GIRL AT PLAY PRODUCTIONS - by Alex Beauchamp

I love when companies allow their employees to be seen publicly in creative, cheeky, fun ways like the "holiday video" above. When you allow your employees to be human and have fun and then share that fun, you create sparks for coworkers and clients.

Any company that calls itself creative or social needs to share both of those things publicly as much as possible and not just through one dimensional presentation (no, no PowerPoint!).

Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinoff has made a new decree that "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead". This is based off of two under-performing female-lead driven movies in the past year (with Jodi Foster & Nicole Kidman).

I've got to go and pull some statistics but there are very few female driven movies (even Pixar has yet to do a movie with a female lead) but there are a whole bunch of male-lead movies that tank every week and no one seems to find this alarming.

When I first got into movie making I was 19 and very naive - I just did anything and everything for fun. I love movies and the movie making process. Background bits and stories are my passion. I never really took it all serious because it was just so much fun (yes, 20 hours on set was fun). But I was working in Canada, Europe and New Zealand - a much different beast than working in Hollywood itself. It wasn't until 4 years ago that I actually made my way to Los Angeles and began working in "Hollywood."

For the first time I found everything - the people, the attitude, getting things off the ground, getting taken seriously - a challenge. Because I look like I'm in my early twenties, I wear dresses and I have a quick wit that makes people and myself laugh a lot I wouldn't get taken as serious despite the fact I had years of experience, great perception and was completely capable of putting together the right people, coordinating sets or working in post production to get stuff out.

Hollywood is still run by an Old Boys club and these men would think me "cute" but not "capable " until I started proving myself with successfully completed projects (either in development or production). Once people saw the results, the dresses, the laughter and the look didn't seem to matter - as much. However, being female always has and people in Hollywood are very open about this. And the only women who seem to care about this are those who work in the background (producers, directors, script writers, designers, coordinators etc). It's been my experience that a lot of the young actresses just don't care - and they should. They're going to suffer for this with crappy roles that are disappearing.

There have been a lot of women in film that I've been working with on getting projects up and running and they are almost always small and independent - even with big A-List actresses. These projects don't get as much promotion so finding an audience can often be hard but the upswing is that when they do find an audience, they're almost always well received.

I'm not one to do "women only" projects but I do believe in supporting women in areas where we lack credibility and accessibility solely because of gender. I work to help us do what we want and not necessarily to prove anything. But it's comments from people like Robinoff that make me just want to flip the bird and say, "Alright, game on."

Metrics are rarely useful for the community members themselves. Most of what matters is experience. People may revel in the fact that there are over 25 million people signed up at the same service that they are using, but what matters is that their closest friends are using it and that they are getting value out of it. The 25 million people just have the experience in common.

Who are metrics for then? Business people. Venture capitalists. Journalists. Outsiders. People who want a number to tell the whole story (mostly because they are not part of the community itself and it’s really hard to explain the impact of a great community to an outsider). In the end, it comes down to Social Capital and as I’ve discussed, Social Capital is incredibly elusive. It is measurable, but only relative to the source (how do you measure happiness? everyone has a different experience of it), which probably makes it the loveliest, most perfectly decentralized system in the universe, which is where we are headed, but so many people can’t grasp that yet.

But hell, we need to communicate outside of the experienced boundaries of our communities, so we have metrics. We use metrics to entice more people to come and experience our communities beyond the numbers. We use metrics to try and communicate the pride we have in the amazing things happening in our communities. We sometimes have to compare to give others a reference point. But in the end, we know in our hearts of hearts the real measure is in the experience of it. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding (why do they say that, though?).
By Tara Hunt

Fantastic article on community metrics. Need to blog more about this and will. It's been a crazy, busy year thus far and for the first time tonight I've got a moment to think about what it all means and what's next.

I think most artists, creative people, entrepreneurs go through very rough patches when they're young which then causes a lot of us to not do publicly what we were meant to do. In fact, I think we often hide behind "safe jobs/hobbies/days" whilst secretly engaging in our real passions/pursuits.

But when a person finally believes even just a little in themselves to say "My talent is worth something - I am worth something" and then does something (no matter how terrifying or impossible) the result is always magic and life changing.

My take on this is because if you have nothing you don't have fear of losing anything. All you know is you want something so bad you'll do whatever you can to get it. The more desire you have, the less questions you ask and the more actions you take - this is true of anything.

Comfort is something so many of us strive for yet can become a sort of prison if we're not careful. It can breed fear and laziness by tricking us into thinking we can't risk. When it's at that very moment we should.