Creative Rituals

Today’s guest is Alex Wain, a creative digital, publishing and communications wunkderkind with a runsheet a mile long. He founded the tastemaking platform So Bad So Good, taking it to a million followers on his own grit and determination. He’s been the digital marketing manager for Sydney Festival, same for the Ethics Centre, has worked with Universal Music, Rolling Stone, and was even a key part in the absolue epoch of the myspace era. And thats just scratching the surface!

Alex has a very clear vision around what digital presence needs to be to be effective, and he’s really refined his takeaways into a beautiful science. I know that creatives often struggle with the prospect of communicating who they are to the wider world, especially if we have hangups, neurosis or even straight up fear about presenting ourselves on wider platforms. 

This episode is called ‘overcoming the neurosis of self promotion’ and contains a wide range of handy takeaway you can implement as you navigate across the vast sea of white noise that is the digital landscape, and how you can make a lasting impression. 

In today’s episode we speak to Peter Teys, a master of many, many creative disciplines - he’s media he is cinematographer, director, editor, producer, and highly accomplished stills photographer, and in the music world he has spent 3 decades as a drummer and percussionist, performing with scores of artists and performer, and he’s also studying the intricacies of percussion and complex polyrythms in west africa.  

Peter is also one of my best friends - we have known each other since 1992 and have done a whole range of creative things together over the years, we have played in multiple bands across thrash metal and electronic music, as well as worked on a wide range of travel documentaries for World Nomads - so we have both been in the trenches together in terms of our relative creative development and evolution.

Peter is now moving much deeper into observational and factual documentary, coupling his love for rich imagery with the potency of capturing the essence of the human condition. He is working on a feature doc about the challenges and intricicaies of complex post traumatic stress disorder, interviewing a wide range of subjects about their experience with this terrible affliction.

A documentary like this requires emotional sensibility out the wazoo, and in our discussion, we find that to show up to be able to capture the meat and potatoes of a heavy topic, we need to be not only at a relatively optimal point of our own personal physical and mental wellbeing, we also need to know who we are as creatives.  

This episode is called ‘the psychology of the interview’ and is for anyone who is taken with the task of pointing cameras at people, and asking themselves questions of any capacity. It seems easy until you start to do it, and you realise - quite quickly - that theres so much more going on in the interview than meets the eye. Enjoy!