Monday, August 25, 2014

Read FIGURING OUT THE DELICATE ART OF POSITIONING YOUR STARTUP

Image Credit: rap.genius.com

<< This is what you wanna do to your market audience. (Googling haymaker photos is pretty hilarious.  We pay a lot of money to watch people do this to each other. Bananas! I digress.)

This is what you wanna do with your product and for the last several years I have to admit it's just been easier being a lazy muffin.

I get a great idea and that's where it stays.  But according to the article the process of creating a consistent package isn't all that different from selling up to a financier.  You need to have some solid homework and materials ready for the push and an ongoing plan in place to stay with the momentum.  For marketing a film, especially a no-budget for an emerging artist, thinking like a professional shouldn't be a "maybe."  You need to use every available piece of advice because there are no more excuses and no more shortcuts.

That said I wanna break down where I've been on debugging the willpower question.

Image Credit: www.bjorkaoddities.com
You might just be a big baby when it comes to building your own production vessel; a company that will attempt to fly on its own steam performing job after job while fitting in time to pursue feature productions that compete for notoriety and long term payoffs.

If you grew up like the greater portion of Americans you're lower middle class, a generation-y pimp of a dreamer who's likely come to terms with the humility of your own existence. But now that you've embraced production you gotta throw your business up in everyone's face and encourage them to take a whiff.  

Positioning isn't just about homework and self-awareness and discipline.  It's about growing up and finding your courage and your source of will power too.  And it's crazy because if the original plan was a city-job or a corporate gig or working at your dad's motor shop and you can't go back that way because you got on set and experienced something unlike any other field elsewhere then you've gotta buck up.  And you have to know you're not amassing your bravery for a shot at the big time, you're generating a charge that is doomed to fail because you might be the first in your family to try to enter a high stakes poker game filled with players wealthier and more politically savvy than you.  You'll be charging over and over again at a narrow passage that won't budge before you flash whatever credibility will force them to slip.

How long do you want to be a filmmaker?  If it's the long term then shortcuts are a danger.  You need to build an army and a product from the ground up and realize that perhaps the biggest obstacle is the modesty you've accepted for a life below the mountain.

It just occurred to me that I'd somehow second-guessed my aspirations because most of my life I've only understood to control my desires for the reality I'm living in.  For my reality to change I've gotta get unrealistic.  Ya feel me?

Positioning is about making a claim and doing some homework to back it up.  All the relevant industries today - art, tech, music, media, etc - contribute this effort in daily doses and so the prime skills to develop are efficient communication with all the bells and whistles provided by adobe products (most likely) and whatever zaniness you can come up with.  Thinking that way is not about being an employee anymore.  The payday comes when you convince the world it's time.  It's a deal and positioning provides the talking points and the bottom line.  Without these you're a spectator, a civilian, and a consumer for someone else's gambit.  For those trying to break in, filmmaking truly is do or die.

So that epiphany, about having to unlearn restraint in pursuit of a dream many more stability-minded folk might resist, helped me sort out a reason to more fully embrace the risks, the greater time investment to now brand the company and it's ideas rather than just sit and try to write while being confused that the phone isn't ringing.  

What to do, oh what to do about my video game habit...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Translate