It’s funny to be an adult and you’re sitting on an airplane watching cartoons on your phone. But cartoons are not only awesome and hilarious they also can provide some really good lessons for life and business.

On my flight to San Francisco I was watching Gravity Falls, an amazing show if you haven’t seen it. The episode that got me thinking about work was Season 1, Episode 7 “Double Dipper.” Oh, F.Y.I. Spoiler Alert.

In this episode, Dipper uses a copy machine that his Uncle Stan fixed up to copy himself. He needed more and more copies of himself so he could execute his plan to dance with Wendy. Well as you’d expect the plan doesn’t go so well even though Dipper and his clones planned and thought of everything. Dipper found out that his best results with talking to Wendy were simply when he veered off the plan and just winged it.

This is where it got me thinking about my own work. Here we are, the LooseKeys team flying across the country to shoot a video at a winery in Napa Valley. We’ve planed everything we could, went over the script a dozen times and have binders of shot sheets and storyboards. But really we might end up getting our best results for this video when we go off script and just see what happens. I’m not saying we shouldn’t plan for things but sometimes you just have to let what’s going to happen happen and for all you know it might end up being better.

This past week was a bit crazy… Monday afternoon I told Jake that we needed to finish two videos by the end of day Friday. Both these videos had live action elements that had been shot the week before, we just need to add graphics and do clean up to all the shots. The videos each were roughly 2 minutes in length and required a good amount of compositing. I think if someone told me I had a week to get all this done, I may have laughed in their face. But Jake said ok and asked where to start. With that deadline hanging over our heads, we got to work.

Most of the videos we work on don’t really have a hard deadline, we work on the video till it’s done. Sometimes there are launch days that we’re trying to hit but they usually aren’t too crazy of a turnaround.  I know our abilities and what we can take on and accomplish so we don’t usually find ourselves in a situation where we are freaking out about deadlines. The opened ended deadline or no deadline is great but sometimes if you really want the work to get done you have to set a deadline. That extra push is often just what you need. 

Basically we had two days to work on each video and then Friday for any final tweaks. Yeah, that’s a fast turn around. Just like in school when you have a paper due the next day and you haven’t started it, you let that stress fuel you and you get it done. You have to get it done otherwise you’re going to fail and in this case if we didn’t do well, we wouldn’t get paid but we’d also burn a bridge and disappoint a client. 

Because of that deadline, it forced us to work harder, smarter and well faster. We didn’t have time to screw around; no checking YouTube or getting lost on wikipedia. If After Effects or Cinema 4D wasn’t rendering then we better be animating. You might be surprised to hear there were no sleepless nights either. Typically we worked from 9 am - 1:00 AM which if you know me is my typical work schedule anyway. 

Right now we’re doing some final changes that the clients had but they loved the videos and I’m really happy with the result as well. 

Weekends for me are typically busy, I’m not known to kick back on the couch and just veg out. This weekend seemed a bit more hectic than usual and it’s weekends like this that make me enjoy those slower weekends, even if I am working. 

This weekend I had a shoot scheduled for a product demo video that LooseKeys is working on. We’ve only done a few live action productions at LooseKeys and on every one we seem to learn a little more about what not to do.

With this video we needed to hire “actors.” I say actors loosely here because this was a non-speaking role and we pulled the actors from craigslist  Which I’m not sure I’ll do again. In the past we’ve been able to work with friends or friends of friends and it’s been pretty smooth and low stress. 

I know there are a few other options to find actors but we didn’t have a huge budget to work with. I was also on a bit of a tight turnaround so a casting call wasn’t really an option. Once again from this experience I see how valuable having a producer is on your team. 

So I ended up getting actors from craigslist; I wouldn’t typically hire a designer or get work for myself on craigslist so I’m not really sure what I was expecting. Many of the actors were fantastic and I hope I have another project where I can use them again. They should also be charging more because they were killer and out shined the poor ones. There were a couple actors who really added a lot of stress to the whole project. 

One actor tried to cancel the morning of the shoot but ended up showing up. Another canceled at midnight the day before the shoot. I was asleep so I didn’t see the message till the morning of the shoot. This resulted in a mad dash to find a new talent Sunday morning for the shoot that afternoon. Of course getting a hold of someone on Sunday at 9 AM was not easy. Thankfully we were able to get in contact with a couple of replacements and had a successful shoot. 

Next time I hope to either work with good actors like some of the ones who came through for us on this shoot or at least add some more to the budget so we can get a producer to handle the actors for us. If the budget was a little bigger we may work with a talent agency and do a casting call. Once again, this was another learning experience that will only help us for the next live action project we work on.