Freelance creatives as spray foam

Creative people are like spray foam. (This analogy is possibly… possibly linked to me replacing our giant living room window last week. Also, be kind to your neighbours and family. Sometimes you can’t raise a 10’ window into place yourself.)

Like my wonderful dad-analogy of spray foam, creatives take up as much space and time as we’re allowed. In opposition to this, a client’s deadlines are wonderful. I remember asking my producer to ask a client for an extension on a project and my producer replied “We don’t do that.” So I got the project done. And it felt so good to be done.

That project was ten years ago and since then I’ve built a half-decent workflow… for a creative. I have client projects running smooth. It IS production, so there are of course hiccups… “advertising emergencies” as we call them. But these are things that are not my fault. The actor dropped out of the commercial? We go to our backup. These are problems that can be solved and panicking doesn’t help.

A really embarrassing trap:

The big, but also small thing i’ve solved is a total amateur trap of finally getting to the project, way too late, and then realising there is a really important piece of the puzzle that the client didn’t provide, that you need to get started. You’re forced to reach out to them, at the 11th hour, tail between your legs, revealing your stupid situation.

Experiencing this once, if you’re an ambitious person, is enough to fix you. You now make full workback schedules (working back from the delivery date) for everything. A simple, generated checklist helps us ask for all of these things at the start, even if we’re not designing/filming/editing until much later

A big problem

So what if you’re spray foam, and you don’t have a client container? What if you have a personal project you want done and it’s effortless to extend your deadlines indefinitely? If there’s no container you can pour as much of yourself into this abyss without any shape taking form.

Ok that’s enough about spray foam.

There is no trick. People tell you to make yourself your own client, and it doesn’t happen. Until it does. Eventually, possibly with the big clock of time ticking away, something catalyses and you realize that “someday” is literally now. Only now.

Big Growth

My biggest growth this past year has been the professionalisation of myself. To not feel embarrassed, to not devalue my own personal work when weighed against client work, or going to the bank. The work i do for myself is the most important, it’s what everything else springs from. But as a responsible parent and dad, it helps to put it into a container–A workday–to not give into that amateur urge to pull an all-nighter. (I still do late nights, often on YouTube videos). But they have have a deadline. A Thursday morning. Shit.

This week’s video is a super boring look at my workdays. But at least I loaded it with animation. I don’t hear creatives talk about this stuff enough. The bones. Maybe organs The scaffolding. It doesn't lean into their mystique but it’s so important. I would love to hear how you create a container–a process for your personal, and most important projects.

Thanks for reading and watching.

New video here