Hello, and a happy 2020 (haha) to you.
This is the first of a new series of Do While Thinking articles where you’ll find me thinking a lot about monetization. Making money is a topic I know next to nothing about, so I’m almost certain you’ll be more than a little amused to see how much complexification I employ for such a comparatively simple problem.
I’m going to be thinking about money in the open, and doing things targeted at making money publicly. At least when I fail, you, my dear reader/friend(?) will have all the context.
First - and as always - a quote!
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
— Robert A. Heinlein
Re: Creative Meta-Considerations
I have been recently reminded of an unnecessarily complex article I wrote in 2018, titled ‘Creative Meta-Considerations’. In it, I muse that all creatives, in their early days, start out with very simple tasks: to solve a subset of a creative problem. To the writer, it would be writing their first short story. For the illustrator, it would be drawing their first stick figure, then an anatomically forgivable head, and so on.
In other words, creatives start at a certain level of simplicity, then add incremental levels of complexity as they tend towards mastery.
The curious thing I note is that after a particular point, creatives ‘leap’ into meta endeavors without realizing it. It is the writer seeking a book publishing deal, or the illustrator looking to work for Netflix as a character designer.
As soon as they arrive at this stage, they realize that a lot more than creativity is at stake here, and I called those things ‘creative meta-considerations’. A lot more than merely writing a good story goes into publishing a book. Distribution is the biggest and most obvious part of it, but there are market considerations as well: genre-specific as well as demographic/topical considerations to be made. These problems are often rightly abstracted away from the writer, and it would be fine, all things considered. The problem, you see, comes when you’re in an industry that hasn’t yet figured everything out, so nothing is abstracted - it simply doesn’t exist. It’s not that the industry is ‘protecting’ the creative from the complexity of thinking about marketable genres and the distro engine: it’s that the distro engine is being built (experimentally) and many crucial parts are still missing.
If this is the case, it becomes dangerous for the creative to ignore the meta-considerations.
Whew. How about that for a recap?
So, in a landscape where many of the groundwork has yet to be done — where we’re as much pioneers as the pioneers before us [pioneering never ends], it’s simply not enough to be good at one thing. You have to have metaconsiderations because they help you see the big picture, to understand your limitations, understand your frustrations, explore collaborative opportunities/synergetic openings and learn patience — the art of active waiting [doing work while waiting], waiting for the window of opportunity to swing by for your idea because you’ve done your homework and can now fairly guess when the weather will turn.
For the artist, it’s no longer about drawing the perfect nose: it’s about drawing the perfect nose on the perfect head on the perfect body in the perfect setting for the perfect audience, and replicating that action over and over again and iterating until your cost [in terms of time, cognitive load and the very obvious cost of production] becomes justified by your market.
For additional context: I wrote this article in 2018 after I’d joined a team of (at the risk of autofellatio) enthusiastic/smart writers, animators and artists hoping to launch a pilot of The Mainland Show. As soon as we started collaborating, it became apparent that creativity was not going to be the problem at all. We had to pause in the face of those blasted meta-considerations.
All that has led me to think of the Ad Hoc Studio.
Enter: the ad-hoc studio
I’m a sucker for low-intensity, low-commitment creative endeavors - unpolished versions of something that may or may not go on to be big. In other words: reducing creative output to its minimum viable version. The results came in: I am a risk-averse entity.
Everyone says to go big or go home. ‘Going big’ is how you end up with homogenized creative outputs, because the only justification for going big is the knowledge that an already primed market exists for you to splurge on. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet embraced the commercial aspects of creativity wholeheartedly - so the purist in me screams ‘no, go tiny or go home!’
What does ‘tiny’ look like?
Tiny is YouTube creators creating out of passionate intensity until they finally arrive at both polish and an audience that they can finally go mainstream. When you are tiny, you get to have opinions. You get to say this is what I want to do, and only people who are interested in this should subscribe to it.
There is a shadow, a sliver, a smidge of Disruption Theory here as well: because you cater to a market so small but opinionated, you’re able to ‘improve’ on creative offerings even though you’re using less sophisticated tools! Your consumers want it so bad they’ll tolerate your bad dialogue, character design, set design, post-production and marketing! Haha.
In other words, they may be willing to accommodate your ad-hoc studio.
Think of the ad-hoc studio as your laboratory. It’s where you go to synthesize new creative output, the end goal being to ‘publish’ your findings (by way of a reasonably complete piece of output) as quickly as possible.
The ad-hoc studio is a never-ending hackathon.
It is Obaranda back in 2016. It is Area. It is all those Wordpress blogs from 2013 powered by the angsty inks of teenage creativity.
When is the job of the ad-hoc studio done? When it stops becoming ad-hoc. When it becomes so mainstream it has a physical address, and a budget, and a team, and a go-to-market strategy. Until that happens, the ad-hoc studio should continue to run. It has one job: to strike gold.
How to create your own ad-hoc studio
First, do not overthink it: think of the MIT’s building 20 (affectionately called the ‘Magical Incubator’). I consider it the archetype of an ad-hoc studio: so affably unstructured that everything was everywhere and nothing was anywhere. It allowed for the collision of minds and the birthing of inter-disciplinary outcomes. It was the ultimate water-cooler.
This is what your ad-hoc studio should be like. If you have friends with whom you ‘vibe’, the goal should be to preserve that laid-back synergy and create something out of it without introducing too much bureaucracy too early in the process.
Ruthlessly eliminate shipping excuses. These are things that look like plausible reasons for not shipping. In my case (as an animator), a shipping excuse would be that I have no good voice actors. The obvious solution would be to use my (terrible) voice on all my projects! The goal isn’t to have Seth MacFarlane-type genius, it’s to ship!
Another animation-related shipping excuse is ‘oh my, it’s quite difficult to do lip-sync’. Then don’t do it! Create entire characters and scenarios that allow you not to lip sync. Write voice-over-led stories, or have all your characters wear masks (a la V for Vendetta).
By all means, eliminate shipping excuses.
At the end of the day, your ad-hoc studio is constantly testing for one element of the whole production process: the one element that makes everything else irrelevant. If your story is so enthralling, no one will care about your bad lipsync. If your character acting is so dynamic, no one will care - at all - about the bad character design.
So.
Synergy - Shipping Excuses = Ad hoc studio.
Seems simple enough. As soon as you have these requirements, what’s the next thing to do?
Ship, of course. It’s that simple. You’ll find your process, and get better. Then get even better. Until - and you best believe it - people will actually consider paying you for it.
And then they’ll start paying you. The drizzle turns into rain, as MI Abaga said.
Fin
I hope you’re as energized as I am. Before the end of the year, I hope to have my ad hoc studio running. What it will be producing, I don’t know, but it will be fun figuring that out!
Consider sharing this Substack. I’m now on Twitter as @LifeOfMogwai. Report typos, send spam or profess love to me. Happy to connect!
Ship.
This was great mogwai! I hope to have my adhoc studio running by the end of the year as well.