We’ve talked about practice before:
- 32: How to practice (according to games)
- 15: Talkin’ about practice (with Jason!)
- 01: Autotelic Exotelic
It’s one of our favorite topics but we should probably stop talking about it and start being about it.
IGTV C4D: Make something daily (and share it!)
(Can’t seem to get the IGTV embed to work but I uploaded this episode to YouTube so that seems to be working.)
What did you do today?
I’m trying to share every day but I need to build the habit again. In June, I was sharing a drawing every day in Karen Abend’s Find Your Flow community. I had some momentum going, built up a routine for making something and then sharing it. I posted something every day for a month, I patted myself on the back, decided I’d take a few days off from sharing since I’d be traveling for a week, and then…
Well. Then not much.
I stopped sharing. I was still making something here and there. I thought I’d try to make an IGTV episode every day and have made one every 3 or 4 days. Not bad, but it’s not daily.
I want to share my answer to this question every day:
What did you learn today?
Why does daily matter?
Well, in the spirit of sharing what I learned, I’ll share some quotes and thoughts about creating things daily.
In “Better Than Before”, Gretchen Rubin writes about building good habits and stopping bad habits. She shares a couple quotes about doing something daily:
Andy Warhol said, “Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.” Gertrude Stein made a related point: “Anything one does every day is important and imposing.”
She says that she decided on blogging daily because it removes the choice. No need to decide if you’ll post today if you know it’s every day. If you choose to post 3 days a week and don’t pick out and stick to a regular schedule, then you have to decide if today is the day or remember that you already posted three times this week or remember that you had planned to skip today because you had something time-bound to write about tomorrow or or or…
(Check out my post with extended thoughts about “Better Than Before”.)
The video I embedded here is an IGTV episode featuring my first Cinema 4D creation where I flawlessly re-created T-Rex’s appearance in Jurassic Park.
If you browse the #c4d tag on Instagram or read about Cinema 4D for, I don’t know, maybe 30 minutes, you’ll run into something made by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann). For the past 11 years, he’s made an image every single day. For the first couple years, they were drawings. The rest have been in C4D.
They’re called everydays and that term specifically seems to be tied to the 3D or motion graphics community. The first time I remember hearing about daily projects it was daily photos and usually called something like project 365. Of course with jokes about how it ends up being more like project 10 days.
Anyway, Beeple’s really done his version of project 365 and expanded it to 3650 and beyond. In an interview with Vice, he answers whether or not he really hasn’t missed a day in all that time:
“I really haven’t. I define a day as by midnight, and there are definitely days where I go really down to the wire. Last night I cut it pretty close. The thing is, you don’t always have an hour, but you always have five minutes, and you can make something creative in five minutes.”
Listening to different Beeple interviews and browsing his archive has been inspiring in a few ways.
- He makes something every day. More importantly, he shares it every day. Then he moves on.
- The first things he shared weren’t close to the complicated animations he shares now. You can see the progression and improvement through the years.
- He just seems generally positive about the whole thing. He doesn’t talk about how important it is to grind, grind, grind.
- He encourages other people to do everydays. He’s open about his process.
Beeple really makes it seem like you could get as good as him if you show up day in and day out. Whether you actually could is sort of beside the point.
If you put in the work for ten years and you aren’t any better, you’ve proven that muses and talent must exist. In 2029, feel free to express your outrage to the gods that didn’t bless you.
Turning some of my attention toward reading about 3D and motion graphics has reminded me of the value of finding inspiration in different places. Daily creation works, even if your body is what you’re sculpting.
Pavel Tsatsouline popularized kettlebells in America. One of the most popular kettlebell programs is his regimen called Simple & Sinister.
Summary: kettlebell swings and kettlebell get-ups, every day
Why daily? Shouldn’t you rest? Here’s what Pavel says in Simple & Sinister:
It may seem strange to recommend training without days off when the goal is storing energy, but moderate daily training will keep the muscles’ fuel tanks topped off, while making tissues resistant to microtrauma and almost soreness-proof. It is the ticket to being always ready.
So, yes, training at 110% every day will eventually break you. But you’re not going at 110%. Over the long haul, moderate and consistent will be healthier than intense and inconsistent.
That can apply in creative work also. You could try and write for 8 hours straight one day a week. Will those last four tired hours be as good as the first four hours? It’d be like trying to work out for 8 hours and expecting it to be the same as working out for an hour for 8 days.
What if something comes up and you can’t write and now you’re going 2 weeks between writing? Not great.
Aim for consistency.
Seth Godin is consistent. He’s written a blog post every day since what seems like the beginning of the internet.
He wrote about his secret in his post “This is post 7000”:
The secret to writing a daily blog is to write every day. And to queue it up and blog it. There is no other secret.
Now I know the secret. Only about 6800 posts away but I’ll get there.
(Actually I like his other secret: write in the editor.)
And here’s what Seth has to say about the daily discipline:
I haven’t missed a day in many, many years–the discipline of sharing something daily is priceless. Sometimes there are typos. I hope that they’re rare and I try to fix them.
I want to build that sharing habit.
Of course, I’ll share more about this as I go along.
(Otherwise, check out my other C4D creation on IGTV about Getting Things Done: For Teens.)
55: (More) Sacrifice — Dream lockbox, levels of sacrifice
We congratulate DC on upgrading from 12 pounds to 24 pounds of UFC championship belt.
Then we express a bit of gratitude that the things we discuss about sacrifice are peanuts compared to what our parents had to give up leaving their homes for different worlds.
Books mentioned
- “Four-Pack Revolution”
- “What Should I Do with My Life”
- “Barking Up the Wrong Tree”
54: Sacrifice — Socks vs. Friends
iPad apps for presentations (and videos)
You bought an iPad and a Pencil, and you’ve been using it to browse the internet and watch videos. Now you’re thinking of making some things with it.
- You’ve been playing with your Pencil but not really finding it useful for making anything since you’re not a professional artist
- You are a professional artist and want to share some things that you’re making but you want to add some context by putting a presentation together
- You know what to do but you don’t want to keep jumping back and forth from your iPad to your laptop
I’ve been making videos and presentations with my iPad Pro for a year now, so I wanted to share the apps that I use regularly in my process.
If you’d rather just watch some videos showing the process in action, you might find these three useful.
I hope it helps you if you’re trying to create. If you haven’t yet, try making a presentation on your iPad. It might take some time getting used to it but you just might:
- …have more fun with your iPad. (If you find it fun making things.)
- …be able to go end to end from capturing ideas to sharing a narrated video of your presentation on your iPad
And even if you don’t go start using all of these apps, you can still cherry pick parts of the process.
Here are the steps I’ve organized the apps into:
- Start with words: Gather all your ideas, start writing, and start structuring your presentation
- Create some images: Doodling will help get the point across and if you’re more skilled than I am then here’s how you can share your beautiful drawings in your presentation
- Put them together, put them in order: Aka Keynote, Keynote, and Keynote.
Let’s get started.
It starts with words
Do you watch hockey?
Okay I don’t, but there’s a great Stanley Cup commercial from a few years back showing how much emotion people can share without using words at all.
But the people in the video just won the Stanley Cup.
Your presentation is probably going to need some words.
Here’s what I use.
Mind map with MindNode: Every time I use MindNode, I leave thinking that I should be using MindNode every day. If you need to generate ideas, you can start with the main idea and expand out in MindNode. If you’re already overflowing with ideas, you can start dropping them in as their own nodes and then group and organize them into shared themes after.
Outline in GoodNotes or Notability: Here’s the main difference that mattered to me: GoodNotes presents a single page at a time and Notability shows them in a scrolling view.
I’ve used both of these note-taking apps extensively. These apps allow you to get the benefits of thinking on paper. It’s good for slowing down and figuring out the structure of your presentation.
Why not just use a fully featured drawing or painting app? Fully featured drawing and painting apps create the temptation to explore brush settings instead of exploring ideas. That comes later.
Write longer parts with Ulysses: I don’t always write full scripts out for video, but many people do. Ulysses will help you write and organize anything long form. (I’m writing the first draft of this post in Ulysses.)
You have plenty of options here. There’s iA Writer, Bear, Docs, Pages, Scrivener. I like that Ulysses Focus mode, iCloud syncing, word count goals, and the export options. (And yes, the other apps mentioned also have these things so try them out and find one you enjoy.)
And some apps that I use all the time for capturing ideas:
Gather with Evernote: In Creative Quest, Questlove talks about how his MP3 collection is his garden. He takes some time every day to prune it and to organize it.
Evernote is my garden. I throw a ton of stuff in there. I’ll put things that are a single sentence to capture a thought about an article I’m reading to full PDFs. This is where I try to keep excerpts to build presentations, videos, and posts around.
Capture with Workflow: This could use its own post, but I wanted to mention that I use Workflow just about every day. I have a workflow on my home screen to run through some prompts to create basic outlines or capture stories from things I’ve been reading lately.
You’ll need some imagery also
You’ll probably watch at least one blockbuster this summer.
Remember the shot of the brachiosaurus in grabbing leaves from the top of the tree in Jurassic Park?
Blockbusters also start with words in a script. (Or in a Michael Crichton book.) But they’re not blockbusters without visuals.
You might not be Steven Spielberg, but you’ll want to create some images to go along with your presentation. Here are the apps I use regularly.
Procreate: There are many many tutorials about Procreate. It seems to be able to do just about anything 2D. I am not a professional artist. I still enjoy using Procreate. The killer thing for your presentations is that it’s able to playback and export video time-lapses of everything you make. I’ve started using those and chopping them up in video to add to slides.
Use MindNode, GoodNotes, and Notability again: Mind maps can create interesting visuals. Definitely better to show that than a bulleted list.
As for the note-taking apps—I used to do entire presentations in Notability. I’d export the slides as PDF files, convert them to Keynote files, then use that to present or record a video on my iMac. Now I usually use GoodNotes to drag images to other iOS apps.
My point here is that you don’t need to use fully featured art apps if all you need is a few words on screen. You can still make them visually interesting. And simpler drawings can be more clear if you’re expressing an idea.
AirDrop (iOS feature): You probably already know about AirDrop. If so, skip to the next section. It was something I knew about but didn’t use regularly until I started making more and more things with the iPad. If you have an iPad, I’m guessing you have an iPhone that you use to take way more photos with. Remember to use AirDrop for transferring things between devices.
I’m guessing you might also have a Mac. It’s handy for sharing things between devices. This is particularly useful if you make most of your presentation on a Mac but want to add drawings made with your Pencil. Just use AirDrop to send the drawing from your iPad to the Mac.
Put them together, put them in order
Keynote, Keynote, Keynote: I love Keynote. You can start making slides earlier in the process. If you have a good outline in your head then you skip mind mapping and outlining and just start creating slides in Keynote.
When I have an outline I’ll jump to Keynote and create slides that just have text placeholders describing what will be on that slide. If you’re doing a live presentation, this is a great way to start practicing early. You can do a really early test run to see if the structure really makes sense and cut or add things before you start locking things in by adding images to it.
PDF to Keynote (if you have Mac): For a majority of videos I’ve made, I create slides on my iPad and export them as PDFs. Then I AirDrop those to my Mac and use the PDF to Keynote app to create a Keynote deck. With that, I can use the MacOS “record slideshow” feature to record a video of the presentation with narration.
Screen recording (iOS feature): I wish iOS Keynote had is the MacOS option to record your slideshow. It’s probably redundant with the screen recording feature. I just learned you can turn the mic on for screen recording (long press the screen recording button in the control center). You’ll have to trim the ends off the video but it does the trick. I’ve started doing this to make IGTV videos.
53: Questions