Projects of Passion

Beware traveler, strange items are ahead

As lockdown set in last year I found myself spending an increasing amount of time playing D&D games online. With this came the cumbersome task of keeping track of hundreds of items for players, keeping track of prices and logs of what stores had which items. As a person I am already pretty detailed oriented and my personal life is no exception, so I set out to make the task easier for myself and more dynamic for my players, the result? Two books collectively over 100 pages representing the catalogues for two very large in-game stores, as well as a very detailed excel sheet for all of the data per item including but not limited to; type of item, rarity, item number, page number, price, as well as cost to make, and of course using those items you can easily find your profit margin. I understand that on surface level that can easily brushed off as some very nerdy time spent, but incase the parallels were not clear allow me to present the polished version of what i accomplished here.

“Over the the course of one month I created two product catalogues for a pair of large store fronts to allow their customers to more conveniently browse their products. My main ambitions when starting on this product was to allow for the customer to easily extracted the relevant information they would need without guidance from an employee while not providing so much information as to overwhelm the consumer. Simultaneously I created a spreadsheet that allowed for any employee to easily look up any item in question going as far as to even include the page number in the catalogue so the representative can easily rest assured they are quite literally on the same page of any would be customer.”

An itch for twitch

After a while a friend suggested I start streaming on twitch. He suggested people would be interested in watching my group play D&D, or maybe watch me play video games, or even watch me spend time designing. All of these suggestions aside, I was skeptical to say the least. It was after watching a few streams that I began to find an interest, not in the stream its self admittedly but rather with what I could do with it. I used twitch as a sort of case study to see what its like to build a brand from literally nothing. Believe me when i say nothing, I started using my we cam that was purchased my freshman year of college for 5$ at the local fry’s electronics. I got to create banners, logos, merchandise, intros, outros, highlight. For the first time i spent an extensive amount of time learning Adobe After Effects, something that before that moment was well outside of my wheel house. Using my knowledge I believe it took me about 5 months to make the requirements to initiated into twitch’s paid affiliate program. However what the real highlight was for me was getting my first paid commission for an After Effects project. I went from never having interacted with a platform, to generating revenue from it. Which in turn took me down the path of learning a program I had never given a glance at into getting commissioned for projects. Twitch was a wild ride, unfortunately due to taking on extra hours at work I am not as active on the platform as I once was, but the lessons i learned while journeying down this path are some of which that I would not trade for anything.

Clowning around

Full disclosure, I was paid for this one. Prior to lock down i was given a strange proposal by a man in a funny top hat. I was offered a job to tour across the country along with a troupe of well meaning clowns, contortionists, and captivating lights. Many children joke about wanting to run away with the circus, I actually was given the opportunity to do it! Let alone be paid to develop the brand, help design sets, design lighting effects, communicate with companies to see my designs on billboards. It was. . . overwhelming to be honest. But if there was anything all of that work taught me, it was that I can wear many hats and most often I found myself wearing which ever one was needed. Designing flyers was an easy task, finding meaningful ways to distribute those flyers so as to gain actual traction from them was a challenge. And finding a way to fit in learning how to operate a DMX board and rewire XLR cables in-between those tasks felt next to impossible, but I did. This job will always be a passion project for me because I learned so much about myself in working it. I learned that when given an opportunity I have a hard time saying no. I learned that I enjoy working in groups that are passionate about what they are creating. I learned that working until 3 am because you have a deadline to meet is a lot less strenuous when you are proud of the final project. I learned that you can find creative solutions to projects even when its your first time encountering anything like it. Most of all I learned a good laugh is sometimes the best way to get the wheels turning again, because the show doesn’t stop just because things got difficult.