Otis Funkmeyer, The Ph.D. of Popping

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For some reason, I have a real affinity for darkness. This often comes as a surprise to most people, as I think I am considered pretty upbeat and positive. But every so often, I have one of those days where nothing seems worth anything, faith seems pointless at best, and death seems like a pretty good deal.

I really love these days for some reason. I relish them. I don’t know why exactly, but there is something nice to me about feeling down. So much of life seems to have such a point and a purpose. We are continually told–and I in turn continually tell–that having a purpose is important in life. A big dream with some meaning.

I want to show the world the power of love and self-empowerment and following your joy. I really dream of teaching this to people, of showing it to them, of watching their minds blow as they realize how good life can be.

So where does darkness fit in?

Since “The Secret” hit the ground running, there has been a real noticeable desire in me to always be happy. Continuous, uninterrupted bliss. Somehow though, this rings false. Spiritual teachings tell me to stay in the now, to focus on the breath, to remember my connection to all that is. And sometimes, I want to say FUCK YOU. I feel pretty damn separate right now thank you very much. I feel pretty worthless if you don’t mind.

I write this because I am trying to learn. To me, this is part of integration. This is part of enlightenment. Light + Dark. Not Light - Dark. But for some reason, there is a real fear of dwelling on the darkness. And I think that this has some validity.

For while it is good and easy for me to say I love darkness, I am most likely going to wake up in the morning cheerful and happy to be alive again. This is not the case with everyone, and dwelling on the darkness can lead people into some places that are hard to come out of.

So what then? How do we do this? How do we honor the darkness. How do we raise it up and see it for what it is. A giver of humility, a reminder of mortality, a dispeller of illusions. I think this is increasingly important, as more and more people wake to the fact that this reality is of our creation and that we actually do have the power to make of our lives what we will.

Facing this darkness, the parts of our selves that were perhaps easier to not see, is a process of purification. It seems that the best teachers are those who have gone through it themselves. It’s easy to come with pat answers and say that life is easy, but to embrace struggle and pain and be a living example of light is where true teaching and healing lay.

As we move closer to the time when this all comes to a head, and we each once and for all surrender and embrace all the parts of ourselves that we felt were unworthy, facing this darkness, looking into it with tears in our eyes and love in our hearts, is really the way to go.

I look forward to continuing to share my own journey in this regard, and I would love to hear your thoughts.

namaste.

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Being a provider of online video content (robot dance and breakdance), I am always looking at ways to tighten up our workflow. Get more things done, and do all of it in a shorter amount of time.

For those of you who just want the end of the puzzle (like me when I’m a read and not a writer), let me kill the suspense. It goes like this:

1. Sony Vegas
2. Adobe Photoshop
3. Apple LiveType

And now to continue with the story…

The Video Editor

When I began, I was told that the holy grail was Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects. At the time, I didn’t have a Mac, so I started exploring other software. I explored Premiere, I explored Pinnacle Liquid, man, I even explored using Nero, and then I came across Sony Vegas. Ahhhh beautiful Vegas. How I love thee.

It was the first time that I had found a video editing application that was intuitive. And not only that, it didn’t crash–and ALLLL of them crashed. And not only that, it was by far the fastest. And not only that, it did everything in real time–and NOOOONE of them did everything in real time. And not only that, it easily took in every format you threw at it.

And I was happy, oh so happy. But then it happened. I saw the light and bought a Mac. I couldn’t deal with the hell that is PC-only anymore–20 years of purgatory was enough. And there went Vegas. So I started searching some more. I got Final Cut and learned that. And the first thing I realized was that it sure is a lot less intuitive than Vegas. And the second thing I realized was that it sure is a LOT less real time than Vegas. And the fourth thing I realized was that it sure was picky about type of file format you used. And the fifth thing I realized was that everything was hidden. You had to really LEARN this software.

And that was that. I decided then and there that Final Cut is too slow, too ugly, and too much trouble for my workflow–where I want to be putting out videos every single day. Because remember, this is a WEB video workflow, and in my opinion, Final Cut is made for the filmmakers.

And then the beautiful thing happened. And it called itself Parallels. And I was able to quickly, easily, transparently run Windows on my Mac. And so I tried Vegas again.

Now mind you, this whole time that I had been using Vegas, I had had a bit of shame about it. It seemed unprofessional. It seemed like an also ran. I mean, in the reviews, it was either Avid or Final Cut or Premiere. People only mentioned Vegas in passing. But at the same time, I kept having this gnawing feeling that it was REALLY REALLY good. So what was the deal?

Well, this was the deal. People are dumb and prejudiced. Final Cut and Premiere’s interfaces were developed by the same guy and they are both designed for people coming out of a background of actually chopping up film with razor blades (this is why they actually have a BLADE tool).

The thing is, not everything translates from analog to digital that well. And more often, there are new and better ways to interact with a computer than there were to interact with film. And this is definitely one of those cases.

Vegas seriously just trounces everything else. It is so much more fun, so much faster, so much more robust. It has advanced compositing, keyframable velocity and position and scale tracking. It can even rotate in 3D. This is something that you can only find on After Effects or Apple Motion or Shake.

But because it comes in a different package, the sheep seem to just follow the herd.

Well, I encourage you not to be a sheep and not to follow herds, because well, you’re better than that.

——–

Our Saga Continues

So there I was, having learned how to do basic to intermediate level video editing. And then I started watching motion graphics designers (read about my journey learning motion graphics). And I saw that there was a whole new can of worms opening up.

I saw this video and started corresponding with the maker of the video. She informed me that the backbone of her workflow was Photoshop. And that’s when that piece of the puzzle hit me (may be “duh” to some but was “whoa” to me). Motion Graphics is primarily going to be done in Photoshop. You are just animating still images. AHHHHHHHH!!! EUREKA!!!! I get it!

So that took care of that, because basically there are no alternatives to Photoshop. You can say what you want, but if you really want to do stuff that is good, GIMP or Fireworks or Paint Shop Pro just ain’t gonna cut it. There is Photoshop and that’s it.

Last But Not Least

Now, Vegas does have a weak point. I admit it. The titling system in Vegas, especially compared to that of Premiere (which uses a Photoshop derived titler) is WEAK SAUCE! I mean, the sauce is just ridiculously weak. It’s passable, but it’s kind of pathetic. I heard recently–and I haven’t researched so this is just hearsay–that PCs use raster-based fonts and Macs use vector-based fonts, which basically means that PC fonts are pixelly and ugly and Mac fonts are pleasing and beautiful, which sounds right to me because that’s been my subjective experience.

Anywho, the search for a titler continued. I checked out all of Final Cut Suite and was THOROUGHLY unimpressed. Final Cut Pro sucks, Motion is so bad and so unintuitive that it literally made me laugh at times, everything that Soundtrack Pro does is BUILT IN to vegas, and DVD Studio Pro just feels bad. BUT! Then there was Livetype.

Beautiful beautiful Livetype.

The only Apple application other than OS X and iTunes that I have totally fallen in love with. It is amazing this program. You can make titles that look beyond amazing in a matter of minutes. It defaults to exporting with alpha channel transparency, meaning you can drag and drop your Livetype movie into Vegas and it’s already transparent, just like that *snaps fingers*. There is also a series of expansion packs that makes the program even more useful.

The Wrap Up

So basically, what it comes down to is this. What you need to make dope special-effects laden, slick-yet-ghetto, motion-graphicsed web videos as quickly as possible are the following:

1. Sony Vegas — video editing, compositing, audio editing, visual effects
2. Photoshop — image chopping, animating, more compsiting
3. Livetype — crazily good titles galore, crazily fast

I would put this workflow, combined with a good Hard Drive camcorder and a Mac Book Pro, up against anything.

Well, anything except an After Effects/Maya/Combusting render farm with a whole lot of designers with a whole lot more experience than me. But those guys are busy making movies and making Hollywood run, so I’ll let them stick with that.

Good luck and good night kiddos!

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My story is probably not so different from most.

I saw Michel Gondry.

The end.

But I was a dancer and was into dancing and that was that.

I later had the great idea (along with Tyson and Ace) to make dance DVDs. Instructional, performance, and everything in between. And so it began. We already have 2 (robot dance & breakdance). Making those DVDs was like our way of teaching ourselves the software. When we started, we had no idea what we were doing.

Well, as time went on, I started getting more and more into this motion graphics stuff. I wasn’t really even sure what it was, and I started hearing all these new words like layers and compositing and keyframes and after effects and masking. I wiki’ed them all and started getting a sense of what I was getting into.

I learned that it basically all just came down to layers. And surprisingly, it was really just animation. But shit, when I saw things like this or this or especially this I thought that this was going to be near impossible to learn.

I started looking at colleges and design classes. I looked at the usual suspects like Art Institute and Cal Arts and Santa Monica College. I was really thinking about Santa Monica College because the classes are cheap and they have all the things I would need.

But as the day went on, everything I thought I knew started getting flipped on its head.

You can learn how to do all this stuff online–for free. From the actual people who are doing it. My mind was blown.

First, I found this tutorial which taught me how to take a freeze frame, make it look all pretty, and move on, like this.

Whoa.

Next, I found that Go Media, whose work I was already so admiring, had a serious compendium of tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects here.

Well, that was great and all, but I’m no artist, so it’s still going to be years of learning how to draw and design things of a professional caliber.

But, wait, wrong again.

There are ridiculously amazing templates all over the place. You can buy vector graphics, buttons, different kinds of paintbrushes and gradients, for cheap.

Check it out here and here.

And then I realized that the new world that I have so long been dreaming of is actually here. You can learn a highly technical, highly advanced skill, for free.

Toss in a Mac Book Pro for $2000, the necessary software for another $2000, and all the plugins and graphics your heart could ever desire for another $1000 and you can be a world class designer, for 5000 bucks. And that is totally top of the line. If you want to be frugal, you can easily chop $3000 off of that number.

I feel so good knowing this. Seeing how a dream I had less than two months ago is now able to be fulfilled almost instantly at no cost. All that is required is the desire to learn, and I have that in spades.

The beauty of this approach, as opposed to traditional schooling, are many.

1. it’s free.
2. with a good idea, you can be selling your work that you are making AS YOU LEARN. There are so many websites that can sell your t-shirt design, your image, or your video that rather than paying to learn, you can get paid to learn.
3. you can go at your own pace and learn whenever you want to.
4. you have an army of teachers on the various forums on the web. people there will answer nearly any question you can think of.
5. it’s free.

The only potential downside that I can see is that you miss the interaction and ability to bounce ideas off of friends that you get at school. But I have always been sort of a loner anyway, especially when it comes to learning and creativity.

The sky is really the limit in this new Web 2.0 world. Realize that the possibilities are endless and that you can do anything you wanna do! I just realized that fully today and the world looks a little bit brighter!

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So it was only three weeks ago that I made a video saying that I would release a work out into the world everyday (meaning in my head [then and now] Monday-Friday). Whether this is an article (like now), a song, a design, a painting, or a video, or something else I haven’t even thought of yet, I wanted to commit myself to doing this.

This came out of another habit that I have setup for myself with exercise. Early last year, while backpacking in the Middle East and eating a lot and exercising not at all, I realized that the story of my life, and really the story of pretty much everyone else I know, involved lots of quick starts and equally quick fades. With exercise, this meant for me committing to doing an hour of workouts everyday, sticking with it and going strong for two weeks, missing a day, and then slowly but surely stopping altogether.

So that fateful day in Egypt, I made a new pact with myself and with God. I would do a single sun salutation each day for a year. Then, the following year, I would add another, and so on and so on such that by my 25th year in, I would be doing 25 sun salutations per day.

My reasoning was as follows. I figured that if I couldn’t do 1 sun salutation–an exercise which takes approximately 45 seconds–than I, Brit Wolfson, actually had larger problems than an inability to workout. I had problems sticking with things.

Lo and behold, this plan turned out to be the best that I’ve ever devised, ever. I’m now a year and a half in, doing 2 sun salutations a day, and my life has forever changed. Because I find that no matter how far I sink into despair or hopelessness, I show up and do my sun salutations and in that moment I realize that I am still moving forward, still expanding, despite what my external reality seems to be showing.

So, being full of chutzpah, I decided to add another daily commitment, as you read above. 3 weeks in and I stopped doing it. For a whole week. I lost the momentum. And before sitting down to write this article (which starts me anew), I was filled with terror, feeling like what’s the point, this is stupid, I can’t do it anyway.

And that brings me to the point. It’s really just about showing up. We live in a dimension where time spreads out before us. Each day, we wake up, do some shit, and fall asleep. We repeat that until we “die” and move on to another type of reality.

I’ve thought a lot about this and I think that in this dimension, the most important thing we can do is develop good habits, especially good small habits. Because things add up. And they add up surprisingly quickly. Often, it’s not the big ideas that end up counting, it’s the multitude of small ideas which as days and months and years roll by, add up to become quite a force to be reckoned with.

I find myself moving more into a place of empowerment, into a place where people are asking me for advice, and how I am able to do what I do. And I am seeing more and more that it comes down to habits. It comes down to showing up everyday whether you feel like it or not, doing your thing, and waking up again and repeating. Over and over and over and over.

Along with this comes getting back on the horse. No matter how stupid you feel, how shitty the last thing you did was, how useless it all feels, you just get back on the horse and do it, because well, you are here on Earth and you might as well do something.

Take this article for instance. Some of you might read it and find it useless or a waste of your time. Others might think what an awful writer, and hopefully a couple will find something in it to take with them. But my focus is simply on getting it done. On writing what was closest to my heart tonight, the act of getting back on the horse myself.

To end, let’s look at it mathematically (I love looking at things mathematically)! If you release something five days a week, every week, for five years, you will have release 5*52*5=1300 creative products.

I went to a gallery today featuring art that was pretty good. That old familiar “I could do that” voice came up in my head and I had a new realization. Your god damn right I could do that but the reason that I’m seeing the other guy’s work in the gallery is because he DID THE WORK. He had a large enough body of work such that when someone came along looking, he could supply them with a gallery’s worth of material.

So, I’m telling you, just do it. The best thing about it is that when you have to release something everyday, you are bound to have off days where what you release sucks and you get OK with sucking. You realize that no matter how great you dream of being, you are still the totally flawed and imperfectly perfect human being that we all are. And I’m telling you, once you get that creativity rolling along, it does NOT want to stop. It will launch you into a whole new dimension.

That feels good. Later skaters.

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If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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