Chris Ruggiero joins me to talk about the thing we often don’t want to talk about. Creators are often most comfortable tearing everything apart and starting over instead of being consistent. Repeating.
Being redundant may be the thing your audience is awaiting.
Entertainers need to try, but not too hard
We know that experimenting is the way to create something great, but who has the time and money to run a million experiments on developing entertainment? You do. It’s the only way. This is especially true if you find yourself working on something that will never pay the bills.
If you complete an experiment, you learn something. Either it matches your hypothesis or it doesn’t. This is really helpful because as long as you’re experimenting and keeping track of what you’re doing, it’s never a waste of time.
It’s easy to feel like experiments are slow and not productive. If you’ve never done standup, imagine what great standups go thru to get good. After work, you immediately head to a bar to signup early for the open mic. You wait around for it to start. When you’re a beginner, often they won’t give you a good spot in the night, so you wait for up to 3 hours to go on stage for 4 minutes. You probably drink to be a good sport. You probably watch the other comics to be a good sport. You leave depleted for that short stage time. If you’re in a big city, you might try to hit a second one that night.
This system works. This system ends up turning out most of the great standups you’ve seen. It’s a grueling experiment process that’s somehow worth it.
I have run into people too often in showbiz who are at the extremes. Some people don’t experiment at all and those who experiment endlessly. Experimenting endlessly is the way to go.
If you start with a clear goal, your experiments will have purpose and as you continue to poke around, you’ll be taking smaller risks and refining instead of staying in this eternal not-goodness that some folks get hooked on. Don’t try ventriloquism, then a week later try writing a screen play, then try being a fountain pen. Try making a video game about purple zombies, then try making it a video game about green ghosts ghosts, then it becomes about yellow ghosts, then it’s about golden ghosts.
It can be hard to not get hooked on the freedom of experimenting and the excitement of luck.
It’s a big ask in just about every genre of entertainment to ask an audience to consume something… even something great. Hopefully the great thing is worth it.
Remember that the people you’re testing on gave you a chance. You will most likely not burn a bridge. This isn’t about that, it’s just about respecting people and their time.
It may be helpful to note also, while you’re not burning bridges, you’re also not building them. You’re not building your fanbase while experimenting most likely, so we gotta get thru the experimentation process sooner.
Having a solid goal is def going to help. For a standup, this goal is developing a tight 5 minute comedy chunk. And how do we make each experiment more valuable? I’ll stick with the comedy thing for the examples.
Get something that functions right away. In the standup comedy example, get to a place where you have 5 minutes that works okay. This isn’t the killer set yet, but it’s something that’s cohesive and can be predictably repeated. This means you’re ready to get on stage with it now and do something that’s not an experiment in case there’s an audience you don’t want to burn, or you want to get feedback from a role model, or you just want to know that you’re part of the way there. Having a prototype will have a lot of great aspects and uses. Most importantly, it might help you determine if it’s worth doing more experiments or changing your goal.
This is my position based on never attending a single “socially distanced performance” … and I’m 100% correct
We still get to do live in-person shows during lockdown by being really crafty! There are all these newspaper articles about clowns performing half way across a yard from a kids birthday party. Drive-in festivals. Concerts performed for audiences on balconies.
It’s a dawning of a new age of entertainment that completely sucks and consistently emphasizes the fact that we are not allowed to be close to each other.
We are evolutionarily programmed to love live entertainment. Even an amphitheater show is just a modernized campfire that we sit around to share hunting stories.
While we’re rubbing elbows with audience members, we’re hearing them clap and laugh and gasp, but we’re also hearing them and seeing them breath, fidget, look around. We are getting primal herd clues about our place and safety in the world. We are getting status shift cues from those around us that help us determine where we fit in a pack of people.
Not only does the crowd set the context of the performance, it sets the context of our identities. I’m not saying you’re going to change your entire image of self from a puppet show, but these tribal reinforcements are soothing to our animal minds.
Besides the entertainment value of the shows, I think we have a responsibility to encourage people to stay at home for all non-essential activities. Creating public non-essential activities is antithetical to public health ideals.
Some people are saying they’re making socially distant performances to encourage more social distancing. This to me is like drunk driving to encourage sober driving.
I’ve had the bluntness of my blog criticised.
I told people their IRL entertainment services have no value during a lockdown. I encouraged people to quit. This is not because I hate showbiz folks, but because I want to get to the root cause of why we’re doing this stuff.
| When people ask my friend Chris Ruggiero how to get into entertaining, he says “Don’t.” He knows that people that people that are determined will be fueled by that, and the others don’t need to suffer the slog. |
I heard someone say this pandemic is going to lead to some businesses shutting down, some businesses maintaining, and some businesses taking off! That can happen every single day of history. It’s true for every thing people create.
If you’re a great entertainer with something to share… If you’re helping the world… If you want to face humanity with a truely generous gift… speed up now! Give more. Increase your audience size. Increase the amount you serve your audience. Find the way to to more business success now.
The toughest part of the pandemic is figuring out what the rules are.
None of those questions are “Does it matter?” or “Is it possible?” If your mission is important to you, those are easy “HULK YES!” answers.
Now the rules of the game are settling into place and the new realm is going to be different. You can’t approach it the same way, just like you can’t approach anything the way you did 10 years ago.
Entertainment can’t succeed if it can’t fail. The more we protect ourselves against mistakes, the more we protect ourselves against kismet. Basically, take risks.
There’s the story of an entertainment thing ( John McClane needs to save the Nakatomi Plaza and he’s putting his life on the line), but then there’s also the meta-story. The story of “This director took a risk” or “This composer is just doing the same thing as always” is just as much a part of the story for audiences.
There can be a lot of layers to the meta, also. Depending on the audience, they might notice all of them or only a few, but only a naive person would think the audience only sees a single narrative and is capable of being focused on only that.
Public speaking is believed to be Americans’ greatest fear. When someone stands out and asks for the spotlight, they’re taking a risk. That risk goes away when that person is crazy or is obviously driven by some crazy-making force (like a fame).
Sane charisma amplifies this risk because someone charismatic is showing a total commitment to deserving the attention.
…So failing is succeeding, but going for the middle is not anything.
So, let’s find the risk. Let’s stuff our stuff full of it on every level. Let’s surround ourselves with bold people. Let’s make ourselves stories of risk and success.
I tell the people I advise to commit to real goals with time constraints, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.
I’m taking my own advice, and also making it public for extra pressure!
My goal is to positively affect two thousand twenty people in the entertainment industry. I want to give a boost to their work somehow. So, I set up this page… If I’ve helped you this year, please let me know!
Starting August 3. A free branding challenge for entertainment pros. Five days, five emails. Join the challenge and up your branding game 100%!
Can you handle it!?!?
Don’t waste your time on getting a terrible logo made.
People come to me all the time to help them with something that will not improve their business. A logo for a small company is the best example of this. I will not accept payment for any job that doesn’t return payment to my clients.
The reason for a company to have a logo is so that it sticks out visually instantly from other brands. This works because people see the logo over and over again. The ones you recognize above – that don’t have words in them -are recognized because you’ve seen them so many times.
The reason these companies can get you to see their logo so many times is because they have a lot of money for advertising.
After they hit the same potential customers over and over again with the same logo, then they start reaping the benefits. The benefits of logo recognition are not huge, but big companies with big profit margins don’t need huge results. They benefit from intellectual property protection (like a soda with a Coke logo is probably made by Coke) as well as brand trust for repeat customers.
A good logo expresses a brand promise in a simple form. The Nike logo is not about a goddess, or a shoe. It’s about enhanced physical performance. To come up with a way to state your brand meaning with a few lines is very difficult. To make that logo mark stand out from all other logo marks in your domain is insanely hard. Companies pay a dirt-ton of cash to get the simplest logo designed. Logos are supposed to have a shelf-life of a century.
The only defining reason for a small business to show identity is to express that there’s something there. I think this is why most people want a logo. They think, “We’ve gotta stand up for ourselves and show we’re not the same… that we’re legit.
This makes sense, but this is why you need simply a type treatment.
When someone sees that film strip, they’re not going to know it’s your company. When someone sees either of these, they probably won’t be sure they’ve seen it laid out like that before. That doesn’t matter. You want people to know your company. Make it clear what your company is. With the top one, you’re gonna really squeeze that logo mark down in order to fit it on a website. With the bottom one, it will be legible at all sizes and doesn’t take up any unnecessary real estate.
… but you don’t have to pick something awesome and it doesn’t have to last very long. All you have to do is make sure it doesn’t clash with your brand. You can make a new one next year. Easy.
Spend a few hours getting your type treatment done, move on to things that will actually help your business… like returning that one email!
Part 1: Great entertainment is about leading an audience. You take care of them thru the whole experience. Leaders are powerful. Leaders think through everything for you.
Part 2: Everything that humans experience is a story. We are incapable of taking in new information or making sense of sensory input without attaching it to a story.
Combine Those Parts: Someone creating great entertainment must give the audience story. A strong, bold, story. Great entertainment overwhelms with story, so the audience can relax. Mediocre / generic entertainment leaves it up to the audience to go off on their own, this is not rewarding, and is possibly even isolating.
You go to a play and it’s people pretending to be different people in a different town, in a different time, where the passage of time is even different and probably the concept of time and space is different.
There’s a bigger story that envelopes this narrative. It’s the story of the entire world as you know it. You came from dinner. You’re sitting in a historic theater with a slight dusty smell. You know one of the actors from another play. You know that it rained outside today. There are a lot of other things you could be doing.
A great playhouse will overwhelm you with story. There’s messages about their mission, the concessions are fun, the building is grand or weird, the employees are wearing a uniform, the preshow is intentional, the choice of the play and the actors makes sense in that venue even. You get overwhelmed with meaning, personality, story. You are unified with the rest of the audience and on the path to accepting, and enjoying the narrative story.
The story is … we’re all here to play pretend. We’ve all come from different lives because we want something great. We are in the hands of capable people who do this because they’re passionate about sharing something great. They want to give to us. They want to take care of us. They are people like us. This is a tradition. This is tribal. This is amazing. We’re experiencing something historic and also something infinitely immediate.
He enters the stage shouting. He’s either dressed like a used car salesman or Mr. Rogers’ cousin. He’s telling you how he’s old and fat and his daughters are costing him money for tutors. He’s calling out what’s in the room and how his wife is at a concert instead of being there to see him perform. It’s a lot. Then, he’s rolling a cheeseburger on a parasol; or flipping a tennis racket under a wheel barrow. This is a story of a man who loves to show you how ridiculous life is. There is no downtime. There is only a firehose of story.
There’s a vocabulary of only so many things a human body can do. Lamonte’s Cyberyoga is physical modern Shakespeare. Not only is it poetry with the vocabulary you’ve seen, but it invents.
He’s serious, contrary, familiar ( yoga / breakdance / modern dance / contortion ) and on a mission to do something. What is he trying to do? What’s important to him to express? Where’s he coming from? How does he have all these influences and what’s he going to do next?
It’s a story of mystery. It’s not “here’s a thing, figure it out.” It’s more “watch this and wonder!” from his costume, to his expression, to his gestures toward the audience, to his music choice. It’s a story of a man who wants you to see him and also leave you questioning.
She’s a vapid singer songwriter, who gets way too far on her beauty. Then, she’s ditsy and annoying too. Then, she’s actually a good singer. Then, it turns out this was a parody of a songwriter. Then, okay, we get it — it’s a comedy song. Then, this is brilliant with an unusual perspective. Then, there’s no way there’s any more directions to go. Then, it goes further! This is a highly trained pro with comedy that doesn’t stop. And she’s hot (I’m married to her).
It’s a story of someone battling every assumption who wants to deliver perfection in entertainment with every moment. She doesn’t keep you guessing… She keeps you assuming and being wrong and it’s delightful and worth it!
If you’re not a magic geek, this may not be for you.
I started doing magic tricks when I was 7, started making money doing shows when I was 11. I’m 41 now… I think. I have booked hundreds of magic acts through Scot Nery’s Boobietrap. I have watched way too many magic acts. All this is not to say that I’m an expert, but to say how many painful experiences I’ve had with magic!
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The lockdowns around the world are leading us to advance technologically more than ever. The bureaucracy that has held technology back for so long got rolled back due to crisis-mode and innovation was allowed to happen.
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