🎥 A Creative Challenge!

Jack Close -

The video this week really pushed me! I had a grand total of five 720p iPhone clips from my trip to Belfast, not exactly a lot to work with. But I wanted to challenge myself to make the video anyway. Could the story carry the video without much actual event footage?

Every video needs B-roll. B-roll is the cutaway shots that keep the video interesting as you tell the story. I had none. I trawled through my projects from over the years to find clips that fit with the story. Trying to tie them all together into a cohesive story was a real challenge.

What I've learned from it is this: Sometimes with these projects, it isn't a case of 'will this work?'. Instead, it's a case of 'I'm going to make this work, now let's work out how.' Searching through five years of archives, stock footage and some cheeky Google images and vualá—we have a video!

I hope you can find some creative challenges this week. If you do, good luck! Anyway, here's some content I think you may enjoy.

🗓 This Week

I embarrassed myself in front of Peter McKinnon
I met Peter McKinnon at Power of Video in 2018, the combination of inspiration and caffeine led me to blurt out something I quickly regretted. This is a story about inspiration. A story about ambition, and reflecting on it 4 years later has taught me a valuable lesson. This is the story:

I embarrassed myself in front of Peter McKinnon

🔊 Resonators

Matthew Hussey: The Secret To Building A Perfect Relationship (Podcast)
Romantic relationships were only a small part of this conversation. One relationship that I enjoyed hearing about was the one with your job. The discussion was centred around the question:

Why do we begin to dislike our hobbies when we begin to get paid for them?

Matthew's answer was as follows. When we get to remuneration for our hobbies, we are no longer intrinsically motivated to do them. They discussed a rat study where Rat A could run on the wheel whenever it wanted, but Rat B could only run when Rat A was running. Rat A got all the benefits we expect from exercise. Rat B didn't get any. Relying on an external source to dictate its actions caused Rat B to become profoundly stressed.

As we get paid for our jobs we upgrade our lifestyle, we no longer are intrinsically motivated because we require the extrinsic rewards to maintain the trajectory of our lifestyle. It’s not necessarily that we enjoy the task itself less, but the underlying motivation has changed.

Imitate, then Innovate - David Perell (Blog)
I really love this concept of imitating your favourite creators, the concept is very similar to that of Steal Like An Artist. I always find myself stealing small aspects of other people's style. The personal reflection of Nathaniel Drew, the notepad drawing and writing from Ali Abdaal, the graphs from Vox, etc.

What I love about this concept is that when you recombine all of the individual aspects that you stole, the finished product looks nothing like any of the originals. David Perell explores this concept in great depth, I highly recommend reading this post!

Can You Create Good Luck? - Dr Christian Busch (Podcast)
Christian reframes our existential questions to potentially provide more meaning and allow you to prioritise the importance of tasks more precisely.

People say that middle age is 50 years old when actually the life expectancy in the US on average is 75.5 years. We treat life as though we are counting up from the day we were born. It may be more beneficial to count down instead. Count how many books we can read in our time left, rather than how many we’ve read. Count how many times we have left to see our loved ones, rather than how many we've had. I remember Thomas Brag, from Yes Theory, discussing that he only saw his parents every few years. At that rate, he may only see them around 20 more times before they die.

Counting down provides more meaning and allows you to prioritise the importance of tasks more precisely. Steve Jobs said the death can be life's greatest motivator, if you lived forever then you would have no sense of urgency towards reaching your goals.

💬 Quote