Trying to Lew

On working with people, properly.

I’m really interested in working with great people, one of whom is Lewis Bennet – a film producer from Vancouver. I’m also really interested in not taking advantage of people, and want to make sure that I can pay them, make sure the work I’m asking from them fits the budget I’m offering, etc., in the hopes that the work I can generate helps build healthy relationships without putting strain on people.

I DIY

My background is in media arts, both my business partner and I have degrees in Interactive Arts and Interface Cultre, and over the last decade have had the incredible fortune to be a part of the media arts community. This community is an international one where artists, hackers and practitioners share strong philosophies in the idea of Do It Yourself (DIY) or Do It With Others (DIWO) culture. People want to make things on their own and help others to learn, build and create.

One of the great strengths of this community is the ability to pull from nothing the resources to build new works – whether through finding cheap hardware, great help from others, or online tutorials, one of the major motivations is a grassroots approach to creativity. This approach is so ingrained in the way I think about things that I’ll build my own desks, drive to a metal shop and buy cheap material to assemble my own dual screen monitor mounts, or write an API from scratch and give it freely to the world.

A Tension

One of the things I’ve struggled with over the years is the lack of compensation for the passionate, bleeding heart innovation that happens in the media arts. For myself, and other people I’ve grown up with in this community, there always exists a tension between the desire to produce highly innovative and creative work v. any sort of reasonable compensation for that work.

Yes, I mean money.

My Experience

A couple of examples in my own experience:

1. Working for years at one of the most innovative, creative-artistic interaction design labs in the world, I was often paid approximately €4/hour without any regard to the effort of my work.
2. I was commissioned to create a new artwork for a prestigious european company. They brought the opportunity to me, but then only offered €500 for the work. At the time I absolutely needed the payment, so I agreed to it. The work took me about 100 hours to create a new print, and interactive installation which I set up at the company’s headquarters. When all was said and done one of the components from the installation had been stolen and I had to fork out another €80 to replace it – they didn’t even offer to pay me for the loss.
3. Over the last couple of years I have been collaborating on a large project for which we received a really generous grant. Between hardware, software, modelling, and everything else that went into it, we spent the entire grant within a year of production. About a year after we finished building the piece we were commissioned to bring it to an exclusive festival in Canada. In order to create new content for it I ended up working for a full month, building motion tracking and animation software, as well as traveling to the location and installing it. In all, I ended up getting $1450.

There are other stories I could tell, but I don’t think I need to explain more than this.

My Point

People get taken advantage of in this field. I’m sick of it, and I don’t want to be another cog that promotes working for scraps and undervaluing the work of media artists and creators.

So, Lew

I’ve wanted to work with Lewis for a really long time, but hadn’t had the budget to do so. When I moved to Vancouver in May 2013 I ended up seeing Lewis and telling him that I wanted to work with him. I didn’t have budget yet, but I needed to know how much he cost so that I could plan projects and drum up funds.

By September, we still hadn’t worked together yet but I had secured the funds to work with him; I just didn’t know what I could afford for the amount of funds I had earmarked.

By November, we hadn’t completed our project so we had some talks about how we could prepare for when the project would complete and what to do at that point.

By January, we completed the project, but Lewis’ partner went on a shoot in Africa so we delayed again. Then, in Feb / March / April we were too busy to spend time creating the content and setting up the installation for the video work.

By May we renegotiated to more than double the original budget.

By June everyone was finally ready and able. We shot footage on the 16th, and with a rough first cut done by the end of the week.

By July 25th we had the final masters in our hand and we submitted the second half of our payment to Lew + Ben.

The Vid

In November 2012, we submitted a concept to develop an experimental interactive installation for visualizing city data. In February 2013, we were told that we won the grant. We had 12 months to complete the project, and for various reasons ended up not getting focused on it until November 2013. We completed the project, but it took us extra time to get the video worked out… But, now, here it is:

https://vimeo.com/102370306

Hindsight

It took a long time to get this project completed. From proposal to finished documentation: 18 months. We concentrated on it sporadically, though we did so with a vengeance. It was great to work with excellent creators like Lewis and Ben, and I’m glad we were able to pay them more appropriately than I had originally budgeted. The quality of their work is really high, and we’re happy with the product for sure.

A couple things I’ve learned along the way:

1. It takes time, sometimes a long time, to get a project rolled out and completed properly.
2. Getting from concept to production takes a lot of planning, most of which is dependent on finding funding if you don’t already have the capital.
3. The professionalism and quality that you get from paying people what they’re worth is by far more valuable than paying shitty wages for shitty service only to get shitty products.
4. Going through this long process once has helped me learn how to structure longer-term projects and make sure that timelines, budgets and production happen properly. With a bit of practice I’ll be able to keep that cycle going on and on and on and on.