Making Snowmen

Here’s a corporate video I just wrote and helped produce. It’s a gamble to share something like this, because as a creative you only want to show your best work, and that’s not usually the same work that pays your grocery bill.

“Well, I’d never do that kind of thing.”
A melodramatic creative wants to fall on the sword of integrity, but I’m not sure that’s real or interesting. The bloody-red sword is what everyone else wants to see. Creative suffering reinforces some myth in their minds. They’ll be off to lunch while you clean up after your performance.

There’s no high drama. There’s no selling out, either, if the stakes are low. It’s all work. Moving pictures. Voices. Cobbling. Choice.

Learning less about the foot than how it fits the shoe.

The Melting Point
Filmmaker Werner Herzog said one should consider himself a craftsman, not an artist. In an interview in Herzog on Herzog, he sums it up beautifully:

“After Michelangelo had finished the Pieta in Rome, the Medici family forced him to build a snowman in the garden of the family villa. He had no qualms about it; without a word he just went out and built the snowman. I like this attitude and feel there is something of absolute defiance in it.”

Image courtesy of BetterLivingThroughBeowulf.com

The Pieta (“Pity”) is the only sculpture Michelangelo ever signed. “Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence Created This.” Over 500 years old, it’s probably the world’s most famous sculpture of religious subjects, showing human acceptance of immense sorrow with serenity and without grief.

Michelangelo's snowman, on the other hand, melted the next afternoon and left a carrot in the yard.