Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ian Helm. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Ian, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge to profitability in freelance creative work is rampant undervaluation. Because creative work, especially good creative work, is hard to attach an objective dollar value to, it is not seen as a sound investment except by romantics, who are an endangered species anymore. On the opposite end of it, there is an enormous population of ruthless cheats and skinflints out to extract value from creative work, using that same lack of objective valuation as a smokescreen. In this environment, every creative freelancer has to fight tooth-and-nail to find and keep clients who offer fair compensation and then actually pay the bill.
As the art director for SomethingAwful.com’s front page for 3 years, I naively thought that I could pour effort and quality into someone else’s business and create good opportunities for myself and others from the artistic equivalent of brute force. It took the incredibly messy collapse of the publication and a nightmarish maze of personal drama behind the scenes to finally show me how badly I and all my fellow creators had been used by the site’s founder. I was an idealistic young artist who just wanted an audience and a place to belong to, and those very common dreams were dangled in front of me like bait for a trap that I fell into repeatedly.
That’s why I tell young creative professionals, freelance or otherwise, the same advice every chance I get: find reliable contacts and keep them. Clients, patrons, fan communities or employers, however it shakes out that you get paid for your work, when somebody actually honors their commitments and treats you with even basic decency, treasure those professional ties because they are rare and getting rarer.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I got into freelancing through academia, having spent about ten years studying film and television production and then creative writing and film history, all the while applying my education to any place in AV work I could talk my way into to keep the lights on. I pride myself on being a jack-of-all-trades within that realm, a screenwriter, designer, editor, photographer, lighting professional, producer and performer, and knowing how all those pieces fit together helps me when I manage to sneak into the job I love most, directing. I owned my own tiny video production company for over ten years and under that banner branched out even further into writing prose fiction, non-fiction and poetry, as well as illustrating books, articles, cards, advertisements and safety manuals, and designing games, puzzles and escape rooms. I’ve worked on award shows, sporting events, professional conventions, restaurants, and many other strange things. What sets me apart from other freelancers is this wide range of experience both in terms of medium and role. Whatever kind of creative endeavor and whatever level of involvement, I understand how to get each phase to the next, from conception to final product, as a department head or a day-laborer. I’m proud of my ability to lead and follow with equal drive towards a cherished goal: telling great stories, making great art, and enchanting audiences within an inch of their sanity. I rest best when I’ve derailed your afternoon with shocking beauty, there’s no other feeling quite like it.
As much as I’d like to claim I got this blessing of experience through nothing but hard work and gumption, it’s simply not true. I was fortunate enough to be raised in a family of artists who believed in me and supported my odd career choices, both incredible luxuries that I didn’t fully appreciate until much later in life. I owe my artistic sensibilities, without which none of my work would have been possible, to being raised by parents who dunked their kids head-first in the creative arts like Achilles in the River Styx. What I want potential clients, followers, fans or, most beloved of all, collaborators to know about my work is that it comes from a lifetime of creative focus and a genuine devotion to entertaining that I, through sheer luck and childish naivete, grew up thinking was a normal way to live. Thank goodness for mad dreams and the hidden niches they’re allowed to grow in.
Any advice for managing a team?
I find it helpful to consider management and morale by comparing them to similar forces involved in how an aircraft functions: thrust and lift. Thrust is the forward movement of the endeavor, the daily or ideally moment-to-moment confirmation that hard work is actually leading somewhere, which is essential to the nuts-and-bolts functions of management but also goes a long way to maintaining morale (nobody wants to think their work is going nowhere). Lift, meanwhile, is the supporting force that defies the gravitational drag threatening to crash the endeavor, the frictions that want to thwart the thrust. It too serves both managerial goals and morale ones, as supporting your people helps them thrive personally but also, ultimately, keeps the entire operation from imploding, which is in general bad for even the harshest bottom-line business plan. Just like in literal flight, getting a creative team figuratively off the ground is about balancing the thrust of the endeavor’s practical potential and the lift keeping the participants’ lives afloat, and a good leader knows how to maintain meaningful balance between these forces, same as any pilot interested in actually getting somewhere in their aircraft.
When I am blessed with the opportunity to serve as a leader I keep thrust and lift on my mind at all times. How do I keep the project moving forward logistically while supporting my people against the frictions that would impede their ability to work? An obvious example is careful budgeting, making sure that costs are kept reasonable so we have enough thrust to get the endeavor to its destination but also making sure enough support goes out to lift your team and allow them to focus. In general I try to cut costs at the organizational level first and the individual level last, as there are often creative solutions to shared problems but no amount of creativity is going to keep your individual peoples’ bills paid if they’re not getting enough compensation for their work. If monetary thrust, which is to say budgeting for the whole organization, fails then you can often figuratively glide for a bit, but if monetary lift, the individual support of your team, fails then you’re usually in immediate trouble.
On the opposite end of this extended metaphor is scheduling, where it’s harder to be generous towards individuals needs vs the organization, but balance is still necessary. Project deadlines are often unmissable and require team members to invest extra hours personally, this is an example of thrust winning out over lift. But a good team will draw inspiration from a well-approached goal and meet the challenge of a tough schedule with solidarity and even pride, if encouragement is in the right places at the right times. And, going back to budgeting, generous overtime rates set this kind of situation up real well.
It’s tempting to think of managerial objectives and morale as being at odds with one another but really they aren’t- a well built team should actually be interested in the endeavor succeeding and automatically derive motivation from reaching objectives that obviously serve that. And I dislike the approach to morale that calls for endless distractions and fripperies. Fringe perks and team-building exercises are generally wastes of money and time that could be handed directly to your team, who would usually prefer a Friday off or a bonus in their paycheck to anything you might think to “reward” them with otherwise. Provide a well-built team with thrust, which is to say apparent progress towards your shared goals, and lift, which is to say adequate compensation for their labor, and all other matters tend to retreat into the background. You’re all too busy flying to care about anything else.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice
One of my pet fascinations is how people react emotionally to technological change We live in a highly polarized society which way, way too often boils down to dumb tribal loyalties masking anxiety with instinctual puffery, and that happens a lot especially within tech. Some people identify as the pro-tech tribe and jump headfirst into every new thing with glee that’s often unearned, while others identify strongly as foot-draggers who are suspicious of the tiniest change mostly on principle. It’s unfortunate that we so often meet new ideas with these knee-jerk loyalties to preconceived notions for or against, either celebrating or despising novelty for novelty’s sake, since, generally, new ideas are neither all-good or all-bad. And that nuance gets lost when it’s all just a zero-sum game of flag waving.
NFTs are a good example. Blockchain technology writ large is an undoubtedly valuable advance, it has the potential to make our old standards of triple-redundant bookkeeping obsolete, providing more reliable records for everything from medical care to factory management, world economies to, yes, even entertainment. Owning works of art is important to the survival of that art, no matter how much we may want that not to be true, and the new markets that have appeared wherein patrons can prove ownership of tokens associated with original artworks are a solution to the wild-west period of rampant plagiarism that the digital art age has thus far represented. A robust business environment of patronage in the arts is good for artists, that’s hard to argue against.
At the same time it’s also hard to argue that the most popular examples of NFTs are all that impressive as artwork goes. With the bulk of the conversation so far about, to put it bluntly, lazy efforts to mass-produce the same monkey drawing with different hats on or other such low-effort tripe, it’s easy to see why some critics hate the NFT scene so vehemently. For all the potential that the blockchain represents towards organizing the business of art, it’s hard to reconcile that with patently disappointing offerings like Dan Harmon’s outrageously overpriced krap-chickens or other laughable modern paper-doll noise stapled to glorified Patreon perk lists. NFTs did not invent fan clubs, they just made them more expensive to join.
It is my sincere hope that the NFT market will get over their initial gold-rush phase soon and start showcasing works where digitally provable ownership is legitimately meaningful, beyond the dumb promise of your costume choices for an avatar appearing in a TV show background crowd, or being able to flip verified pngs to a celebrity collector for a greater-fool’s price bump. And the Luddites have to up their game too, as it’s not enough to embrace “right-click mentality” as some kind of rebellious act (it’s not, it’s just the rinky-dinkiest form of digital plagiarism available). I want to see NFT ownership actually mean something beyond monetary value and who gets to reap it, which is, as important as it may be to the arts logistically, simply not that interesting within the internal logic of the work itself. Certainly not interesting enough to convert anybody from a detractor to a supporter of the idea.
Some interesting work is being done in game design now whereby an NFT wallet can be used as an inventory for ARGs (alternate reality games), a very clever solution to some of the limitations a traditional online database comes up against when building synced multiplayer experiences. Geocaching and escape rooms both stand to overcome some technical limitations too using blockchain tech- it really does have potential in it for the actual functionality of entertainment. We just have to see the exciting new kinds of art facilitated by this tech up front, instead of focusing on speculative bubbles around cat gif memes and arguing about technical details the average audience member simply doesn’t care about. The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake currencies to base NFTs on takes care of a great deal of the environmental concerns too, so that’s a definite advancement, the field is clearly maturing. Like most shiny new tech NFTs just need to get to the point where they can recede into the background and let the use cases shine, they need to become an invisible mechanism for what we’re actually doing with them, and get out of the audience’s line of sight. Then they can become an empowering tool for art, not just another debate point on slow news days.
Contact Info:
- Website: i-helm.com
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/ian-c-helm