Still working on my iStockphoto collection. Here are some recent uploads:
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Go and see all of them for yourself. I’m working hard to improve both my photography and design, as well as recording and post skills right now. Slow periods make for good resource acquisition and training.
Q4 of 2009 has seen a number of wonderful projects wrap up and get distributed.
Winnetka Story is a feature-length documentary about the history of Winnetka and the North Shore area, outside of Chicago. Once again I worked with the wonderful John Newcombe, with whom we authored the DVD for Rancho La Cañada: Then and Now a few years ago. Hearken Creative did all of the DVD authoring and DVD menu design, as well as managing the production for the packaging.
Servant Partners launched several new videos prior to the Urbana missions convention that Hearken Creative produced. Most of the interview footage was interviewed and shot by Loren A. Roberts, with video from around the world provided to us by Servant Partners in various formats. HCS brought it all together and turned it into several promotional videos, for use both online as well as looping on plasmas in the organization’s booth at the 20,000-person convention. In addition, HCS authored the DVD, designed DVD menus, and duplicated copies of the DVD for all staff members. Below is one of the four videos produced:
And finally, Dave Schultze of Schultzeworks created a video promoting a computer design that he calls the “Philco PC,” an homage to the Philco Predicta television set from the 1950′s. I was able to work with Dave, consulting on camera movement, editing, and pacing for the video (Dave occupies my old office space, and we have become good friends over the past few years). We were stunned at the response after releasing the video: Vimeo shows that it has close to 100k views of the video, the design has been featured on EnGadget and the NY Times, and Dave has received calls from news outlets and potential clients. This was a great collaboration for us, and HCS looks forward to consulting in the future for other friends and clients! See the video below:
http://www.vimeo.com/7951005There are many changes coming to Hearken Creative in the new year, but the one thing that will not change is our passion and dedication to making our clients look awesome, bringing creative and powerful solutions to the world of advertising design and corporate video.
It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted here, so this will cover a few things.
First, posting images to iStockphoto has been going well. Now, I just need to start making more money from them. Here are a few recent uploads:
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So is the economy up or down? I don’t think anyone can decide. Even Wall Street was bipolar this past week — way up one day and way down the next. We are considering ways to drastically cut expenses for the company, like moving to a smaller office and using fewer computers, or even temporarily closing the post-production side of the business (entertainment industry has been hit hard). But, on the other hand, I added more job numbers to my jobs list this week than I have in recent memory, and completed several large projects as well. So I’m feeling cautiously hopeful, at least in the short term.
While we’re talking about the business, I found an elegant little program called TimeTagger for tracking my time spent on projects throughout the workday. It’s going to help me track profitability much better than I have been able to previously.
And, in the “covet” department, I’m really wanting a Canon 7D. Great photography and HD filmmaking at multiple frame rates, with lots of upsides. Expensive, but possibly worth it. We’re not ready financially to make a big purchase like this, but if the right project comes along, this is the one that I would purchase right now. If you want to buy it for me, the link is here
Scott Simmons recently posted a farewell note to Kodachrome, Kodak’s brilliant film stock. As unforgiving as it was (bright sunlight was its favorite playground at 64ASA), the brightness, richness, and crispness of the photos were unmistakeable. Oh, and, by the way, the developed film lasts forever. You think I’m kidding you? Go over and look at my lightbox at iStockphoto. All of these were shot at least 25 years ago, and some of them date back to the 1950s. Over 50 years old! How many things last that long nowadays? I mean, look at a few of these:
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And we are saying goodbye to the film stock.
Honestly, this brings up a larger issue that I have discussed previously on the blog. Storage. Archiving. Longevity. I am pulling up a video project that I haven’t touched for a few months today, and the hard drive is screaming at me. It took a few tries to even get it to spin up. So I am spending this afternoon dumping the entire drive onto another, newer drive so that I can go back to working on the project.
I am fastidious about backups and archives (borne of experience). All material that is on a hard drive in my office is redundant. As soon as a project is finished, it is backed up to DVD or another hard drive. But I have no expectation that those hard drives are going to last longer than 5 years. So I guess I was not surprised to be losing another hard drive.
But here I am, pulling 50 year old Kodachrome photos out of a closet and scanning them and they look like they were taken yesterday.
Once I get all of those slides scanned, I was planning on throwing the slides away; I have the scans — why would I need the original slides? But I’m not sure anymore: I’m learning that, if you have a hard copy, that might be better than having a digital copy! Even for all the miniDV work that I have done, I have carefully labelled and stored each tape in fireproof boxes. Those are my “hard copy” from those projects. Once I switch to solid state (P2, hard drive, etc.) what is my primary “hard copy” of the original media?
Additionally, the beauty of that Kodachrome film can not be overstated. It is simply gorgeous. I wonder whether a still camera like the Canon EOS 1D Mark III or a video camera like the new RED cameras will ever show us the depth and clarity of that film. I’m sure they will achieve it, but will anyone be able to pull that data off in another 50 years to admire it like we admire Kodachrome today?
Wow, it’s hard to get a hold on where the economy is, for entertainment companies both big and small. The L.A. Times has a story on how the toy industry is looking to large blockbuster films like Transformers to drive more and more toy sales, especially in the off-peak summer months. A story about the success of the movie industry? But a day earlier, the Times looked at how smaller production and support companies were being squeezed by runaway production — filming moving to cheaper locations out-of-state — and how it’s going to be hard for the SoCal economy to absorb the loss of work.
And is NBC-Universal for sale or not? Who knows. They have been having a hard time, both on television (Knight Rider) and at the moviess (Land of the Lost). But what happens to the big affects even us small companies.
But look at total box office figures for the last few years. We’re on track this year to at least keep up with last year, if not surpass it. People are still spending money on entertainment.
With all of the bad things that are going on in the economy, it’s good to look at a few bright spots. When an economic shakeout happens, the competition in the market becomes fiercer, allowing strong companies to strengthen their position and weaker ones to be weeded out. Interestingly, it’s not always those that stay out of bankruptcy protection that are the safest. And sometimes, especially in the entertainment industry, it becomes hard to capitalize on a successful business — like British films.
A few quick links:
Happy Monday to you, wherever you are!
This newsletter was produced quarterly for almost a decade. The Banning Residence Museum (I didn’t do the website!) has a fabulous collection of early California art, artifacts, and household items. We created this newsletter to highlight both the collection and the important educational work the Museum was doing.
We had a lot of fun with this account. Professional photography was shot of individual pieces, as well as photos taken at Museum events. The extra-large tabloid format of the newsletter made for a great read and good presence when it showed up in the mail.
You probably don’t see it every day, but, if you are running a blog or forum, or any web application running on a database, you might have implemented MySQL on your server. I had heard about Sun and Oracle, but I hadn’t heard about what it could mean for MySQL:
Even before the Oracle buyout, there were signs of strain within the MySQL community. Not long after Sun acquired MySQL in 2008, key MySQL employees began exiting the company, including CEO Mårten Mickos and cofounder Monty Widenius. Widenius, in particular, was vocally critical of the MySQL development process under Sun’s stewardship, citing rushed release cycles and poor quality control. Another MySQL cofounder, David Axmark, left out of frustration with the bureaucracy and tedium of Sun’s buttoned-down corporate culture.
Funny: I was just thinking a few days ago on how dependent my work has become on other’s software: I use Adobe products exclusively for graphic design (InDesign and Illustrator and Photoshop), Apple products for film and video (Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro), Digidesign’s ProTools for audio, and now WordPress/MySQL for websites. What happens when one of these major tools stumbles? Let’s look at a case study: Quark XPress.
From 1990 until 2004, I was producing all of my print design using a wonderfully powerful program called Quark XPress. The toll was lean, fast, and tool advantage of Apple and Adobe’s strong support of PostScript — the language that ran every laser printer in the world. And then, the company got cocky. Knowing that they had no competition, Quark took five years to release an update to the program. Their technical support was horrible. It got to the point where I would rather have left graphic design than continue working with their software. So, with a bit of research and some soul-searching, I dropped Quark XPress for Adobe’s InDesign. Within a few months, I was producing all print projects on InDesign, and loving it. The migration costs were mostly calculated in time spent learning new software, and my clients saw a seamless workflow transition from my office.
All that to say: technology moves quickly. If MySQL transforms into something else, or morphs into something that needs more support, we will be ready. It’s easy to forget some software program that’s in the background, but all of these programs are the lifeblood of what we do at Hearken Creative. So we will keep on top of all developments, and make the necessary transitions to whatever is the most recent, workable software solution.
So I’m doing a lot more music recording these days. And one of my favorite tools is a wonderful little program called Auto-Tune, which, if used correctly, does exactly what its name implies: automatically pull a note that is out-of-tune back to perfect pitch. Let’s say there’s one note out of a whole phrase that’s a bit off-pitch: why re-record the whole verse for that one note? I just punch-in the plug for that one note, and we’re back in business. [TIME did an article on Auto-Tune, and the company has its own
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so you can hear how the program works.]
I do the same thing with Photoshop a lot right now because I am now selling stock on iStockphoto. They need every photo submitted to be as close to perfect as possible, so I go in and “airbrush” all the little imperfections out, creating (hopefully) a more marketable/usable photo.
But I’m also conflicted. Overuse of Auto-Tune turns out lifeless vocals. And I love to “grunge” up my graphic design work, when the project calls for it. Imperfections are what make things human, and removing all of the human element isn’t always a good thing.
That said, I will never throw the tool out [like these people want to, or here’s Neko Case complaining about Auto-Tune towards the end of the interview, or these studio engineers who are as conflicted about using it as I am). If I can use it when needed but make it practically invisible, and then not use it when we have the time to get it right, then I think everything will be okay.
But taking the time to get things right is another concept that is dying right now — budgets are way too tight to actually try to do something right. So I work overtime even when the client isn’t paying for it, just so that I can be happy with the final result. Unfortunately, that cuts into the time that I’m supposed to be recording…
In my ever-expanding quest for synergy between all media, Hearken Creative is now selling stock photography (mostly scenics) through iStockPhoto. This company has a wonderful business model, and was so successful that they were eventually bought by Getty Images (probably because iStock was taking away all their business).
So check out all of my photos — new ones are being added every week — and please purchase them if you need for design projects!
Over the years, we have done literally thousands of projects for lots and lots of clients. And most of those didn’t make it into the portfolio. That loss is your gain, because now I can pull some of them out and show them off one at a time here on the blog.
This first one is a postcard that I did for Salvation Army Southern California. They needed a hip, active look for their “Army of Stars” campaign. I designed a style and look, and then built postcards, newsletters, letterheads, and all matter of materials that the could use to communicate with the Hollywood community (here’s the front cover of the newsletter).
What I remember about this project is how quick the turnaround was, and how important it was to establish an identity for the Army of Stars program. We were successful beyond our wildest dreams, and were able to introduce a whole new generation of Hollywood stars to the joy of serving in the Salvation Army.
Flickr Photos
