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

PS -- Like this? Like what it does for your day? Do you ever mention ideas you encounter in this blog to someone else in your life? If so, share the link! Sure, it sounds like a ploy for free, crowd-sourced advertising, and guess what: it is! If you do spread the word, we'll simply appreciate. We might even bake you a batch of your favorite cookies. (Just ask!)

SENSUAL

Sensual beach

Some kisses you remember for a lifetime.

What is sensual? It's more than physicality. It's tied to memory, to emotion, to dreams. It has to be. The sensual immediacy you have recalling that summer when you were nine years old playing at your friend's house, near that gnarled oak tree in the backyard, is just as resonant now as it was those many years ago. You easily recall the roughness of the bark when you climbed the trunk, projected into imagination as if you were climbing the side of a thousand foot cliff. There was the pleasing exertion in your legs as you levered yourself onto the rickety plywood platform perched high in the main crook of the tree. There was the smell of mud and leaves, July's great passion urging the powerful tree to unfurl. You experienced those sensations then, but you remember them all to this day.

That's memory. Memory sends us into the past. But some expressions of sensuality project solidly into the future.

The press of desire you feel when lost in thought about days not yet lived are always sensual. Are you dreaming of a vacation? Most certainly those thoughts are not just abstractions. You can smell the beach, the mountains, the city, your girlfriend, the cafe where you imagine ordering fruit and cheese, even if you've never visited the location of those dreams. It's a conjuring of future moments not yet lived. It's sensual even just to imagine the brush fine Phuket sand beneath your toes. You're sent through time and space, you hear the sea. The aroma of fresh baked bread drifting over the cobblestones on Rome's Via del Moro, the morning sun sparkling on the medieval facades of the 7th Arrondissement in Paris--you always live where your mind sends you.

Sensuality is not always kind. You'll never forget the stuffy, overheated 5th grade math classroom you endured. You'll never be free of the rotting smell from the back of that twin turboprop bound for Grand Rapids you suffered for hours on the tarmac. You'll never forget the angry hunger you felt growing up when your parents lost their jobs and times got tight. Our senses imprint themselves like water etches paths through stone.

These days we all seem to push sensual experience essentially into two camps. Sensual experiences are either extreme or ignored. That's too bad. I hate to miss a minute of my day, but I also know that I cannot easily live in a purely sensual space. I often wish I could, but I know that's not realistic.

But memory or anticipations for the future can distract us from life, right now. Don't miss the sensuality of life lived today. Feel your feet beneath you. Feel the ways your heels contact the ground first, how you roll through your foot, hip joints making endless pendulum swings in their sockets high above.

Perhaps your hip joints are past their prime, bind a little when they shouldn't, cause you to wince. Perhaps you're young and spry, an athlete, a nymph. Either way, the great pleasure of being aware of your own physicality in the world is yours to experience. It's true: aching joints traditionally do not provoke pleasurable thoughts, but you're thinking about this all wrong if immediate pleasure is the only reward. Even in the distress of our days--and some of us face longer lists of distress than others--there are the roots of our future history. Each feeling is a story, and each story we allow ourselves to feel is a moment when we're each more present in our day. I'm not suggesting that you embrace what ails you, that your pains are equivalent to what makes you feel good, but I am suggesting that you reconsider the feelings, that you recognize them for what it can offer. They remind you that you're alive, and the alternative is hard to imagine at all.

The sensual aspects of our days are the essential balance to the intellectual pressure of modernity. We enjoy seeing an attractive person because of the narrative force that inevitably will accrue to that sensual experience, even if that force is pure fantasy. It's okay: you're human. The next time you smell something in the oven that makes you wonder when supper will be ready, you're doing the same thing.

When you think about this all later today, checking your email, waiting for a red light, replacing the ink cartridge in the printer, remember to connect even those most mundane experiences to your own sensual experience. It's not the smell of the ink that makes us thoughtful. It's the fact that we can stop to notice it in the first place that makes us human. The moment we try to ignore, or worse, suppress the sensual aspects of our lives is the moment that we miss the best parts of the short time we have to be alive.

--MS   (Hey, you can follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin if you're so motivated.)

PS -- Like this? Like what it does for your day? Do you ever mention ideas you encounter in this blog to someone else in your life? If so, share the link! Sure, it sounds like a ploy for free, crowd-sourced advertising, and guess what: it is! If you do spread the word, we'll simply appreciate. We might even bake you a batch of your favorite cookies. (Just ask!)

READ A BOOK

Put that tablet computer down.

I mean, don't put it down if you're reading this blog. Send messages to all of your friends about the blog, and THEN put it down.

And don't reach for your TV remote, either!

See those stacks of thinly sliced trees across the room with the colorful cardboard covers? Those are books. You used to read them. They miss you, and more to the point, you probably don't realize just how much you miss them.

I know you do. You're just numb to the surrounding din. If you're reading this blog, you're a reader already. Blogs like this one, about creativity and philosophy and life and all that artsy-airy stuff, tend to attract people already inclined to the slow-motion pleasures books. But there's no prejudice here: books ought to matter to wide populations more than they do these days.

Listen to Public Radio and you'll start to think books grow on trees rather than get manufactured from tree pulp. "So-and-so is the author of a new book on…" seems to be the opening line to interviews all day long. To a lesser, but still significant degree this phenomenon appears on television news programs, too--an ironic reality for a medium that often appeals to viewers who'd never think of picking up a book. The message from mainstream media is that everyone writes books. Therefore it would be easy to be suckered into a false belief that people actually, y'know, still read 'em.

You already know what the problem is, don't you? The ubiquity of electronic devices and the ease of consumption for the data they serve outweighs the comparative work of focusing on black words on white pages. No pictures! No sounds! No birds knocking bricks out from above thieving pigs! What's more, the stories we consume in books often take days to experience. Pages go by in minutes, not seconds. Action scenes happen only in the mind's eye; characters unspool only if we apply ourselves to the words writers use to bring them to life. I'm not opposed to electronic books, per se. But I sometimes wonder if the ability for them to facilitate quick jaunts to email is like having doughnuts on the kitchen counter when someone else in the house is trying to lose weight. It's a temptation that simply stacks the deck against even the toughest resolve.

The loss of a book culture is incalculable. Electronic methods of communication simply do not function in the same way. In the singular way that sustained reading focuses the mind, books ask us to absorb precisely because we must make room for them. They require our participation to work, where videos and blog posts and photos and tweets barely require our attention at all. Words function differently in different formats, and pictures are not replacements at all. I say this as a guy who not only makes his living making pictures, but genuinely loves good pictures. It's simply that they're not interchangeable. Pictures do not replace books.

The loss of a book culture is the transformative process in a culture that cannot sit still and has trouble thinking complex thoughts. Can the culture do complex things? Sure: cell phone networks are intensely complex enterprises. Next day package delivery systems require astounding algorithms and organizational plans. But there's a difference between complex technical requirements and introspection. Values clarification never comes from technological achievement, and morality--flexible and fuzzy though that term may be to diverse audiences-- can not accrue without introspection andexperience.

This lament does not confine itself to fiction. Non-fiction books matter, too. Countless titles on the miles of non-fiction literature shelves can thrill and inspire in ways just like fiction. But even here, the trend is to wade ankle deep in Wikipedia rather than dive into the deep waters of a full length tome. Science may move faster than the speed of conventional printing presses these days, and not for a second do I suggest that it should slow down. But practical information skimming as a replacement for deep knowledge acquisition are not equatable.

The irony here is that people read now more than ever. Short non-fiction on the web has exploded, with texts of all sorts evolving in real-time. Blogs, new journalism, long form articles, tweets, comment forums, and more constitute an ocean of content that never existed before and competes ferociously for time. But while the level of wordplay may have risen in some sectors as a result of Darwinian pressures in the marketplace, I worry about audiences losing touch with the merits of sustained focus on singular topics.

Modernity has also turned us into consumers of endless instruction manuals, often hyperlinked on electronic platforms, chockablock with detailed information. Are they books? Technically they are. But to claim that instruction manuals for video cameras and networkable toaster ovens and programmable vacuum cleaners have the equivalent heft of novels and histories and other works of sustained thinking is to misunderstand the value proposition. Even pulpy trade paperbacks, showcasing soapy romances or endless spy capers of limited literary legerdemain have are a loss. In the sustained focus of reading the culture learns how to critically assess detail and imagination and opportunities that are not simply simply a click away.

In a thought experiment that will never find it's way into real-world practice, the best way to make non-readers pick up a book may be to lock them in a prison for a few months surrounded by richly stocked bookcases and no hope of escape. Given a paucity of stimulation people are naturally curious.  With nothing else to do but read, I have to believe that most captives would rather open a book and escape. Outside prison walls, the very same action--picking up a book-- is the very opposite of escape. It is an act of quiet engagement. But faced with the beeping, blinking stimulations of the real, non-captive world, natural curiosity often struggles to overcome the ubiquitous distractions all around. Books require a measure of mental isolation, of focus. The modern world does not like to leave us alone.

I don't read nearly as much as I would like, despite my best intentions or druthers. The books that matter to me stay with me everyday. Characters are my friends, my advisors, my foils. Stories become my maps and my inspirations. In a culture that sees the power of this old fashioned technology fading into a quaint antiquity, I lament the implications even as I struggle to find the time to  turn the page.

--MS   (Hey, you can follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin if you're so motivated.)

PS -- Like this? Like what it does for your day? Do you ever mention ideas you encounter in this blog to someone else in your life? If so, share the link! Sure, it sounds like a ploy for free, crowd-sourced advertising, and guess what: it is! If you do spread the word, we'll simply appreciate. We might even bake you a batch of your favorite cookies. (Just ask!)

WHADJA EXPECT?

What time is it?

I expect a lot, actually, especially of myself. I get frustrated when I know I've merely phoned it in, scratched the surface, written two cliches in a row.

Expectations can lead you to treasure and they can lead you to the abyss. They can build respect and they can cause calumny. Expectations define goals and calibrate presuppositions. They can also tie you in knots.

The thing about doing creative work is that expectations are simultaneously your best armor and your worst enemy. If you've done well before, people expect high quality next time. That tends to instill loyalty among fans, and help you continue doing what you're doing. Of course if you don't deliver something sublime, dashed hopes can shatter a reputation in no time at all. Positive expectations that fail to deliver can prompt death spirals of doubt, friction, and poor judgement.

But nobody's great all the time. Even your best friend acts like a jerk once and a while. Michael Jordan had bad games from time to time. In terms of expectations that I believe should hold particular sway, it's vital always to expect integrity among those closest to you. Honest appraisals and honest effort matter more than perfection of craft in almost all cases. To expect less is to live in a house with a leaky roof. Gentle rains may not destroy the furniture, but come a bad storm and your risks rise.

At 1AU we hold these values close. While everyone on the team has some degree of cross-applicable skills, we all specialize, too. The great synergy that emerges from cross pollination of ideas demands honesty and effort. That leads to expectations of mutual respect and of probity in pursuit of solutions. Without it, we're working at cross purposes.

Is it fair to expect excellence from colleagues all the time? Not at all. Is it fair of myself--or anyone, really--to assume that all creative output will be sterling, that nothing short of superb work ever deserves to be done? Of course not. But the expectation of an overall pursuit of quality defines fair and reasonable expectations, in my opinion.

Should we simply presume that everyone believes this, that everyone want to pursue excellence? Nope. We all know lots of people who choose to bump along, to get by, to slouch. That's fine, but for my part I choose to steer a polite distance around.

Consider this: without reasonable expectations, everything we did every single day would be left to the vagaries of whims and chance. Expectations force us to bring our best selves to our work and to each other. Expectations provoke honest dialogue and thus honest efforts because we understand the rules of the field. When we bring our best selves to creative work and to those with whom we create that work, we expand the potential for us to bring similarly positive values to the broader domains of our lives, too.

Next week, we continue this train of thought with a look at politics in creative work.

--MS

HEY: ONE MORE THING! Our new movie WATER FALLS opens on October 10th. Check out all the latest on the movie at the website http://gpm.nasa.gov/waterfalls

Or follow the movie on Twitter at #waterfalls

Or, y'know, follow me on Twitter @michaelstarobin

Or, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/1auglobalmedia

PS -- Like this? Share it! Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn...hey! It's internet kismet, donchakno? We'll smile broadly, and so will you. Why? It's good to share!