You're Using Your Own Joy as a Discount Code
The Jake Hallman podcast
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Never Do It Twice: The Rule That Killed My Busywork
The Jake Hallman podcast
Years ago I watched a part-timer in the newsroom resize senior portraits one at a time in Photoshop. Open image. Click. Type. Save. Close. Open the next one. I lasted about four minutes before something in my brain gave out. She wasn't doing anything wrong. Nobody had shown her the better way, and nobody had stopped long enough to ask whether this was a problem a computer could solve faster than a human. That moment gave me a rule I've used ever since: if I'm doing something the same way for the third time, I stop and ask whether I should automate it. In this episode I get into where that...
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Stuck on a commercial? Make it a mini-movie.
The Jake Hallman podcast
My niece Lucy was three the first time she watched a cat food commercial and called it a mini-movie. Kitty was hungry. Kitty got food. Kitty was happy. The end. That's a complete story. And it's better than most of the 30-second spots people are making on purpose. In this episode I get into the mini-movie rule — why the best commercials aren't crammed with logos and features. They're the ones that tell a tiny, complete story. I walk through the three questions that'll carry almost any spot. I talk about a holiday commercial we did that dropped the audience straight into Santa in a...
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AI will destroy (some) photographers
The Jake Hallman podcast
I’ve got friends who are pro photographers. Some of them have portrait photography – headshots – as an integral part of their businesses. Those photographers are about to have the metaphorical rug pulled out from under them by artificial intelligence. So how can they adapt? By co-opting the process, making it so the client doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting, and turning AI photos to their advantage.
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The terror of the blank page (or screen)
The Jake Hallman podcast
Mornings in my world are spent teaching A/V classes to a bunch of bright-eyed teenagers in a rural high school that’s as small as it is full of character. You might wonder what the scariest part of this routine is. For me, it’s the chill that runs down my spine when administrators grace the classroom with their presence for observation. But for the students? It’s the stark terror of facing the infinite possibilities of a blank screen (or page, but honestly, we rarely actually write anything).
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The B Movie Trap - "So bad, it's good!"
The Jake Hallman podcast
Much like “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” there’s media out there that so terrible, so awful, so poorly-done that it flips around the scale back to being good. In films, you have “Plan 9” and “The Room.” Commercials featuring the late Billy Mays (OXICLEAN!) and Vince Offer (The ShamWoW guy with the jaw). Or any commercial featuring a spokesperson with the title “Crazy.” Music brings us the phenomena of William Hung, “Barbie Girl,” “Achy Breaky Heart” and a lot of the disco produced in the 1970s. Literature has “Fifty Shades of Grey” and the “Left Behind”...
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Make a pot.
The Jake Hallman podcast
If you try to make every creative work a masterpiece, you'll go insane. Sometimes, you don't need to make a Ming vase - you need to make a pot that holds water.
info_outlineIf you try to make every creative work a masterpiece, you'll go insane. Sometimes, you don't need to make a Ming vase - you need to make a pot that holds water.