Part of our rethinking recruitment experiment.
There was no time to edit the script down to my goal of 3-5mins. I either committed to my process and stopped questioning my work or I failed.
I am cursed with a brain that likes a challenge. I am blessed with experience of 'the process.'
I begin.
I immediately run face first into a wall while trying to find music. I can’t start editing without it, but it also needs to feel right. It needs to listen like video game music, feel inspiring, and read like I am not an unhinged basement dweller info dumping about my favourite hobby instead of creating a video that represents a serious business.
Insert ‘The Internet Is Serious Business’ meme here.
After listening to dozens of different tracks with no joy I decide to pivot and come back to it. I start wrestling with the question of ‘how to create a graph without data points’ instead.
Three pieces of software and six attempts later and I am back to feeling the full weight of my imposter syndrome. My skills are clearly lagging behind my ambition.
Then the doorbell rings.
I take the much needed break with a mixture of relief and frustration. I probably do need to put this down for a bit and my visitor is not in the area often.
They have bought a GIANT pastry from a local bakery.
They are a most excellent visitor.
We have tea and curl up on the sofa to catch up and, before I know it, I have unabashedly info-dumped on them for 4 hours.
I find, to my surprise, that my friend needed this conversation. That they have been actively experiencing the same debilitation curve (while trying to lead a community organisation) that I have been bashing my head against to create a graph for.
We wrestle with the concept of autonomy together, ideas and theories jumping from topic to topic and circling back at a record pace. They become late for their next appointment. I run out of clean tea mugs. There are crumbs permanently embedded in creases of the sofa.
When they leave, I return to the work slightly sticky and deeply humbled.
People need these conversations. Making this video was always about more than me and even if I wasn’t emailing Abby to ask her opinion, I wasn’t doing this alone.
Autonomy didn’t have to mean ‘entirely by yourself’ yet that was what I was trying to do.
It was like re-learning what the words ‘collective impact’ actually meant.
Fuck the fucking graph.
I stick my perfectionism in the bin, throw something together in 15 minutes, and call it ‘good enough’.
That evening my fiancé makes a passing comment about an open source music repository he's read about, and I remember once again that I am not doing this alone. I find, download, and convert the music I need from this community in less than 20 minutes.
Then I start collecting the in-game footage that I need.
I’ve not recorded much in game footage before, because of course I hadn’t, that would have been too easy. But I knew I knew enough.
It takes me 3 hours to capture everything.
And it is at some forsaken hour of the early morning, when I am almost done capturing my final shots, that the giant Trolls attack the base that I am recording at.
This is a problem. I am playing as my main character with all my hard won skills, I don’t have my weapons with me, and the Trolls can destroy the laboriously constructed wooden lighthouse base in just a few hits.
I die spectacularly while leading them away from the lighthouse. I’m thrown half-way across the floor in a blur of pixels, my progress across the map only halted by my character greeting a giant boulder with their face. It has been a while since I have died in quite such an impressive way and I am deeply and profoundly amused at the irony of ruining my skills unintentionally, while teaching myself how to film, while recording the part of the video about overcoming challenges.
If this experience got any more meta, I was going to choke.
I am also slightly gutted that I wasn’t recording when it happened.
I dust off my bruised ego, take my vengeance upon the Trolls, and finish filming.
---
It’s 10pm the next day, after a full day of editing footage, when I realise that I have a problem with the voice over recording that I have made.
It turns out to be a problem I cannot easily fix.
I desperately want to do this on my own (what happens if I have this same problem at work? No one else will know how to fix it??) but if I have to keep re-learning this lesson any more during this project I am going to drive myself insane...
So, 11pm finds me hovering in my long-suffering fiancé’s office-come-recording-studio, as he sits in his dressing gown, half-way to bed for work in the morning, using software I don’t have to fix the issue (that I have been banging by head against for an hour) in less than 5 minutes.
I finish uploading the video to YouTube at midnight.
My elation at having actually finished this project, in such a (relatively) short space of time, fizzles out the moment I open a reply to Abby & Andy’s email.
It is midnight.
Technically it is 9 hours before the deadline.
It is also MIDNIGHT.
I shouldn’t send an email at midnight. WHO SENDS A BUSINESS EMAIL AT MIDNIGHT.
What if I wake them up?!
Does it look better to schedule it to send at 8am tomorrow? Or does that look like a wide-eyed, dishevelled, applicant screeching into their inbox moments before the deadline?
To be fair I felt like a wide-eyed, dishevelled, applicant screeching into their inbox moments before the deadline.
I realise that no matter when I send it, I am still going to look like I have cut it exceedingly close, because I have. It doesn't matter that this has taken dozens of hours worth of work - because that has never mattered in the past. What has mattered is that people don't trust you when you use the energy of a deadline to get a project where it needs to be.
Don't get me wrong, I don’t tend to miss deadlines. In fact that happens so rarely I can't even think of an example offhand, it isn't that; I just... tend get there more dramatically than most. I'm not a very reassuring, orderly kind of creative, I'm a 'watch where you step, I used the entire floor space and I lost the scissors somewhere a few hours ago' sort of creative.
I know, I know, I’m supposed to do better, I should be less ambitious, I should structure things more efficiently… There are many shoulds here (again). But, at the end of the day, my creativity is emergent, it happens as I do and think - it happens when I follow my own path, even when that path feels embarrassingly chaotic.
So, even though I take great pains to hide this side of myself, to project the type of creative people want to see, I need to trust that Abby and Andy are doing things differently.
I need to trust that it is best that they know this about me up front. I need trust.
I send the video application.
I pray that Abby and Andy both follow they what they preach and have turned off their work notifications in the evenings.
It doesn't even occur to me that they won't even notice the timestamp, that I will actually be the one to point it out to them, that (unlike my own training to be a hiring manager) they're not exclusively looking for a reason not to hire people.
So, instead I spend a great deal of energy trying to be nice to myself about that timestamp over the next few days....
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