I spend most of my waking hours dedicated to five clients. I mean five classes in the Media Arts program. I guess five clients too, but that’s my day job and the number varies. The thing about clients is they’re rarely coordinated with each other, so that is on you, the contractor, to resolve.

I think Media Arts covers scheduling project load and managing client expectations in a course scheduled for next semester?

Anyway, I have a hard time of it or I give myself a hard time of it. Without an external creative director, I tend to go all-in and can quickly spiral down a rabbit hole of elaborate ideas with no concern for feasibility or complexity.

For this project, I wanted to box myself in with a small concise concept that would be accomplishable while respecting overlapping deadlines from all five of my “clients” projects. Initially, I thought about doing someone with a 5-second attention span, but that’d require a lot of quick cuts. I thought it’d be a really difficult concept with which to achieve a cohesive story.

Two minutes is more than enough time to get across commonly identifiable concepts, so I pivoted to another concept involving time. The premise was I had 5 minutes left to throw together a video. The video itself having a 2-minute limit meant that I couldn’t work in real-time. Which is probably a benefit, as editing can have a lot of dull moments where you’re just waiting. So I set up a screen recording and recorded myself creating the video sequence.

This project was a lot of fun and it generated a lot of thoughts around a million and one ways I could have done things differently. But in the real world, people get paid based on timely results. It takes a long time to build the reputation and network that can support/insulate creative work on longer/larger/more involved projects. This is also something I try to remind myself of constantly. I tend to be a “Jack@#$ of all trades” and can quickly overwhelm myself trying to bite off a bit of everything. It takes a focused effort, on my part, to make deep progress in a specific direction. I am happy overall that this project was a reminder to dial in and focus. I look forward to being on the other side of this journey and having more autonomy over which projects I take on at any time.

Thanks for reading!
-Greyson

P.S. – My computer did literally crash five times during the making of this video. Now I’ve another project to diagnose why that occurred!