I know the two seem unrelated but check out this video with This American Life host Ira Glass in which he talks about creativity.

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap. – Ira Glass

Even before seeing this video, I put this mantra into practice with the Make Something Cool Everyday project. Before this project, I would make something and not be willing to let it go. If it wasn’t a hit, I would get depressed and think that I wasn’t good and then it was a while before I had the confidence to make something else. Now I realize that it’s not that I’m not good, it’s that I wasn’t able to trash the pieces that weren’t.

Many great examples of success coming from failure can be found on Threadless. Aled Lewis, aka Fatheed, has had 24 shirts printed and has earned over $56,000 through Threadless. Which seems unbelievable until you see how many designs he’s submitted – 72. Incredible! Fatheed fails almost twice before each success.

Granted, there are the Stanley Kubricks of the world who can succeed almost every time. But, unlike those Apollo 13 folks, for most of us, failure is an option.

An Awesome Style = Much Respek

This meant because I couldn’t pin down a style, I wouldn’t be able to be successful which meant my career was doomed to mediocrity. I became pretty depressed for a while because of it. That was until I saw a series of interviews at Zoom In with a few of the latest Young Guns winners.

They were all great interviews, but the one that inspired me the most was with Brooklyn based Labour (below).

So now the formula goes something like

Dedication + Passion = Much Respek

Which really was the formula all along, I just had a hard time seeing past all the pretty pictures.

Lamie De Zoe Website

My average work day so far has been about 13 -14 hours. I get up at 6 (which is 5 back in Utah), watch tutorials for an hour, go to work for 9 – 10 hours, come home, eat dinner, and watch tutorials for another 2 – 3 hours. So for my first week, I spent around 45 hours at work and another 20+ at home studying. Woohh! I’m exhausted but I gotta do what I gotta do.

By now you’re probably wondering what that image above is for. My first week at work involved designing and building a website for a short animation my company made a while back. It’s really a cute little animation and you can see it by going to LamieDeZoe.com.

I’ve been working on some animation and video projects lately and I gotta say, it’s a lot of work trying to do everything by yourself. Animating, concepting, finding music, etc, gets pretty tiring. And I know I could take on more ambitious projects if I could just get some people to work with (not to mention it could be a lot more fun). Friday Night Feature is a site where I hope to find collaborators of any kind.

Eventually I would like the site to become about more than just helping me find some cool people. I would like to see it grow into a whole community of talented people that easily contact each other for whatever they want. WriterX has an idea and thinks that CharacterArtistY has really great style and that AnimatorZ obviously knows his way around after effects so they all end up working together. Something like that.

So, please, if you want to join in on Friday Night Feature, or you know someone who might be interested, email me at emoryallen@gmail.com.

The Boat by Adam Garcia and Gregory Hubacek

Talk by Daniel Fitzgerald

The Pencil is Mightier by Peter NG

And let’s not forget my entry.

Photoshop “See What’s Possible” from D. Emory Allen on Vimeo.