CHAPTER 26

Creating Your Own Showcase

SHOWCASING YOUR WORK: IS IT WORTHWHILE?

It is reasonable to wonder, given how much effort it takes to create an original piece of work, if it is ever worth the investment of your time and energy to put together your own showcase. I would answer this question with a resounding yes, based on my own observations of the interactive entertainment industry and also based on the interviews I’ve done for this book. A little later in this chapter, we will examine some actual situations in which people have successfully showcased their work. Creating your own showcase can benefit you if one of these scenarios fits your personal situation:

Having an original piece of work to show, or a portfolio of work, is of particular importance if you have not yet had any experience in the field. How else will you be able to demonstrate to a prospective employer what you are capable of doing? A well thought out “calling card” of original work illustrates what your special talents are, where your creative leanings lie, and also reveals something about who you are as a person. A showcase of original work also bears a powerful subtext: You are serious enough about working in this field to spend your own time putting together a demonstration of your work. It carries the message that you are energetic, enterprising, and committed.

Producing a showcase project is a strategy used by small companies as well as by individuals. For example, Free Range Graphics undertook The Meatrix (described in Chapter 12) as a pro bono project in part to stimulate new business, a gamble that paid off handsomely.

However, the advice to build a promotional calling card must be given with a serious note of caution. If you do undertake such a significant self-assigned task, you need to go about it in a way that will set off your abilities in the most positive light possible and avoid doing things that can undermine your prospects.

CONSIDERATIONS IN CREATING A PROFESSIONAL SHOWCASE

For some people, putting together a showcase is a relatively easy task because they can use samples of student projects or volunteer work that they did, or even of professional assignments. But if you don’t have any such samples, or the samples you have are not well suited to your current goal, you are faced with the daunting job of creating something original from scratch. You will have a number of things to consider before you actually begin. The following sections will address many questions about making a showcase that will almost certainly cross your mind.

Portfolio or Single-Piece Approach?

A portfolio approach includes several brief examples of work, while a single-piece approach focuses on one well-developed project. Each tactic has its own pros and cons. With the portfolio approach, you can effectively demonstrate your ability to work in a range of styles and on different types of subject matter. However, the portfolio approach also means that you will have to undertake several different projects and build them out to the point that they are solid enough to serve as good samples.

By showcasing a single piece, on the other hand, you can present a more fleshed out and complete project than you’d have in a portfolio, where the samples tend to be short and fairly superficial. But having just one piece of work to showcase can be a little risky because the work you are exhibiting might not be what the prospective employer or client is looking for, and you will have nothing else to illustrate what you are capable of.

So where does this leave you? It’s best to make the call based on your own individual situation. If you already have a couple of samples you can use and have some ideas about another one or two you could put together, then you are probably already well down the path toward the portfolio approach. On the other hand, if you feel confident you’ve got a great concept to showcase and that it would work well as a demo piece, than that’s probably the best way for you to proceed. There’s no right or wrong answer here.

Distribution Method?

You will need to determine what method you will use to make your showcase available to the people you want to see it. The three most obvious choices are the Internet, CD-ROMs, and DVDs. Virtually any prospective employer or client should be able to view your work on any one of these platforms, so ease of viewing is not a factor here. Your work itself, and your own leanings, is really your best guide. It makes sense to distribute your showcase on the medium in which you are most interested in working. But if you want to work in an area that falls outside of the three already mentioned avenues of distribution—if you are interested in iTV, say, or in VR, then pick the medium that you feel would display your material to the best advantage. One final consideration for a multiproject portfolio: It is advisable to package your showcase on a single platform rather than having a jumble of different works that cannot easily be viewed together. If you have both Web and CD-ROM samples, you might want to put your Web pages on the CD-ROM with the other examples, or vice versa. As another possibility, you could embed links to your Web pages in your CD-ROM.

Subject Matter and Approach?

One of the most important questions you will be faced with is what the content of your showcase will be. The honest answer is that no one can tell you what to do here. The best choices are the ones that most closely reflect your own personal interests, talents, and expertise. By picking a subject you really care about, you have the best chance of producing something that will be strong and will stand out from the crowd. The way you decide to construct your showcase should also reflect your personal taste and style—within limits, of course. Coarse humor and disparaging portrayals of any particular ethnic group are never appropriate. Also, you do yourself no favors by employing a sloppy, unprofessional-looking style.

But what if you have tried your best to think of some topics for your showcase and still come up blank? Then you might consider volunteering your services for a nonprofit institution in your community. Possible choices include your church, synagogue, or mosque; the local chamber of commerce or a community service group; or a school sports team or Brownie troop. Another alternative is to create a promotional piece for a business belonging to a friend or relative.

Although on the surface such projects seem to be creatively limiting, you may be inspired to create something quite clever. For instance, you could design an amusing advergame for your brother-in-law’s landscaping business, or an interactive adventure tale about Brownies for your niece’s Brownie troop. Volunteer projects for nonprofit organizations or for businesses have some solid advantages. They give you hands-on practical experience and also give you a professional sample to include in your showcase, even if the work was done without monetary compensation.

Gaps in Necessary Skills?

Lacking all the skills necessary to put together one’s own showcase is a common problem because few people are equipped with the full range of talents necessary for building an effective sample piece. The problem can be solved in two ways: by teaching yourself what you don’t already know or by teaming up with someone who is strong where you are weak. Teaching yourself a new skill like Flash animation may seem like an intimidating project, but as we will see from the Odd Todd case study later in this chapter, it is manageable. Software is becoming ever easier to use, and books are available that teach animation programs, image manipulation, Web page design, and media authoring. You might also take a community college course to fill in a particular gap.

But if you prefer to team up with a colleague instead, keep in mind you need not even be in the same community. Many collaborations take place in cyberspace, and sometimes they occur between people who have never met in person. Perhaps your strengths are in art, writing, and conceptualizing, while the other person excels at the more technical side of things. If you work together, you can create a project that is more effective than either of you could do alone and also demonstrates your special abilities. This can be a win–win solution for both parties. Of course, you will want to be sure that each person’s contribution is made clear in the credits and that no one is claiming solo authorship for the entire project.

ODD TODD: A CASE STUDY

While it is important for a personal showcase to look professional, this does not necessarily mean it needs to follow a conservative, play-by-the-rules approach. If you take a look at the website Odd Todd (www.oddtodd.com), you will find an immensely quirky piece of work that breaks almost all the rules and yet has become a wildly successful endeavor. This is not to say that everyone should build a project as idiosyncratic as this one is, but it does effectively illustrate the power of being fresh and original and of having something meaningful to say. Essentially a one-person operation and done on a tiny budget, Odd Todd has thrust its creator, Todd Rosenberg, into the spotlight and changed his life.

The site is named for a fictitious character, Odd Todd, and is loosely based on the experiences of the site’s creator, Todd Rosenberg, who lost his job with a dot com company during a radical downsizing. In a series of Flash-animated episodes, we watch Todd as he futilely searches for a new job and gives in to such distractions as fudge-striped cookies, long naps, and fantasies about large-breasted women. The artwork in the cartoons is rough and childlike, and the only human speaking character is Todd, who chronicles his hero’s struggles in a voice-over narration. (See Figure 26.1.) The voice he uses is distinctive, marked by a puzzled kind of irony and bewilderment at his predicament, and further made unique by his urban drawl and a particular way of stretching out the end vowels in such words as money (mon-aaay) and cookie (cook-aaay). And though the site is extremely funny, it does have a serious side, touching on the painful issues of being unemployed and serving as a kind of a cyberspace support system for laid off white-collar workers. It even contains a special community feature called Laidoffland.

Figure 26.1 Odd Todd is the fictional hero of the Odd Todd website, an endeavor that has turned its creator’s life around.

Image courtesy of Todd Rosenberg.

Beginning with just a single animated episode, the site has mushroomed into a full array of features. It includes dozens of cartoons, games, and interactive amusements, all relating to Odd Todd and his life and obsessions. It also includes a variety of daily and weekly specials such as a feature called “What’s Happening,” a diary-like log of Todd’s life, and the Tuesday lunch special-recipe concoctions sent in by fans to nourish other laid-off stay-at-homes.

The Hows and Whys of Odd Todd

Why has a site featuring roughly drawn cartoons about an unshaven, unemployed guy in a blue bathrobe become such a hit? How did Todd Rosenberg set about making this site and how does he keep it going? And as a showcase, what has it done for his career? The real Todd shed some light on these questions during a phone interview and several follow-up emails.

First of all, let’s address one burning question right away. No, the real Todd does not sound like the voice he uses on the website. That is a made-up voice, and many of the situations depicted in the cartoons are invented as well. But the core conceit—that an unemployed dot comer built the site—is totally true. The authenticity of the character’s predicament, the real Todd believes, is an important reason why Odd Todd has become so immensely popular. People identify with it, Rosenberg explained. “They see it and say to themselves: ‘It’s so me!’ or ‘Someone else is doing exactly what I’m doing! ’ ”

Rosenberg began the site after he was laid off from AtomFilms.com. Thinking he’d only be out of work for a few months, he decided to spend some of it doing something he’d always enjoyed—cartooning—and create something that might possibly help him become employed again. The result was the first episode of Odd Todd. The debut episode was a humorous take on what it is like to be newly laid off, with too much time and too little money.

Keeping Things Going

Though Rosenberg’s cartoons have an unpolished, homemade appearance, he can actually draw much better than the work on his website would suggest. In doing the animation for his first cartoon, he made a quick series of drawings, intending to use them as placeholders. But after he refined them, he discovered he much preferred the look of the rough first set and discarded the more polished ones. Even now, with multiple episodes behind him, he still makes five or six versions of each cartoon before he has one that he feels is right. Making the website look quickly dashed out and candid is totally in keeping with the fictional Odd Todd character, though accomplishing the right look actually takes a great deal of work.

In the beginning, however, Rosenberg’s abilities in many areas truly were less than polished. His Odd Todd character would look different from picture to picture; he had trouble making him consistent. In addition, he didn’t know how to synch the sound and the picture properly, or how to make a button to let users replay an episode or game. He kept going back to his books and asking more knowledgeable friends for help before he mastered what he felt he needed to know.

Now that the site has been up and running for a number of years, it still requires regular maintenance and new content. He continues to update it with new cartoons, games, and other features.

Since its launch late in 2001, Odd Todd has been visited by millions of unique users and has attracted major media attention. Dozens of articles have been written about the site, and Rosenberg has been featured on a great number of TV and radio shows. Loyal fans have contributed thousands of dollars to Odd Todd’s online tip jar, one dollar at a time, and they also support the site by buying a great variety of Odd Todd merchandise, from tee shirts to coffee mugs. The site has also spawned a book, The Odd Todd Handbook: Hard Times, Soft Couch, which, like the site, was created by Rosenberg.

Over time, however, the life of the fictitious Todd and the real Todd have diverged. While an episode might show a dejected Todd sending out résumés and trying to find work, in actuality Rosenberg is no longer dejected or looking for full-time employment. Instead, he makes enough money from the site and related merchandise, plus freelance work, to keep going. The success of the site, he said, and the creative satisfaction it has brought him, has caused him to lose interest in returning to the 9 to 5 corporate world. Ironically, he’s actually making a living by being unemployed.

SOME OTHER APPROACHES TO SHOWCASING

The Internet, especially with the rapid spread of broadband, has proven to be an extremely effective platform for getting one’s work seen. Some people, like Rosenberg, have created an entire website to promote their work, while others post their creations on sites like YouTube and MySpace. Still others, like Rosenberg’s cyber support team, show off their work by collaborating with others.

A Two-Pronged Approach

Stacey Kamen, a Web and graphic designer with a specialty in business imaging (giving businesses a particular image via websites, brochures, and other materials), has taken two routes to making her work known. She contributes design work to the Odd Todd site and has built a site of her own (www.StaceyKamen.com), which is totally different from Rosenberg’s.

Interestingly, when she first approached Rosenberg and volunteered her services, she wasn’t thinking about how helping him out might boost her own career. She first learned of Rosenberg’s website when she was working at a dot com company, and it became clear that she was about to lose her job. A friend sent her a link to Odd Todd, and she visited it every day. “It made me laugh, and it took away that alone feeling, ” she told me. “It had a big draw, apart from the humor. You felt you were in good company.”

Still, she told me, the site was driving her nuts because the home page was so disorganized and the navigation was so clumsy. She contacted Rosenberg and offered to help, but he wasn’t interested, maintaining that the unprofessional look was part of the Odd Todd mystique. She persisted anyway, and even sent him a plan of what she had in mind. Finally, the day before Rosenberg was due to make an appearance on CNN, he agreed to let her redesign the home page. She had just one day to do it but managed to tidy things up and add a smoothly functioning, jaunty new navigation bar on the left-hand side of the screen.

That was the beginning of their successful collaboration. Kamen continues to help him out with special tasks, like adding falling snowflakes to the site for Christmas and giving it an appropriate seasonal look for other holidays. In return for her help, Rosenberg makes a point of promoting Kamen throughout his site as “The Official Web Designer of OddTodd.com!” As a result, Kamen reports, 90% of the inquires she gets from prospective clients have come to her from the Odd Todd site. She’s also getting more of her dream clients—companies and individuals from the arts and entertainment world, including musicians.

Looking back on how she first hooked up with Rosenberg and started working with him, Kamen said: “I was coming out of a corporate situation, always working with the same color palette. I was looking for more creative opportunities. It turned out to be the best business move I ever made.”

Kamen’s own website for her freelance design business, which she launched soon after she was laid off from her dot com job, is entirely different from the casual bachelor style of Odd Todd. It is crisp, polished, and elegant, laid out in a highly organized way. (See Figure 26.2.) Its design earned it a Golden Web Award from the International Association of Webmasters and Designers.

Figure 26.2 Stacey Kamen’s elegant style features a bank of scrolling images (far right) and utilizes a quite different approach from Odd Todd.

Image courtesy of Stacey Kamen.

“My website says a lot about me,” Kamen said. “For instance, I love nature and earth tones, and I’m organized.” She says the site also reflects her skills and style at a glance, without making the visitor sift through mountains of text. She wanted her site to show her creative side and eclectic nature. “A site like everyone else’s—standard layout, standard buttons, standard navigation—wouldn’t be ‘me,’ ” she asserted. “I created my site with the idea of doing something different, not only its visual structure, but in navigation as well.” The samples of her work that are included on the site reveal the diversity of her design approaches. “If you are going to be successful in the design business,” she said, “you need to be flexible, and be able to shift gears easily.”

Lonely No More

LonelyGirl15 is another self-made venture that, like Odd Todd, was produced on a shoestring budget and yet thrust its creators into the limelight. Unlike Odd Todd, however, this faux video blog, discussed in Chapter 15, was released at first as individual videos on YouTube. (The series now has its own website.) The project is the joint effort of Miles Beckett, a young doctor who dropped out of his residency program to do something more creative, and Ramesh Flinders, an aspiring screenwriter.

The two met at a karaoke bar birthday party and discovered they shared a vision of producing a new kind of entertainment specifically geared for the Internet, one that would use the kind of video blogging found on sites like YouTube, to tell a fictional story and that would seem so real that it would pull viewers into the lives of the characters. Together they created LonelyGirl15, shooting it in Flinders’ bedroom with a cheap webcam, inexpensive props, and unpaid actors. They planned their strategy carefully, giving the episodes a rough-hewn look like other YouTube amateur videos and even having the main character, Bree, refer to recent videos posted on YouTube to make her seem all the more authentic.

An Almighty Hit

Mr. Deity, which made its debut in 2006, is another Web-based video series made on a tiny budget that has given its creator enormous visibility. The Mr. Deity of this comedy series is God himself, and he is portrayed as a visionary who is not especially good with the details. The videos are far too quirky to ever find a home on television but are a great fit for the Web, which loves edgy humor. Though they do not actually mock religion, they do pose some thorny theological questions in a humorous way. For example, why does God allow terrible things to happen to innocent people, and why do so many prayers seem to go unanswered? The series creator, Brian Keith Dalton, it should be noted, is not only an independent filmmaker, but was at one time training to be a missionary and asserts that he has great respect for religious people.

Like LonelyGirl15, the first episodes of Mr. Deity were released as individual videos on YouTube. They feature a revolving cast of four characters, including God, Jesus, Lucifer, and God’s right-hand assistant, the highly efficient Larry. Dalton himself does almost everything: He writes, directs, edits, produces, and stars in the videos and even wrote the theme music. A one-person crew handles both the camera and sound. Mr. Deity has not only been a major hit on YouTube but also attracted the attention of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which now features two new episodes a month of Mr. Deity on its website, Crackle.

Mr. Deity is yet another example of how high originality is more important than a high budget when it comes to creating a showcase for your talent.

POINTERS FOR MAKING YOUR OWN SHOWCASE

If you are planning to create and build your own professional showcase, the following suggestions are helpful to keep in mind:

The process of creating an effective showcase will take time, but be patient. You will probably experience some frustrations and hit some walls. Such setbacks indicate you are stretching yourself, which is a positive thing. If you persist, you will end up knowing more than you did when you began the project, and you are likely to create something of which you can be proud.