Constant Interruptions

by Nick

I’ve enjoyed having an all-access pass to the Masterclass website for a couple years now. There are courses on all kinds of topics from some of the foremost experts in the world. Frank Gehry on architecture. Wolfgang Puck on cooking. Hans Zimmer on film composing. Great stuff.

One of the classes is by author Joyce Carol Oates. I haven’t watched all of her class, but one of my favorite things she says is actually in the trailer for her class, which you can watch below:

Right at the beginning she says something I thought was profound:

“The great enemy of writing isn’t your own lack of talent, it’s being interrupted by other people.

“Constant interruptions are the destruction of the imagination.”

If that’s true then it’s no wonder I struggle to feel creative or to come up with what I think are good creative ideas.

COVID has me working from my house, feet and sometimes inches away from my wife and two young kids.

But even if that weren’t the case, we have these smooth little rectangles in our pockets now that are the world’s greatest interruption engines.

They constantly demand more and more of our attention, if we let them. And I’ve tended to let them.

It’s nice that if I’m somewhere boring, like a doctor’s waiting room, and have my phone with me, I can keep myself occupied with something I’m actually interested in instead of six-month-old magazines.

But it also means that I’m never alone with my thoughts anymore. There’s always one more tweet, one more Insta-story, one more email.

And more often than not, it’s not that I got interrupted…it’s that I sought out those interruptions myself. I never even gave myself a chance to do anything else.

I’ve been wasting a ton of time staring into the abyss of my phone. More and more time each year it seems.

I don’t think phones are inherently bad. But I want to control when I let it distract me, rather than letting it control me.

So, my plan for this year is to try to spend more time in my imagination,…less time succumbing to interruption of my own creation…and see what happens.

New Work: HxGN OnCall Dispatch | Smart Advisor

For the launch of their new HxGN OnCall Dispatch | Smart Advisor product, Hexagon’s Safety & Infrastructure division wanted something to grab people’s attention.

The product is an AI assistant that mines data in the background to help public safety call-takers and dispatchers see emerging trends or complex emergencies that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The idea we eventually settled on was that Smart Advisor connects the related events in a CAD system like pins on a cork board.

Tools: Cinema 4D, After Effects, Illustrator

Gradient Does Motion Graphics

Today we’re proud to announce that we now offer a brand new service: motion graphics!

We’ve been dabbling in mograph for various clients for a while now but we’ve never advertised it as a service. Until today!

We made a short video to show you what we mean:

I thought Gradient already offered animation.

True, we do, but giving it a fancy name means we can charge more. Shh…

Animation and mograph are similar, but animation is typically story- or character-driven, whereas motion graphics are really more about moving shapes or other graphic elements.

Motion graphics can be used to communicate information or just to catch people’s attention, like at a trade show booth. It can take all kinds of forms including 2D, 3D, hand-drawn, stop motion, or even live action, and it can be any length from a few seconds long, like an animated gif, to a video several minutes long. Think of it like graphic design…that moves!

Who is mograph for?

Appealing, polished movement can increase the reach of your message. It can engage people visually more than static graphics might. It has all kinds of applications including full-length videos, ads, social graphics, presentation visuals, and more. And the kids love it.

Interested?

If you like what you see, ask your doctor if mograph is right for you. Or reach out and let us know what you have in mind and we’ll be in touch.

What's in a Name?

Hi guys! One of our goals around here is to to regularly give you a super honest look behind the scenes of what it has been like for us to do what we're doing. Today, Erin's chatting about what it was like choosing our name!

Today, we are so in love with the name we chose for our company. Gradient. Gradient Media, Inc. We like the feel it has. The meaning behind it. 

But rewind several months. February-ish. We were fairly certain we would never be able to start our business. This conversation we'd been having, this dream we'd been thinking about for so long, was missing one major thing.

A name.

We talked about it ALL THE TIME. Constantly. And, like naming our babies, literally ALL of the names we came up with had a valid excuse for not being able to use it.

Too silly. Too serious. Too long. Too confusing. Too corporate.

Made us sound like something we're not. (Ahem. Apple Cake Media.) 

Perhaps a little too honest. (Straight-Laced Media. Bless us.)

Or the ever-popular, "well, I guess that will work." We wanted to feel a little more enthusiastic about whatever name we chose!

Not to mention the fact that every single thing we genuinely liked was already taken. EVERY. TIME. It became the running joke. "I like ____, but I'm sure it's already taken."

I knew it had gotten really bad, when my two-year-old climbed up to the breakfast table and said, seriously and out of the blue, "How about Milk Media?" 

Really, really bad.

Also, we definitely considered that name.

After literally months of meeting each week, coming up with a to-do list, and then saying, "okay, we can get started as soon as we pick a name," we finally narrowed it down to two.

(I'm not even going to tell you the other one, because then you're going to tell me you liked it better than Gradient, and our poor, elevated blood pressures can't handle that.)

We talked about it. And talked about it.

We Googled. We read. We talked some more.

We texted a short list of friends and family members to get their opinions. Gradient won, by one vote.

Ultimately, we (obviously) chose Gradient. We liked the subtle reference to movement. Lifting. Raising. We liked that it was a creative/design term. We liked the possibilities it offered for our branding. We liked just the general way it sounded. The hard G. The way it went with the word "media." 

And frankly, we were just glad to be done. A name! We did it! Woohoo!

And then we realized. No more excuses. We had to launch this thing. 

Gulp. Here goes nothing!

Below the Surface: Sesame Street

One of our goals for this blog is to regularly go Below the Surface, where we analyze the ins and outs of a video that means something to us. Our goal is to help you see how every little detail is a careful decision that affects the mood and the message. LB kicks things off with a classic...

Watching Sesame Street should be easy, right? I mean letter of the day, number of the day, and Elmo’s world. That’s pretty simple. However, after just a few minutes of watching it with my one-year-old the other day, I suddenly realized it too is no longer something simple to watch. Why you may ask? Well, let me explain.

It’s the same philosophy behind why engineers can’t just drive a car; they have to know how it works. So they take it apart and put it back together. And why chefs can’t just eat a meal prepared for them; they have to figure out how it was made and recreate it. It’s the same for video producers and editors. Watching TV is no longer a way to relax and give your brain a break. When we watch something we have to know: how did they do that? And then we seek out the skills to figure it out ourselves. 

Yes, even Sesame Street is now something to analyze. While I watch, I’ll think, "I wonder what size green screen they are using to fit all of this action in one scene?" I find myself looking to see someone’s hand accidentally operating one of the puppets (spoiler alert…sorry if you didn’t know). How did they time that animation with those kids jumping around? There are so many intricate things you don’t realize it takes to create an episode of Sesame Street.  Have you ever stopped and counted how many different video clips there are in Sesame Street? Live action, animation, both mixed together. Then there are puppets for goodness sakes and all these voices that have to be matched up… good grief, I’m getting worked up just thinking about it more! It’s really an amazing, intricate show.

Do you see what I mean!? Ok, maybe not completely… but it’s true. I’ll see a cool commercial and instead of getting what the product was about, it will end and I’ll tell my husband, “Hey, I could have made that commercial.” I know how to make that! To which his reply is usually, “Good for you….,” and he changes the channel. 

So the next time you get to watch Sesame Street, or any show for that matter, stop to think for a minute about how much time it takes to create that show, that commercial, that YouTube video. There are a lot of talented and skilled individuals who work to create that instant entertainment for you to enjoy. And speaking as a video producer, we sure do love creating it!

Oh, and in case you were wondering. The letter of the day was “J” and the number was “16.” See, I didn’t miss the entire show's message.

Why Video? Everyday Learning

This post is part of a series called Why Video? You can read the first post about personal video here. Today Erin is continuing the series with a post about using video to learn in everyday life.

I sometimes feel like I get more credit than I deserve. I can't count how many times I've been asked for help on something in my career and in my personal life, and I say, "Oh, yeah, I can take care of that." 

When...the real answer is, "I can definitely Google that."

In this connected world we live in, we can find answers with speed like never before. 

And the amazing number of videos available for learning things for your daily life is a real game-changer.

LB was telling us about just last week she wanted to try out a new recipe. She didn’t quite understand one part of the written instructions so off she went to Google to find a demonstration of how to make it. The dish was a hit, even with her four-year-old! Perfect example of a video solution.

There are videos on how to fix your broken toilet. How to fix your hair.  How to fix whatever new confusing thing is happening with whatever electronic thing is not working right now.

How to solve a Rubik's cube. How to tie your shoe. How to write a resume.

This is all exciting for a lot of reasons.

We can save hiring a professional in some situations, if the solution is simple enough, thus saving money and time. 

We can teach our kids things (and frankly, learn it ourselves at the same time) with speed and accuracy that we might not have been able to do as clearly otherwise.

And it opens up an absolutely enormous market for creatives like us here at Gradient. Think of the possibility of things that could be explained through video. Via traditional videography or whiteboard animation or whatever.

I don't know about you, but we find that all pretty exciting. 

Stay tuned for our next post from Nick, who will be sharing all the details of how he became a self-taught creative and what role video played in that!