BEING, KNOWING, DOING

Thinking about tea, understanding tea, making tea: like all things, there are different points of entry to understand the merits of these things. 

You exist. We'll get nowhere if we don't presume agreement about that. Existence is being.

Knowing is harder. Knowing simultaneously concerns an accumulation of information and experience, as much as it's about internalizing those things to achieve depth of understanding. Some things we know superficially -- like the rules of scoring an "out" in baseball. Some things we know deeply, like a pro player knowing where to throw the ball in the middle of a forced play with runners on first and third. Knowing is an ratio of information learned against depth of understanding. It always has room to grow, and it always has the potential to change. It even has the potential to be wrong.

Doing is where it counts. Doing means converting information into action to fit the needs or desires of circumstance. Where being confers need, and knowing describes skill, doing is the manifestation of life.

It's simple, right?

It can be, even when it's complicated.

Whether you're a creative person in the traditionally artistic sense, or you're a creative person in your law office coming up with inventive ways to settle intellectual property disputes, this simple triangle defines all solutions. Each facet presents challenges; each presents opportunities.

It's possible to change your state of being. Not always, but often. For many people there are circumstances that offer limited opportunity to change states of being. Wage slaves in third world factories cannot easily alter their daily lot. But the metaphor matters here, as even subtle ways of reorienting our thinking can sometimes unlock opportunity.

Knowing has to do with how stiff your skin may be. It takes courage to open yourself to the world, to take in new ideas, to become soft enough to absorb. Knowing is like moving water with your hand: the action must be intentional-- not so fast to cause water to become a wall, not so slow that you hand hardly moves any water at all.

Doing is about engagement. Doing is about being willing to turn the autopilot off, to grab the controls, to make something that did not exist a moment ago. People often mistake action for doing. They're similar, but they're not the same. When we go through our routine labors every day--our commutes, our same old disputes with our spouses, our weekly reports for bosses, our water bills--we're acting, but we're not doing. The real measure of doing is about being intentional, about converting being and knowing into something that radiates its own light. That light means we're making something new. That light means we're involved with something that's growing, alive, real.

Being, knowing, doing. Sometimes things that sound simple most clearly limn the parts of life about which we should aspire. And sometimes those simple sounding things actually aren't that hard to put into practice after all.

--MS

SALES PITCH....OURS!

This blog differs from most weekly postings in that it's not so much about creativity as it is about the creativity that we do. To put it bluntly: this is our sales pitch.

Production houses come and go like seasonal blossoms. New creative teams show up with bright bursts of color, expend enormous sums of energy running around town, displaying their wares, only to fade into the background foliage as relentless entropy ultimately takes its toll. No doubt there are always a few standouts that rise and thrive, overcoming the forces of evolutionary pressure. They thrive and they continue to journey.

Let's be clear: we are not new to the scene. As the saying goes, "There's a reason for that." (Many, we like to think!)

People ask us what we do at 1AU Global Media. Here's what I like to tell them: we engage creative challenges and invent solutions.

1AU Global Media is a full service creative boutique. We produce exciting multimedia content for diverse audiences. From video production for corporate and government clients to dynamic database driven content on mobile platforms, to development of exciting live events in small conference rooms or huge performance halls, 1AU has you covered. Our team has a deep expertise in translating complex subjects to general audiences. With decades of collective experience designing content for NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy, FEMA, and more, we understand how to turn even the most challenging material into dynamic, accessible presentations.

What if you're the one giving the presentation? Are you going to be in front of a crowd, speaking on camera, presenting something vital? We can help you there, too. 1AU offers media coaching and communications consultation services, including prep for on-camera appearances and senior level speech and presentation development.

Want to know more? Get in touch, and let us help you take your dream…and go farther.

--MS

TYPES OF PEOPLE

Types of people

Dog people.

Admit it: you know them. These are the people who believe their pekinese are the bees knees. They're people who can tell you everything about teaching Terriers to talk, walking with Weimeraners, and shearing a Sheltie.

How about car people?

You know the type--the kind of people who can spend two hours on a precious Saturday discussing  whether a straight-six has better torque than a V-eight, assuming proportional engine displacement. (I have no idea whether it does or not, but I overheard this conversation the other day and I couldn't help but be fascinated.)

There are subcultures for everything and this truism is a wellspring for narrative.

Then there are creative people. Actors, painters, musicians: they're simply weird. (It's okay. I'm speaking about ourselves.) What makes a creative person? A creative person experiments with his or her world, all the time. They can't help themselves. They're restless because there are a million possibilities, and only enough time to explore a few. Creative people are flowing over with the need to create, and sometimes they don't even know why themselves.

But wait, aren't LOTS of people creative to some degree? Of the millions of office workers selling insurance and shuffling medical records and ordering plywood shipments for the local hardware store, aren't many of them also into playing the guitar in their free time? Into knitting? Cooking? Building with Lego? I may prefer the bassoon player to the basset house breeder, but that's not the point.

I turn to animators for certain solutions, accountant for others. But the ones I like the most are those who are open, even interested, to learn new things always, even as they make certain disciplines  unique specialties.

But it goes deeper than simply being a subject matter expert. It goes to the marrow, to a person's intangible core. Curious people are different than those who aren't, and I mean no malice when I say that not everyone is curious.

There are types of people who instill confidence in little more than a glance. There are people who make you believe they've got your back, no matter how hard the battle ahead threatens to be. There are people with whom you want to spend your fleeting life, just as there are those who's most basic yes or no answer can make you feel like they're consuming your brief, precious day.

These people too: there are those who look for cheapskate shortcuts. There are those who try to sell you on "good enough". There are those who trade life experiences like used cars, always looking for the next better model. There are people who'll sell you short, run you ragged simply because they can, push you endlessly, not give a damn.

I care about those who look for solutions. I enjoy those who gravitate toward collaboration, even as they are just as interested in focusing like singular laser beams, alone.  Those who are curious, who listen, who push themselves and want to discover new ideas always grab my attention. That's because creativity has no singular solution. There are endless ways to bring ides to life, just as there are endless ideas to bring to life. I'm fascinated by the disciplines that people choose to make their life's work, even if I'm not interested in that particular work itself. (I'm not a dog person, for example.)

But among the many, many types of people out there, I'll still always gravitate to one type of person above all others. Regardless of discipline there's a rare breed who makes you believe in integrity above all, in honest efforts and open exchanges of ideas and civil discourse to discuss the vagaries of whatever it is being discussed no matter how challenging the subject. Those are the types of people with whom I most like to create. Those are the types of people who most fire my soul.

--MS

@michaelstarobin facebook.com/1auglobalmedia facebook.com/michael.starobin

ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

1AU

1AU Global Media, LLC

Endless possibilities. The future awaits. We're 1AU Global Media, LLC. Make it your business in 2014 to get to know ours, and let our team of extraordinarily creative communicators, artists, thinkers, and builders help you go farther.

We're back next week with the first of a new year of blogs.

Go farther.

All the best from everyone at 1AU.

--MS

@michaelstarobin facebook.com/1auglobalmedia facebook.com/michael.starobin

WHAT SCARES US

Door ajar

It's a modern, technological age. There's high tech everywhere, signals flying around, machines imbued with logic dictating everything--even if we don't realize it. We get up, we get dressed, we log in, and immediately the quest to overcome the new day's challenges begins. Every day we consider our chances. What fresh hell can it be? Lifetime trajectories are no longer ballistic projections along calculable parabolas. Every day has become an effort to trade up, catch and capture trend lines we can ride, invent new strategies to get ahead, but just as often not simply be marginalized.

Think about that for a moment. Marginalization is no longer a middling option for millions. No one ever aspires to mediocrity, of course, but that's where the vast majority find themselves nonetheless. The difference is that now there's no longevity in the anonymous middle anymore. You either swim with sharks or you're eaten.

In the first world, superstitions aren't what they used to be. Electronic talismans and palimpsests have replaced rabbits feet and lucky pennies of years gone by. Even when we're alone, we're not alone, tethered to the social network, connected by invisible ropes of all kinds, some of them safety lines, many of them snares. There's always something to do, but perhaps more insidious, there's always something that needs to be done.

Is it any wonder, then, why the return of old school horror has made a ferocious comeback?  Blood has gone big time. From cable channel neck biters to cinematic slashers to flesh eating zombies everywhere, horror has a new lease on life even as it racks up a massive body count.

Why?

In an era where millions of people no longer have a sense of security they thought would accrue from their wealthy, first world birthright, a pervasive background hum of anxiety has become omnipresent. We understand from our leaders that extra-national threats are everywhere like shadows. We don't know the names or addresses of the baddies anymore. It was easier to feel safe at home when we knew the Soviet Union was a malicious entity far, far away. Now it's harder to tell the teams apart. But national security is ironically the least of it.

The big angst these days comes from daily life. Money and class and education usually aspired to a ladder of easily articulated choices. I don't meant to imply that movement among classes was ever easy, nor was the promise of success simply because a person had a dream. But what was once at least a possibility for following a rationally defined path is now totally in question. Even the promise of college may no longer be a good bet for high school kids, and the promise of long term job security for employees is about as secure as a Mediterranean bond fund.

People walk on edge these days. The phone rings, the email dings, we don't hesitate to check to see what the intrusion may portend. People try to harness their anxieties now more than ever, getting tougher, twitching faster. Horror thus becomes cheap catharsis. I would even suggest that it becomes an inexpensive, if possibly ill-advised, form of therapy. It's stylized desensitization for people already filled with way too much to information. With limited plot, the visceral details of borrow replace the need to learn lots of new detailed nuance, to track ever more data, to work for understanding of subtle folds in the terrain. Story is the least of it. Sensations come efficiently, if brutally, like blunt force  trauma. When a creepy knock on the door augurs a bloody axe and a violent doom, it reflects the interior sounds of the racing thoughts that keep millions of already exhausted people awake at night, wondering if they'll survive, figuratively speaking, the next day.

Horror gets made relatively cheap, too. No-name actors are fine for shrieking on cue, and special effects can usually be kept to a minimum, with many scares delivered by smart editing, aggressive sound effects, and macabre inventiveness for displaying pain and suffering.

And there it is: my thesis. Pain and suffering have become the new vacation thought experiment for an overstimulated, hyper vigilant society. The new wave of horror movies, often delivered through alternative delivery vehicles other than traditional movie theaters, serve as a means for people to convince themselves that their own experiences are survivable, not so bad, could be worse.

In doing so, however, I worry that the vocabulary of suffering may transform us into emotionally dull automatons. A good scare is part of theater, as old as a story told around a primitive campfire or Homer's tale of a Minotaur in the center of the Labyrinth. But narrative stories of what's scary is not the same as horror presented for it's own sake.

Don't get me wrong: when Ridley Scott scared the socks off me as a teenager watching Alien, there was a point to the terror. I still love the movie to this day. Same goes for the inevitable distress that painful, tough, serious movies about war might portray, like Platoon and Apocalypse Now. And if it were simply the presence of blood by the gallon, John Boorman's superb, slightly loopy movie Excalibur would have to be brought before the court, too. The point is that context defines meaning, and suffering and death and blood in endlessly gruesome guises goes back a long way in storytelling.

It just seems to me that for all of the creative energy expended these days to devise horrific new ways to make us cover our eyes, we might consider that the trend should be a cautionary clue to where we're headed. What we create to scare the socks off ourselves these days reminds us that reality demands resolve and confidence to face real world circumstances. Just as every horror director knows, you need to release tensions once in a while lest the whole enterprise lose it's potency. For a society already coiled tight with uncertainty, mounting pressures, and a fair measure of fatalism, horror's new resurgence might be the canary that keeps us from getting trapped in a dark and deadly coal mine.

--MS

PS -- Like this? Like what it does for your day? Do you ever mention ideas you encounter in this blog to someone else in your life? If so, share the link! Sure, it sounds like a ploy for free, crowd-sourced advertising, and guess what: it is! If you do spread the word, we'll simply appreciate. We might even bake you a batch of your favorite cookies. (Just ask!)

ROUGH CUTS

Under construction

First, here's a definition for those of you who don't make movies every day. A "rough cut" is essentially a rough draft. It's an assemblage of images and words and sounds to show how a scene or even an entire program fits together. By definition it's not something you'd want to show to a paying crowd; it's rough.

Recently I began to realize something about how people who make media every day regard rough cuts. It occurred to me  while looking at one with a close colleague. It occurred to me and made me laugh. Then it made me curious.

To be clear, anybody in this business worth his or her salt understands that a rough cut is generally a wreck. The messy condition of the piece shouldn't be cause for concern, and yet that's where the comedy comes in. No matter how many times I'm sitting with a pro who's either watching or presenting a rough cut, the experience always comes with caveats or questions.

"Wouldn't you agree that these colors are awfully dull?"

"Try not to pay any attention to this big black space in the middle of the scene."

"Aren't we going to have music here?"

"I can't hear the narration."

"The narration is way too loud!"

"Try to ignore that the special effects aren't done yet."

The list is endless.

The funny thing is that if you do this for a living, rough cuts are a daily part of the process. We all know how they work; we shouldn't need to explain to others in the business about the stuff that's not done yet. ("IT'S A ROUGH CUT!")

So, what's the problem?

It's so obvious that it's easy to miss. The problem for creatives showing rough cuts to each other is that we care about our work. We care how we'll be perceived, and we also care about achieving the goals we set out for ourselves. Even if the value of showing an incomplete piece to trusted colleagues on the same team is to aim at a higher goal, the concerns are always the same. "What if they  think this is the best I can do?"

Usually it's not. That's the whole point. But that's also why I'm very careful about with whom I share works in progress. Without substantial trust in the relationship, the merits of early internal reviews can get convoluted quickly. It's one thing to show a rough cut to a client who wants to follow the progress of a commission. Those kinds of demos usually need some explanation precisely because your client is not usually an expert in how these things go together. Those kinds of demos can also bring risks. Clients who can't overlook the polish that hasn't yet been applied can sabotage a project still in it vital stages of formation. Clients aren't versed in the nuanced rules of viewing rough cuts, and therefore, early demos of works-in-progress can not be left to chance. (If you're one of our clients wondering if you've been shown a carefully prepared demo, rest assured: YOU HAVE! We WANT you to love it!)

But among those who do this kind of thing everyday, I offer a word of advise. Relax! It's going to be okay. We're in this together, and everyone on the team knows how it works, that it's not done yet, that it's still cooking. Deadlines focus the mind, but perfection only grows bit by bit.

-MS

PS -- The new year approaches fast. Guess what? There's still time to share this blog with all of your friends before the new year begins! Don't wait to make it a resolution for 2014, 'K?

facebook.com/1auglobalmedia @michaelstarobin facebook.com/michael.starobin

HEART VS MIND

Venn Diagram

Actually, I don't want to choose. But sometimes it's good to know when to engage one over the other.

Some things are obvious. I never feel much passion for home repairs, just as I never think very hard about laughing at a friend's joke. Wars and investments are generally decisions that ought to governed by mindfulness rather than emotional impulse, but you should probably switch off your critical, calculating mind when you go see your four-year-old's first performance on stage.  Your mind can provoke a beating heart, just as your heart can set one's thoughts racing.

For creative types, the choice can turn murky. Creative enterprises usually require measures of both heart and mind. The challenge is to figure out proportions and not let one side overwhelm the other.

There's no perfect guidance on this, but here's how I try to figure it out.

When a project doesn't speak to my passions, doesn't make my skin tingle or my eyes open wide I try to engage my mind. By reaching up into levels of logic and cognition, it's possible to jump start forward momentum, grabbing individual elements of information as if they were rungs on a ladder. Heart enters the picture later, providing polish and a desire to see a job done correctly. The challenge here is to generate sincere invention and sparkle, the flights of fancy that make people care. Heart becomes the fuel, but mind make the machine go.

When a project fully captures me, obsesses me, grabs me like a restless lover, heart runs the show. The danger is that emotional propulsion will lead to decisions that make sense in the moment but aren't fully formed, don't stand up to critical analysis, or offer the potential for deep and lasting impressions. But when heart is in charge, I've generally caught a tiger by the tail, and it's everything I can do to hang on.

I'd like to deny this, but I cannot: more jobs require mind than heart. But quantity and quality are not the same thing.

The saying goes that all good ideas ultimately reduce to work. It's true. Heart makes me long to pack my bags, but mindful determination gets me to complete the long walk. They go together, just as they must be applied in the proper proportions at the right time. I cannot live without both working in sync, and when they're not getting along with each other, the dispassionate referee somewhere in me tries to get them to play nice, work it out, realize the values of the other.

My point is this: it's inevitable that some projects you'll engage will demand substantially more analysis over emotion, while others will make your pulse quicken and your lungs fill faster. Even as day-to-day tasks generally require methodical, calculating mind to complete, heart makes it possible to see jobs through, and with results that surpasses ordinary mediocrity. Heart lights the fire; mind keeps it from burning out of control. Mind builds the house; heart makes it a home. You need both.

--MS

@michaelstarobin facebook.com/1auglobalmedia facebook.com/michael.starobin

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