Commercials rock!

I've been freelancing for the past several months as a post-production producer at Respond2 here in Portland. The first several projects I worked on were infomercials - they are 28 minutes long, and extremely time consuming. For the past week or so, I've been working on short commercials; 60 and 30 seconds, and they are really fun so far. It's a pleasant change of pace, and I'm looking forward to some of them airing.

There have been just a slew of ASIFA events - the one I'm most recently proud of is that I moderated an animation panel as part of the Northwest Filmmakers' Festival. It's the first time I've ever moderated a panel, and I think everyone had a good time. The conversation was geared much more heavily toward process than I anticipated - all the animations we were discussing were handmade and intricate, so the process gave us a lot of fodder for conversation. I especially liked that our panelists seem to click with each other, and hope that they stay in contact.

(By the way, the films in question were: Old Time Film, Meta Aberratio, and Laszlo Lassu. Fascinating work, all of them.)

Next month, ASIFA is also partially sponsoring the Rose City Animation Showcase. I've been to the previous two years, and it's a fun event.

I'm reading some Nietzsche and dabbling in learning French in my free time, and still writing for the Oregon Creative Industries blog, although not as much as I'd like - I just don't have the time to do a good job of it. I was also invited to participate in the Creative Economy Council: we have our second meeting in a couple weeks, and I'm very interested in what we can do together. It's a real pleasure to be at the table with that group of people- creative, involved, competent leaders all of them, and I feel privileged to be there.

On a larger note, what a crazy year it's been. I'm just now starting to catch my breath and wrap my head around everything that has happened. Most unexpectedly, a lot of the ambitious goals I named in my annual report have come to pass. I'm looking forward to the next one.

Stuck on a name

If you're a friend on Facebook, you might have noticed that I'm trying to name this undertaking/enterprise. There are words that I really like and find evocative, but I'm actually starting to think that it might be a mistake to look for a permanent name. I might name/theme each year, with the symbols and language that are powerful to me at the time. After all, I don't need to register a domain or anything, like I did here, with afflated, which was really what I was feeling at the time. For now, though, perhaps the business is Me, it's Rebekah Villon. Fitting, since I named my own self.

The business of Rebekah

I've got to be honest, I'm getting interested in the prospect of being a freelancer. I like the idea of having a business, of being a business. It elevates the discourse beyond the idea of "getting a job", and puts me in a position to think about my mission, my vision, my one-year and five-year and ten year plans, of actually trying to design my work and my life. I have always allowed work to dominate my life, and, by extension, allowed my employer to dominate my life. I'd like to take back some of that control.
I think I'm going to begin crafting a business plan, and then try to implement it even if I eventually get a full-time staff position somewhere. Let's see how it goes.

Things I've Learned

Here are some things I've learned along my journeys in the working world:

- a boss of mine, a restaurant owner, speaking of customers: "It's not enough for them to like you, they have to love you." What he meant is that it's only restaurants that people love that they go back to again and again, and bring their friends, and have birthdays and anniversaries... merely liking a place isn't good enough when you're competing for discretionary spending.

- the trick to remembering something (and I've always had a good memory, but as a waitress I took orders for two, then four, then six, then twelve people without writing anything down) is preparing a place in your mind for the information before you receive it. You have to take a split second to create the receptacle, so to speak, where you're going to store the information, and then place it there in your mind.

- I had another boss who redefined "boss" for me. I had always had bosses who told me how to do the work. She admitted she didn't know how to do my work, and she saw her role as being there to make sure I had what I needed, to remove obstacles, to provide support. She was a fantastic boss.

- in a phone room, I learned that if I'm looking at a word written out, and then it's pronounced aloud very differently than how it looks, I always struggle to pronounce it, even though someone JUST told me how. The trick to pronouncing it correctly (like a complicated name) is to stop reading it, and just listen to it. This is hard for me because I'm a reader, and my mind keeps wanting to put sounds to the syllables, but it gets in the way. Turn off the eyes and turn on the ears.

- a teacher in art school pointed out that all the feedback you receive is biased toward the tastes, education, and culture of the person who is giving it. There are people who (like me) like high-contrast compositions, so I'm always going to like that more, or give feedback to increase the contrast. But that's just what I like. There are clients who won't be happy with anything except the vision they've come to you with, no matter how good or creative your original designs are.

- another lesson from the restaurant industry: it's tempting to ascribe attributes to a person, or to interpret their behavior toward you, when those things are, in fact, highly fluid and generally have nothing to do with you. For example, I waited on hundreds of people who were just awful people when they sat down at my table. And it's tempting to think that they are like that, and to brace yourself for a difficult time working for them, or wonder what you did wrong. But an awful lot of the time, those people are just hungry, and low blood sugar messes with your personality. Give them some bread, and suddenly they are relaxed and pleasant. Likewise, there are some people who seem so nice and genial when they're full and have had a few glasses of wine, when they are, in fact, terrible people. Distance yourself from someone's behavior (which is different than their personality), since it's very often based on things that have nothing to do with you. This is helpful when they are swearing at you and calling you names.

It's funny, I think that in every industry I learned something that I carry with me into all my future work. But I can't think of anything more tonight that lends itself to these little nuggets. I'll probably have more eventually.