How I look for inspiration in the internet age

Day 100 is a little over a month away.

For all of my 365 projects I have progress checkpoints, where I really analyze improvement. Since vlogging and video editing was so new to me, I have set Day 100 as my first real checkpoint. By Day 100 I should be able to pretty much nail my workflow and have a style starting to come through.

This is when looking for inspiration comes in handy.

Inspiration in the internet age is a dangerous thing: It’s easy to find yourself straight up copying when you fill your head with only one inspirational person or artwork. If you have too many, you rely on “inspiration” aka scrolling through feeds, and don’t get anything done.

Where’s the balance?

It’s all about knowing yourself. For me, this is how I seek new inspiration:

Categorize my work, in this case The 365. The 365 is a combination of technical work, art, and moving toward business. I’m categorizing aspects of The 365 so that I can search for inspiration for each of those aspects.

Technical: This would be the camera knowledge, editing, and social media and sharing aspect of my project. For sharing I’ve often studied Austin Kleon’s work, for camera knowledge I often ran to DigitalRev or various Youtube personalities, and for editing video I looked toward favorite movies of mine and how they are laid out and structured as well as a couple Youtubers making more cinematic stuff, and for editing photos, I kind of just screamed and yelled at my computer alot.

Art: I don’t make much art if any, that said, my photography work is probably the closest thing to art. (Sometimes I wonder if The 365 is some sort of marketing performance art) I learned a lot from photographers like Jeremy Cowart, Emily Soto, and Chris Michel. Then I had some professors that I learned a lot from. My first film photography professor challenged me to experiment with film and create a narrative. Consistency is something that I learned (and still learning) from another professor who really took the time to challenge everything I did. (Which I appreciate, I want more critique than praise most of the time)

Business: This is really the phase that the 365 is mostly in now. I’m learning about marketing and running a business through good old fashioned experience. Sure, you can learn terms in college, but I don’t see how you can really learn anything in college about running a business and marketing day to day until you actually try it. My mentor, Mark is probably my number one inspiration in this sense. I’m out of my comfort zone for sure, but I feel myself growing through it. I like the attitudes of people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Chase Jarvis as well, which is also helpful in learning about this world that I really had no concept of before.

Because of the way I’ve categorized The 365 when you fold it all together you get a pretty long list of inspirations, and you don’t borrow or steal every single thing from one person. You sort of morph into a mega person because you take pieces from each of them and apply them to different areas of your life.

That said I’m in this phase where I’m getting more benefit from making things than consuming things. I don’t really mindlessly scroll through Instagram, I don’t watch a ton of Snapchats, I don’t really scroll through Facebook (because politics). It’s not because those things are bad (except politics), I just know I’m susceptible to doing it too much if I let myself.

I am watching a ton of movies now though as a way to figure out this video narrative thing.

I didn’t realized that this what I did until I really took a good look at my work. I change my focus all the time. Last year’s 365 project was mostly on the artistic self-indulgent very comfortable side, and this year I’m just trying to step out of my comfort zone in every single way I can possibly think of.