SALES PITCH....OURS!

This blog differs from most weekly postings in that it's not so much about creativity as it is about the creativity that we do. To put it bluntly: this is our sales pitch.

Production houses come and go like seasonal blossoms. New creative teams show up with bright bursts of color, expend enormous sums of energy running around town, displaying their wares, only to fade into the background foliage as relentless entropy ultimately takes its toll. No doubt there are always a few standouts that rise and thrive, overcoming the forces of evolutionary pressure. They thrive and they continue to journey.

Let's be clear: we are not new to the scene. As the saying goes, "There's a reason for that." (Many, we like to think!)

People ask us what we do at 1AU Global Media. Here's what I like to tell them: we engage creative challenges and invent solutions.

1AU Global Media is a full service creative boutique. We produce exciting multimedia content for diverse audiences. From video production for corporate and government clients to dynamic database driven content on mobile platforms, to development of exciting live events in small conference rooms or huge performance halls, 1AU has you covered. Our team has a deep expertise in translating complex subjects to general audiences. With decades of collective experience designing content for NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy, FEMA, and more, we understand how to turn even the most challenging material into dynamic, accessible presentations.

What if you're the one giving the presentation? Are you going to be in front of a crowd, speaking on camera, presenting something vital? We can help you there, too. 1AU offers media coaching and communications consultation services, including prep for on-camera appearances and senior level speech and presentation development.

Want to know more? Get in touch, and let us help you take your dream…and go farther.

--MS

TYPES OF PEOPLE

Types of people

Dog people.

Admit it: you know them. These are the people who believe their pekinese are the bees knees. They're people who can tell you everything about teaching Terriers to talk, walking with Weimeraners, and shearing a Sheltie.

How about car people?

You know the type--the kind of people who can spend two hours on a precious Saturday discussing  whether a straight-six has better torque than a V-eight, assuming proportional engine displacement. (I have no idea whether it does or not, but I overheard this conversation the other day and I couldn't help but be fascinated.)

There are subcultures for everything and this truism is a wellspring for narrative.

Then there are creative people. Actors, painters, musicians: they're simply weird. (It's okay. I'm speaking about ourselves.) What makes a creative person? A creative person experiments with his or her world, all the time. They can't help themselves. They're restless because there are a million possibilities, and only enough time to explore a few. Creative people are flowing over with the need to create, and sometimes they don't even know why themselves.

But wait, aren't LOTS of people creative to some degree? Of the millions of office workers selling insurance and shuffling medical records and ordering plywood shipments for the local hardware store, aren't many of them also into playing the guitar in their free time? Into knitting? Cooking? Building with Lego? I may prefer the bassoon player to the basset house breeder, but that's not the point.

I turn to animators for certain solutions, accountant for others. But the ones I like the most are those who are open, even interested, to learn new things always, even as they make certain disciplines  unique specialties.

But it goes deeper than simply being a subject matter expert. It goes to the marrow, to a person's intangible core. Curious people are different than those who aren't, and I mean no malice when I say that not everyone is curious.

There are types of people who instill confidence in little more than a glance. There are people who make you believe they've got your back, no matter how hard the battle ahead threatens to be. There are people with whom you want to spend your fleeting life, just as there are those who's most basic yes or no answer can make you feel like they're consuming your brief, precious day.

These people too: there are those who look for cheapskate shortcuts. There are those who try to sell you on "good enough". There are those who trade life experiences like used cars, always looking for the next better model. There are people who'll sell you short, run you ragged simply because they can, push you endlessly, not give a damn.

I care about those who look for solutions. I enjoy those who gravitate toward collaboration, even as they are just as interested in focusing like singular laser beams, alone.  Those who are curious, who listen, who push themselves and want to discover new ideas always grab my attention. That's because creativity has no singular solution. There are endless ways to bring ides to life, just as there are endless ideas to bring to life. I'm fascinated by the disciplines that people choose to make their life's work, even if I'm not interested in that particular work itself. (I'm not a dog person, for example.)

But among the many, many types of people out there, I'll still always gravitate to one type of person above all others. Regardless of discipline there's a rare breed who makes you believe in integrity above all, in honest efforts and open exchanges of ideas and civil discourse to discuss the vagaries of whatever it is being discussed no matter how challenging the subject. Those are the types of people with whom I most like to create. Those are the types of people who most fire my soul.

--MS

@michaelstarobin facebook.com/1auglobalmedia facebook.com/michael.starobin

ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

1AU

1AU Global Media, LLC

Endless possibilities. The future awaits. We're 1AU Global Media, LLC. Make it your business in 2014 to get to know ours, and let our team of extraordinarily creative communicators, artists, thinkers, and builders help you go farther.

We're back next week with the first of a new year of blogs.

Go farther.

All the best from everyone at 1AU.

--MS

@michaelstarobin facebook.com/1auglobalmedia facebook.com/michael.starobin

WHAT SCARES US

Door ajar

It's a modern, technological age. There's high tech everywhere, signals flying around, machines imbued with logic dictating everything--even if we don't realize it. We get up, we get dressed, we log in, and immediately the quest to overcome the new day's challenges begins. Every day we consider our chances. What fresh hell can it be? Lifetime trajectories are no longer ballistic projections along calculable parabolas. Every day has become an effort to trade up, catch and capture trend lines we can ride, invent new strategies to get ahead, but just as often not simply be marginalized.

Think about that for a moment. Marginalization is no longer a middling option for millions. No one ever aspires to mediocrity, of course, but that's where the vast majority find themselves nonetheless. The difference is that now there's no longevity in the anonymous middle anymore. You either swim with sharks or you're eaten.

In the first world, superstitions aren't what they used to be. Electronic talismans and palimpsests have replaced rabbits feet and lucky pennies of years gone by. Even when we're alone, we're not alone, tethered to the social network, connected by invisible ropes of all kinds, some of them safety lines, many of them snares. There's always something to do, but perhaps more insidious, there's always something that needs to be done.

Is it any wonder, then, why the return of old school horror has made a ferocious comeback?  Blood has gone big time. From cable channel neck biters to cinematic slashers to flesh eating zombies everywhere, horror has a new lease on life even as it racks up a massive body count.

Why?

In an era where millions of people no longer have a sense of security they thought would accrue from their wealthy, first world birthright, a pervasive background hum of anxiety has become omnipresent. We understand from our leaders that extra-national threats are everywhere like shadows. We don't know the names or addresses of the baddies anymore. It was easier to feel safe at home when we knew the Soviet Union was a malicious entity far, far away. Now it's harder to tell the teams apart. But national security is ironically the least of it.

The big angst these days comes from daily life. Money and class and education usually aspired to a ladder of easily articulated choices. I don't meant to imply that movement among classes was ever easy, nor was the promise of success simply because a person had a dream. But what was once at least a possibility for following a rationally defined path is now totally in question. Even the promise of college may no longer be a good bet for high school kids, and the promise of long term job security for employees is about as secure as a Mediterranean bond fund.

People walk on edge these days. The phone rings, the email dings, we don't hesitate to check to see what the intrusion may portend. People try to harness their anxieties now more than ever, getting tougher, twitching faster. Horror thus becomes cheap catharsis. I would even suggest that it becomes an inexpensive, if possibly ill-advised, form of therapy. It's stylized desensitization for people already filled with way too much to information. With limited plot, the visceral details of borrow replace the need to learn lots of new detailed nuance, to track ever more data, to work for understanding of subtle folds in the terrain. Story is the least of it. Sensations come efficiently, if brutally, like blunt force  trauma. When a creepy knock on the door augurs a bloody axe and a violent doom, it reflects the interior sounds of the racing thoughts that keep millions of already exhausted people awake at night, wondering if they'll survive, figuratively speaking, the next day.

Horror gets made relatively cheap, too. No-name actors are fine for shrieking on cue, and special effects can usually be kept to a minimum, with many scares delivered by smart editing, aggressive sound effects, and macabre inventiveness for displaying pain and suffering.

And there it is: my thesis. Pain and suffering have become the new vacation thought experiment for an overstimulated, hyper vigilant society. The new wave of horror movies, often delivered through alternative delivery vehicles other than traditional movie theaters, serve as a means for people to convince themselves that their own experiences are survivable, not so bad, could be worse.

In doing so, however, I worry that the vocabulary of suffering may transform us into emotionally dull automatons. A good scare is part of theater, as old as a story told around a primitive campfire or Homer's tale of a Minotaur in the center of the Labyrinth. But narrative stories of what's scary is not the same as horror presented for it's own sake.

Don't get me wrong: when Ridley Scott scared the socks off me as a teenager watching Alien, there was a point to the terror. I still love the movie to this day. Same goes for the inevitable distress that painful, tough, serious movies about war might portray, like Platoon and Apocalypse Now. And if it were simply the presence of blood by the gallon, John Boorman's superb, slightly loopy movie Excalibur would have to be brought before the court, too. The point is that context defines meaning, and suffering and death and blood in endlessly gruesome guises goes back a long way in storytelling.

It just seems to me that for all of the creative energy expended these days to devise horrific new ways to make us cover our eyes, we might consider that the trend should be a cautionary clue to where we're headed. What we create to scare the socks off ourselves these days reminds us that reality demands resolve and confidence to face real world circumstances. Just as every horror director knows, you need to release tensions once in a while lest the whole enterprise lose it's potency. For a society already coiled tight with uncertainty, mounting pressures, and a fair measure of fatalism, horror's new resurgence might be the canary that keeps us from getting trapped in a dark and deadly coal mine.

--MS

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ROUGH CUTS

Under construction

First, here's a definition for those of you who don't make movies every day. A "rough cut" is essentially a rough draft. It's an assemblage of images and words and sounds to show how a scene or even an entire program fits together. By definition it's not something you'd want to show to a paying crowd; it's rough.

Recently I began to realize something about how people who make media every day regard rough cuts. It occurred to me  while looking at one with a close colleague. It occurred to me and made me laugh. Then it made me curious.

To be clear, anybody in this business worth his or her salt understands that a rough cut is generally a wreck. The messy condition of the piece shouldn't be cause for concern, and yet that's where the comedy comes in. No matter how many times I'm sitting with a pro who's either watching or presenting a rough cut, the experience always comes with caveats or questions.

"Wouldn't you agree that these colors are awfully dull?"

"Try not to pay any attention to this big black space in the middle of the scene."

"Aren't we going to have music here?"

"I can't hear the narration."

"The narration is way too loud!"

"Try to ignore that the special effects aren't done yet."

The list is endless.

The funny thing is that if you do this for a living, rough cuts are a daily part of the process. We all know how they work; we shouldn't need to explain to others in the business about the stuff that's not done yet. ("IT'S A ROUGH CUT!")

So, what's the problem?

It's so obvious that it's easy to miss. The problem for creatives showing rough cuts to each other is that we care about our work. We care how we'll be perceived, and we also care about achieving the goals we set out for ourselves. Even if the value of showing an incomplete piece to trusted colleagues on the same team is to aim at a higher goal, the concerns are always the same. "What if they  think this is the best I can do?"

Usually it's not. That's the whole point. But that's also why I'm very careful about with whom I share works in progress. Without substantial trust in the relationship, the merits of early internal reviews can get convoluted quickly. It's one thing to show a rough cut to a client who wants to follow the progress of a commission. Those kinds of demos usually need some explanation precisely because your client is not usually an expert in how these things go together. Those kinds of demos can also bring risks. Clients who can't overlook the polish that hasn't yet been applied can sabotage a project still in it vital stages of formation. Clients aren't versed in the nuanced rules of viewing rough cuts, and therefore, early demos of works-in-progress can not be left to chance. (If you're one of our clients wondering if you've been shown a carefully prepared demo, rest assured: YOU HAVE! We WANT you to love it!)

But among those who do this kind of thing everyday, I offer a word of advise. Relax! It's going to be okay. We're in this together, and everyone on the team knows how it works, that it's not done yet, that it's still cooking. Deadlines focus the mind, but perfection only grows bit by bit.

-MS

PS -- The new year approaches fast. Guess what? There's still time to share this blog with all of your friends before the new year begins! Don't wait to make it a resolution for 2014, 'K?

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HEART VS MIND

Venn Diagram

Actually, I don't want to choose. But sometimes it's good to know when to engage one over the other.

Some things are obvious. I never feel much passion for home repairs, just as I never think very hard about laughing at a friend's joke. Wars and investments are generally decisions that ought to governed by mindfulness rather than emotional impulse, but you should probably switch off your critical, calculating mind when you go see your four-year-old's first performance on stage.  Your mind can provoke a beating heart, just as your heart can set one's thoughts racing.

For creative types, the choice can turn murky. Creative enterprises usually require measures of both heart and mind. The challenge is to figure out proportions and not let one side overwhelm the other.

There's no perfect guidance on this, but here's how I try to figure it out.

When a project doesn't speak to my passions, doesn't make my skin tingle or my eyes open wide I try to engage my mind. By reaching up into levels of logic and cognition, it's possible to jump start forward momentum, grabbing individual elements of information as if they were rungs on a ladder. Heart enters the picture later, providing polish and a desire to see a job done correctly. The challenge here is to generate sincere invention and sparkle, the flights of fancy that make people care. Heart becomes the fuel, but mind make the machine go.

When a project fully captures me, obsesses me, grabs me like a restless lover, heart runs the show. The danger is that emotional propulsion will lead to decisions that make sense in the moment but aren't fully formed, don't stand up to critical analysis, or offer the potential for deep and lasting impressions. But when heart is in charge, I've generally caught a tiger by the tail, and it's everything I can do to hang on.

I'd like to deny this, but I cannot: more jobs require mind than heart. But quantity and quality are not the same thing.

The saying goes that all good ideas ultimately reduce to work. It's true. Heart makes me long to pack my bags, but mindful determination gets me to complete the long walk. They go together, just as they must be applied in the proper proportions at the right time. I cannot live without both working in sync, and when they're not getting along with each other, the dispassionate referee somewhere in me tries to get them to play nice, work it out, realize the values of the other.

My point is this: it's inevitable that some projects you'll engage will demand substantially more analysis over emotion, while others will make your pulse quicken and your lungs fill faster. Even as day-to-day tasks generally require methodical, calculating mind to complete, heart makes it possible to see jobs through, and with results that surpasses ordinary mediocrity. Heart lights the fire; mind keeps it from burning out of control. Mind builds the house; heart makes it a home. You need both.

--MS

@michaelstarobin facebook.com/1auglobalmedia facebook.com/michael.starobin

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OUTSIDE, INSIDE -- A Report from Japan

The rugged landscape all over Tanegashima Island in Japan camouflages the vigorous, motivated culture all around. 

Steering wheel on the right side of the car, my windshield wiper slaps back and forth every time I try to signal a turn at an intersection. The controls are opposite their placement in The States, and deeply wired muscle memory is a tough thing to reprogram. I regard each and every moment at an intersection like brain surgery, with one false move potentially causing irreparable damage.

Driving on Tanegashima Island to the eponymously named Space Center presents a visitor with powerful reminders that Japan is an intentional, motivated nation. With a land area smaller than California, the country boasts a world-class space center, carved into a rugged stretch of Pacific beach. Tectonic activity through the ages aggressively defined the formation of the terrain, with huge cliffs towering over deeply folded valleys. Ancient upheavals of Earth's suboceanic crust sent sandstone spires rising, the sedimentary stone establishing rugged rules for hearty inhabitants while occasional outcroppings of harder, volcanic matter remind visitors that they're squarely in the Ring of Fire. The intensely sculpted geography forced road builders to draw inspiration from bowls of udon noodles; wild twists and turns test drivers concentration every single kilometer. It's over these roads that NASA must gingerly truck the GPM satellite from the Shimama Port, a few kilometers distant as the crow flies, but a substantially longer drive across tangled, winding roads.

Tanegashima Island is broken into three sections. Most of the NASA crowd lives in a warren of small hotels in the southern section called Minamitane. It's an unassuming town, clearly a bedroom community for the nearby space center and its support services. School kids in brown uniforms and smart black backpacks scamper on the narrow sidewalks each morning, running to school. Far from the blazing neon and sodium glare of downtown Tokyo, Minamitane flickers while the great capitol city to the north blazes. But like small towns everywhere around the world, the affairs of distant places matters little compared to day-to-day realities of making a living. Hotel and restaurant workers realize an unusually large crowd of jet-lagged and hungry Americans are in town, and it's clear that beyond a short term business opportunity, there's a genuine local enthusiasm to be part of this extraordinary multinational effort.

Minamitane shows signs of the hardscrabble existence that must attend its remote location. Few lights glow after the sun goes down and restaurants are best found with a good plan before setting out and a map in hand. Many buildings need paint. Outdoor commercial signs--fewer than a visitor might initially expect to see--have clearly weathered many seasons. But despite its apparently weary presentation, Minamitane has clearly tried to show it's best face. Yellow banners welcoming NASA flutter along streets and not a scrap of trash appears anywhere.

It cannot be overstated: this is a profoundly intentional nation. To support the army of American staff who have descended like starlings, a flock of matching silver Toyotas have been shipped from the larger island Kyushu. Each morning that flock flits at forty KPH across circuitous roads until it punctures the Space Center's security perimeter, alighting outside a building humbly called STA-2.

If the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, is the soul of Tanegashima Space Center, it's clear that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is the brains. Mitsubishi manufacturers the HII-A rocket on which the satellite will fly to space, and Mitsubishi runs the operations on site. But the cosmetic polish of the austere, white building where we work has long since faded. There are no markings, insignia, logos, or even lights on its outside, and signs of long use without any frills suggest the decades of Japan's storied economic power continue to recede into the past. Rust mottles the metal front door, while discolored institutional tiles line the dreary, featureless hallways.

NASA staff occupies emotionally vacant third floor offices, with metal desks of 20th century vintage pushed together to make rows of work tables. On the first floor, teams of engineers have comandeered air conditioned rooms and installed racks of computers and electronics and other vital equipment. A small room for donning "bunny" suits leads through an airlock into the cavernous brightly lit clean room. Through this portal visitors who make the transition realize in a heartbeat that the tumbledown trappings outside have nothing to do with the most fundamental characteristic of the place and the culture. Like the town's support that makes this possible, like the exceedingly polite nation that graciously hosts a horde of loud, blue shirted foreigners, this is a profoundly intentional room, maintained by a focused, intentional company, working for a deeply focused agency. Inside the cleanroom a twenty-first century space program hums vigorously. The gleaming GPM satellite reflects lights from around the room like a great jewel hewn from the surrounding mountains. Inside this aging relic of an industrial giant, there is still majesty and promise of great things to come.

--MS

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MECHANICS -- A Report from Japan

Heavy metal. 

The choreography rivals precision aerial acrobats. The teamwork reflects the forward line of a pro football team. This is the vanguard of NASA's mechanical engineering corps, and to experience them at their full operational power is to gain a profound appreciation for how much more goes into spaceflight than big, booming rockets.

Ages range from mid-twenties well into mid-sixties. A handful of women in the ranks reflects a slowly changing demographic, but it's still mostly a male crew. A visitor may have to look carefully, however. The clean room "bunny" suits everyone must wear has a way of turning human morphology into ambulatory, genderless marshmallows. They're always funny the first time someone suits up. Then they're not. Proper clean room garb includes non-static jumpsuits embedded with micro-mesh electro-diffusion wires, designed to insure that even the smallest discharge of static electricity has no chance of damaging delicate circuit boards. Face masks, hair bonnets, rubber gloves, and electrostatically inert booties complete the ensemble. Different missions have levels of "clean", necessitating nuanced differences in clean room attire, but generally speaking, wearers get used to the extra layers in no time.

The mechanical team handles physical aspects of satellite readiness. How do you move a delicate, billion dollar bird around the globe? That's mechanical's job.

Wrenches and muscle power come into play, of course, but the mechanical team needs to be knowledgable about a range of disciplines. Working closely with electrical engineers, environmental specialists, satellite designers and more, seemingly simple decisions go through rigorous analysis and consideration before they're implemented lest unintended down-stream consequences accrue.

That is, of course, the plan. When things come down to old fashioned common sense, this is the team you want to have.

Standing next to Mechanical Team Lead Jay Parker, I watch as the crew prepares to extract the satellite from it's L-frame, the mounting skeleton in which it travelled around the world in its shipping box. "See this?" he says. "There's only three inches of clearance between the satellite and the frame. We can't just lift it up and out. Too tight." The massive overhead crane can handle the weight, but the problem is a risk that part of the fragile solar array scrapes the structural girders of the frame. He tells me the plan is to simply release the satellite from it's mounting base, and slide it out of the frame horizontally. To the question about how his guys plan to keep the satellite inside it's narrow safety envelope, he deadpans, "Very carefully." The technique involves little more than horse sense, patience, superb teamwork, and a sculptor's gaze before striking chisel to stone: they're going to eyeball the situation and simply make sure the satellite doesn't swing where it shouldn't.

Twenty-minutes later the satellite hangs in space, suspended from high-tension cables. Free of its shipping skeleton, the team begins moving it slowly across the vast integration facility where it will be attached to a special articulating table. Centimeter by centimeter, the bunny suited experts make these moves look easy. On the way to space, these stately, precision maneuvers on the ground matter just as much as lighting the main engines.