Introducing Atypica4 min read

A while ago, I envisioned building a new* professional video production collective for commercial and non-commercial projects, both as a “creative outlet” for one of my long-standing passions, and as a way to build a specialized service offering that can act as a bridge between my own Montreal-based marketing agency and other collaborators or artists and freelancers.

For various reasons—including my brain getting monopolized by a handful of demanding contracts, and encountering a lot of “new and interesting” challenges in life—I had to shelve that project until I could give it proper attention.

As things quieted down over the past year or so, and after I finished an epic yak shaving journey (including but not limited to “bringing Getting Things GNOME back to life with a new release“), I recently dusted off my old notes and plans to present my vision for this particular creative offering.

The result is the Atypica video production collective.

I spun this into a standalone website and name, because I didn’t necessarily want to make it all about idéemarque, and I didn’t want to overload idéemarque’s own offering anyway–video production is a large-enough topic, and it involves a different-enough set of people in general, that it warranted its own website to adequately explain.

Whenever I get the opportunity to add some more of our video productions that meet or exceed this level of quality in the future, I will; and if anyone you know wants to hire a great video producer and editor who brings a human touch to any topic, now you know where to find my specific offering in that space.

Next, I will be reworking idéemarque’s offering and website. That’s a story for another day.

P.s.: a note on the FLOSS community’s sometimes surprising level of expectations—upon publication of this blog post, someone messaged me to make the case, in very strongly-worded terms, that my video work is not worth presenting; that I “should really remove” my portfolio, and “maybe stick to programming or do product management”, implying I have no idea how to make a worthwhile video, as evidenced by <insert list of nitpicks about some lighting or motion imperfections found in my 2019 GStreamer conference video>. Nevermind that I had to fix the colors and motion of hundreds of clips in post-production to overcome some technical limitations I encountered on-site, and did thousands of (invisible) cuts to fix the interviewees’ sentences because sound quality and story flow were more important to me than Oscar-winning visuals…
So, while I appreciate (constructive) feedback, if any photography connaisseur is watching that video and feels compelled to rectify my shortcomings, please have the following in mind, rather than assuming lack of knowledge or competence: picture the constraints of a jet-lagged run-and-gunner who couldn’t bring even a third of his equipment (let alone any crew to help) on site, and simultaneously had to: handle all technical aspects; chase down attendees all day to encourage them to overcome their shyness and speak to the camera in-between talks; wrestle for physical space throughout the day in less-than-optimal shooting conditions; record over 150 B-roll scenes to complement the interviews in a diversified way to truly convey the atmosphere of the event; try to accomplish all of that in only a few hours. It might not be the most perfect video in the eyes of a demanding DP, but I do think I’ve done a fairly good job in the circumstances.

Luckily I have a really tough skin (as I’ve been involved in free & open-source software for over 15 years), but not many “real world” marketeers or PMs are as understanding as me. Already rare in this segment of the industry due to cultural and economic factors, if other benevolent marketeers received such dismissive criticism when publishing creative work for FLOSS projects, it is no wonder why they are typically nowhere to be found in our community. In the business world, I’ve had CEOs express wild enthusiasm over much, much less technically-refined videos I produced before these—I guess I’m glad they have no taste! 😉

*: I used to run a video production collective decades ago, but none of the material produced back then would meet my quality standards today (whether from a technological or “technique” standpoint), and the team that was part of the collective back then almost all became bankers (they also gave up on their award-winning jazz band. True story.)