmiede's raison d’être, and would provide an undemanding but stimulating thing for participants to do together before getting down to work the next day.

So our film was to be shown in the StadtKino across the bridge, where on the day a keen cinema manager was waiting to load the film into his pro cinema gear. If we’d arrived with a huge can of film, the setup would have taken minutes, but we’d come armed (four copies of) digital files and a DVD, which proved a bit of a hassle for the patient cinema fella, who battled with unseen subtitles and belligerent DVD chapters before eventually getting the film to play in all its glory on the large screen. Seeing the faces of our interviewees ten feet high was something else, and suddenly made the whole thing Real.

As the humans filed in, the smell of popcorn permeated the building:

And soon enough, as casual as we tried to be, checking Facebook in the moments before, the nerves eventually bit. Would they laugh (at least where they were meant to)? Would they wander out? Would they resort to checking phones and napping? Months and months of work was about to be put to the acid test.

Here we are battling bad lighting and unflattering camera angles to introduce our film (that’s red-shoed Rüdiger on the left, Leigh with the serious look, and me with the Heidi plaits):

In the end, the film’s reception was everything we hoped it would be. The audience laughed at the right bits, watched all the way to the end (one or two left early, but they later explained that English wasn't their first language), you could hear a pin drop, and the question-and-answer session afterwards demonstrated that it held the viewers’ attention. The content was felt to be not only relevant, but highly useful, and moreover, really helpful.

And usefully for us, thanks to the input of one or two of the technical bods in the audience, the premiere also highlighted some technical improvements that could still be made, making the film just that little bit smoother to watch before it goes off into the wild.


The rest of our time at Schmiede was spent volunteering in the kitchen where vegan breakfast and lunch is prepared every day for the participants - the hungry ‘Smiths'! - and we discovered we run a mean wash-up between us; ‘well oiled machine’ doesn’t even come close, as these ‘official’ Schmiede photographs attest:

Knackered (that’s Chloe, who did the cooking with Walter)

And when we took off our gloves, wandering the rooms and rock-hard salty floors proved a fascinating way to spend the time, utterly baffled about what people were making and doing, but fascinated nonetheless at the mysterious, pixelly, LED-ed bread-boardy things being made by this satisfyingly varied collection of friendly humans from all over Europe:

(what does that even MEAN?)

Despite harbouring concerns that we're not the most natural movers’n’shakers, we met some lovely people, namely Andi who tweaked the Stupid Enough sound for us at a moment’s notice, Marie the festival organiser, Nick and Helen from London who shared late-night sillies and pizza bought in a thunderstorm, new musical discoveries Nicole Jaey and The Unused Word who dominated the stage at a post-Schmiede gig (where people could still smoke!) and dancer Livia, who was the first to take us to task on one or two of the issues raised in Stupid Enough in one of the six languages she spoke, and who was last seen seen dancing spontaneously at midnight to live music played in the cold electrical rooms of the building, where remnants of its previous life still wait:

Thank you to Rüdiger and Lilo for inviting us to be part of what turned out to be a brilliant and surprising event, and we definitely hope to be part of it in the future.

In the meantime, if you would like to book a showing of Stupid Enough, you know where we are! hello@stupidenough.org


Lilo Krebernik // Twitter         https://twitter.com/deadlemming

Schmiede // Twitter        https://twitter.com/SchmiedeHallein

LEIGH AND SARAH ARE STUPID ENOUGH

About three years ago Leigh and I were talking about how my visiting lecturer spots were becoming fewer, and about how when I did them, the fee had been squeezed or hadn’t increased (or had even decreased) for years.

At these lectures, which the colleges and universities seemed to have sadly stopped being able to find the money for, I’d talk about promotion, trying things out, getting your tax sorted, arranging your working day, and getting your first job - the nuts and bolts - and what one student now famously described to me afterwards as ’the meat in the sandwich’ that had been missing from her course.

Me, at a public engagement, being Friendly And Approachable:

At around the same time, I became uncomfortable with my growing awareness of the proliferation of new blogs and sites claiming to offer help and advice to ‘new illustrators’. These were articles written by people with some experience in the trade, which seemed well-meaning and well-researched in the first instance, but carried a mildly bullying tone and a certain, almost imperceptible sense of oneupmanship**. What they also gave off, I’d begun to notice, was a sense that you did it their way, or no way - the fetishisation, for example, of the super-early riser;  the urgency of the tech-obsessed social networking evangelist, or the puritanism of the ‘you must get a studio/move to London/suffer to be taken seriously’ preachers. These articles often took the form (and still do) of scary lists, looking something like:

and


Nice eh?

Now, even I don’t want to read anything with that title. I’d scared of it. I’m also slightly insulted by it - and its unneccesary capitalisation - so goodness knows how a new graduate feels about it. I’ve got a lot of experience at being an illustrator, but more importantly I have a lot more experience of being a human. And although I have never been without work - since before graduation, when the first tentative low-paid paid jobs peeped in - it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been very hard work, and sometimes a struggle, and sometimes, a big old thousand-piece funny-shaped jigsaw puzzle.

So we talked and talked about this, Leigh and I, and he came up with the idea of talking to some of the other creatives we know, the ones who’ve also arrived at a creative career but don’t think they’ve ‘arrived’ at all, and are busy still developing, learning and trying. What would they say about how to ‘get there’? What would THEIR definition of success, or even of creativity itself, be?

Could we take those thoughts and put them into a film some kind of documentary to be take right into the same educational environment that seemed to need it so badly?

The result came in the form of eight interviews, conducted over an approximate 18-month period in New York and the UK, at assorted venues depending on when and where we could hook up with our chosen colleagues. In a noisy West Side apartment, in a Bristol Barber’s shop, a Battersea Park bench passed by endless runners, a kit-filled front room, a workshop beset by clucking hens, a steamy kitchen and a toy-covered studio, each of the improvised locations provided an accidental atmosphere and a charming DIY-ness to each interview.

We wrote a set of questions beforehand, and with cameraman in tow, each individual was asked those same questions. The outcomes were simultaneously surprising and predictable - people said the same thing, in a very different way; or had an opposing experience, with the same outcome; some were non-stop chatters, whose miles of footage we had to chip away at like a block of granite, and others said just enough, right on cue!

Whichever way the interview went, we ended up with 55 minutes of rich, golden nuggets of advice, thoughts and reflections culled skilfully by our famous editor Lisa - herself a candidate for a Stupid Enough interview at some point - which formed the final film, ‘Stupid Enough’.

The title, in case you’re wondering, was used as a working title after film director Gareth Edwards rather clumsily answered the question, ‘what is creativity?’

If we had a quid for everything we’ve done business-wise that seemed bonkers, expensive, risky, a financial black hole, or a foolhardy experiment that could completely exhaust us, we’d have a lot of quids. So we know where he’s coming from - this is the man, after all, who wrote and directed and produced a film 'entirely off his own back’, with no idea of whether that would lead to worldwide fame or bankruptcy, or even just ‘back to the day job’. (If you Google him, you can find the answer.)

And the answers of course ARE out there, it’s just that they can’t be found in one place, on one blog, and certainly not from one person’s mouth, no matter how experienced or confident they might seem. Only by having conversations and trying things out for yourself can you get along. And certainly, you won’t do very well if you feel bullied, patronised or belittled into trying to measure up to someone else’s vision of 'how it should be done’.

So if you think your college, lecturer chums, department, colleagues or fellow students could use a bunch of heads handing you friendly-shaped solid gold in the form of reassurances, thoughts, ideas and advice, get them to look at stupidenough.org and book us in for a session. We bring the parallel but contrasting experiences of our own lives, plus the gems from eight other people’s. We think it’s going to be helpful.


Footnote:
**Not all books and sites offering creative career advice are like this. Some of them are ace and written by very well-rounded and experienced people. We just don’t like the passive-aggressive ones, so we made the kind of film WE’D like to have been shown early on in life.