the really useful media company

On Sunday night, Dan Winckler will be closing out the RE/Mixed Media Festival at Galapagos Art Space, performing live visuals with DJ c-tor. Starting at 2 PM, this free event has some really great panels, films, and performances exploring the issues of “media mixing as legitimate practice” and the implcations of copyright law on digital media. But pace yourselves (especially with those free afternoon mimosas!) so you still have energy to dance it out when Dan comes on at 11:30.

Check out the entire festival schedule here, where you can also watch a live stream of the festival on Sunday if you’re not in New York but would like to check it out.

RE/Mixed Media Festival, Sunday, May 30: 2 PM-midnight (Dan Winckler and C-tor at 11:30 PM)

Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn

Congratulations to Dawn Fotopulos on the launch of her new website, BestSmallBizHelp.com. This site is the culmination of three years of hard work, and we were thrilled to help with some post-production at the end-of-the-beginning, pre-launch stages and to produce the live webcast of the launch event last week at Barnes & Noble Lincoln Center.

We’re working on the video of the site launch presentation and will post a link as soon as it’s ready, but in the meantime, check out BestSmallBizHelp.com. It’s a great resource for anyone who runs a small business and needs some (or a lot of) help, as well as for those who have a business idea they want to bring to life.

Next Saturday, May 1st, from 1-5 PM, we will be exhibiting at the FastTrac Spring Small Business Expo, an event organized by The Levin Institute. We hope you’ll stop by to see us and learn more about what we do and how we can work together.

Other exhibitors, all of whom are FastTrac graduates like us, offer services ranging from catering to printing, investment services to interior design, event planning to insurance to career coaching (and those are just a few examples). This event is a great way to learn about New York based businesses and support the local economy.

We first became connected to the Levin Institute this past winter when we participated in FastTrac Growth Venture course offered by Levin and supported by NYC Business Solutions. This course really helped us with our business development — a challenge for just about every small business — and introduced us to an awesome network.

The details:

The Levin Institute

116 East 55th Street  (between Park and Lexington Avenues)

New York City, NY 10022

RSVP:   www.onlinersvpbest.com – Enter Event ID 2540

A video we shot for the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School is in esteemed company, having been selected as one of ten videos for FORA.tv’s Best of 2009 series. This was a fun event to shoot — Professor Simon Critchley spoke to a full house, keeping the audience engaged while putting forth a lot of big picture, cultural studies ideas about Barack Obama and democracy. See for yourself:

FORA.tv – Branding Democracy: Barack Obama and American Void.

One of our recent major projects came to a close last weekend. Throughout the month of September, we directed the video, audio and lighting design for Yard (To Harrow), William Pope.L’s reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s seminal Yard installation. This piece was presented as part of the opening of the new Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York.

The design was a collaborative effort with the talented Benton-C Bainbridge (lighting) and Chris Burke (audio).

You can see some of the critical response in reviews from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Time Out New York. Most of them get a couple details wrong; for instance, there were no strobe lights — just ordinary incandescent and fluorescent bulbs that were programmed to flicker (nowhere near as fast as a strobe). We’ll have more details and video posted here in the near future.

Last week I spent a lot of time writing a proposal for a new client. At the end of the day — after I’d sent it to the client, had a good phone conversation with them to clarify a couple points, and signed off — Emily sent me a link to this 37signals blog post: A reminder of how simple business can be when you don’t make it complicated. Excerpt:

Yesterday I found a [landscaping company] flyer on my front door.

I’ve been staring at a project in my backyard for a few weeks. Staring hasn’t gotten it done. So I figured I’d see what it would cost to have these guys do it.

I called them. 10 minutes later the guy came by. He was down the street on another job. We walked out back. I told him what I needed done. He looked around for 20 seconds and said $300. I said “deal.”

That’s it. No proposal. No “I’ll get back to you tomorrow”. No “Let me see how much the materials will cost and I’ll drop an estimate in your mailbox next week.”

Just $300. Deal. When can you start? Wednesday. How long will it take? A few hours for a few guys.

He knows his business. I know what my time is worth. End of transaction. It was so damn refreshing.

I know everything can’t be done like this, but often it seems like we’ve slid down a path of formality with so many things that really don’t need it. Extensive contracts, delays, red tape, precise cost estimates based on precise amounts of materials, “let me think about it and I’ll get back to you,” etc. Essential? Sometimes yes, but most of the time probably not. [...]

The whole post and quite a few of the comments are well worth reading — funny how it came along at just the right time. I’d sweated over certain parts of the proposal, gotten feedback from several more experienced freelancer friends, contract advice from a lawyer in my family and thought through the implications of each piece in the pie very carefully. In the end, I think the proposal was the right length: it had the details the client had asked for and the information I thought they needed to know.

Of course, not all proposals can be short. Very large corporate sites may need a more precise definition of scope. Responses to open RFPs (request for proposals) have to show that you understand the clients’ needs since they don’t know you from Adam. It’s all about context: if you’ve worked with the client before and/or you’ve covered all the bases in a conversation, your proposal can be a one paragraph email. These two comments to the 37signals post summed it up well:

Know your craft, and you can communicate what you need to the client with a minimum of effort, and everyone is happy.

A short chat about the basic terms (time, cost, and scope); mutual trust; and, communication – that’s about all that is needed in most cases.

One service we really love to provide is designing networked performances, where performers in geographically separated locations perform together live via streaming media. This month, I’m consulting with Hunter Reynolds, a multimedia artist who needed help setting up a performance between him at his studio and visitors to his gallery show at Momenta Art. Hunter wanted to tell the stories behind his artwork — he makes gorgeous “photo-weavings”, tapestry-size grids of photo prints sewn together at the edges — and talk with visitors in realtime.

Since Hunter had done it before (using Skype video chat), he knew what was needed (cameras, mics, a good Internet connection at each location) but not if what was available could provide a stable platform for the performance. He asked his friend Wayne Ashley for help — Wayne is a noted new media curator and arts director — which led to my involvement (via another helpful recommend). After determining Hunter’s needs, visiting the sites and testing, I was able to recommend a stable setup, including hardware, software, bandwidth upgrades and purchases, and guide Hunter and Momenta through the setup at the studio and gallery.

The first performance last Sunday was a success, despite limited holiday weekend attendance, and Hunter will be telling stories to gallery visitors for the next three Sundays from 12 to 6pm. If you’ll be in New York between now and June 15th, I highly recommend seeing his artwork and, if you can make it on a Sunday, hearing Hunter’s stories.

Here’s the exhibit description:

Momenta Art is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Hunter Reynolds, his first solo exhibition in New York in five years. Since 2001 Reynolds has experienced a series of life-altering events: 9/11, substance abuse, surviving AIDS, Hurricane Wilma, a close friend’s suicide, the collapse of his immune system, and four HIV-related strokes that left his right hand partially paralyzed. These events are the raw material out of which this exhibition was born. Viewers who enter the gallery will be surrounded by a series of large-format works called “photo-weavings” formed by physically sewing together hundreds of smaller photographs. Though stunningly beautiful, the photographs that make up these pieces document a cathartic meltdown during which Reynolds, together with Hurricane Wilma, destroyed his Florida studio in the fall of 2005.

The documented wreckage includes Reynolds’ own paint-splattered and water-damaged work from earlier series, artwork by other artists, CD covers, paper fragments, and shards of broken glass that were thrown and bonded by the forces of wind and rain. Bits of this detritus will be on view in the gallery along with the photo weavings. In addition, Reynolds will present several remote story-telling/conversation performances via Skype and a mini-documentary covering the hurricane and Reynolds’ salvage efforts in his studio, efforts that transform the wreckage and personal history into testaments of survival. All of these elements come together in a complete context; but even as they encompass, they break free. For almost thirty years, Reynolds’ work has engaged with gender identity, body politics, and personal histories. But it is the broad generosity of his work, and this installation in particular, that reveals the artist’s particular strength at forging hope and beauty out of the sometimes dark totality of life.

“Art has always been one of the tools I have used to heal myself and others and to find order in the chaos of my life, by not only telling the story through art, but by transforming myself in the process of making it, using it to rebuild my life, finding hope and beauty and a desire to be alive.”

– Hunter Reynolds

All of a sudden, two months have gone by since South by Southwest 2009, and my grand plans for a series of posts about what we learned there have gone poof. That being said, I’d like to share the one session I attended that’s stuck with me the most: From Freelance to Agency: Start Small, Stay Small, which featured a group of top-notch freelancers talking about their lessons learned as they grew their businesses, whether they ended up hiring employees or stayed solo. If you listen to the podcast all the way to the Q & A, you’ll hear yours truly asking a question. Here’s the panel description to give you a taste:

The web has always attracted mavericks and entrepreneurs, and a rocky economy makes the freelance life more desirable (or at least more inevitable) than ever. So what happens when your freelance business starts to grow? How big can you get without getting bad? How can freelancers and small teams compete with traditional agencies? Hip freelancers and cool agency heads will answer questions, compare experiences, and tell their stories.

So what stuck with me? Be yourself. Whether your website speaks in a “we’re a company” voice or an “it’s just me” voice, be honest about the scale of your business, who you are, and what you do. You can have it both ways, as Jeffrey Zeldman pointed out: present yourself as a business on the Home page, introduce yourself as a person on your About page.

Some of our favorite events we have shot this year for our biggest client, The New School, were Sandra Day O’Connor at the Games 4 Change Festival, Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court, and a panel of food writers remembering Julia Child. Here’s a funny excerpt from the last one, Molly O’Neill’s dead-on impression of Julia Child responding to criticism from PETA.

We have a number of clients at The New School, including the India China Institute, the Graduate Program in International Affairs, The New School for General Studies, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and the Wolfson Center for National Affairs. The New School makes most of their filmed events available online through Fora.tv, an interactive video sharing site that presents thought and discourse from some of the world’s foremost think tanks, conferences and institutions. Follow the last link for many hours of fascinating debates, lectures and interviews.

In July and August, we wrote and edited a promo trailer for I Dig Tanzania, a novel summer camp organized by Global Kids, the Field Museum of Chicago, and the Encyclopedia of Life. In collaboration with Global Kids and the other funders, we collaboratively scripted the trailer based on footage and photos shot by the teachers, students and researchers in the field in Tanzania. The footage and photos were of varying quality and size, from Flip cameras to consumer HD cameras, with on-board microphones, and all handheld. We had to massage and sweeten some of the audio and video considerably to make them easy on the eyes and ears, and the clients were happy with the results.

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