January Recap!
Ahhhh its already the 9th of February and I haven’t yet posted! It was a wild month mostly because I was offered a new job and I took it! I am so excited to start at Rotary International and start using my videos skills for positive change. However, this transition has meant wrapping up a big chapter of my life in a short timeline.
For me, when life gets wild and scary, I drop my creative outlets. For years after my youngest was born, I had very little creative outlets, because it felt too overwhelming and am just now learning to be creative again. Recognizing the importance of creativity now, I’m trying to build supportive communities and create habits that can withstand (hopefully) the pressures of daily life.
This month we had the first meeting of our Artist collective zoom hang. A few ex-BuzzFeed friends got together and talked about what we were working on. This really helped push me to finish my main project for the month. I talked about it in the meeting and knew I had to get it over the finish line. When I worked at BuzzFeed the creative community was huge, but since I left it has been hard to replicate that creative spark. I want to continue to value input and the push from others and foster this collective and all creative chats, collaborations and new positions!
Recapping all creative things this month
The big creative project
I made this 6 second animation by painting on 53 little pictures of our summer adventures and then used Dragonframe to animate them one by one stacked up on a coffee mug.
I wanted to test dragonframe for my future alien project and thought it would be a fun simple project. It wasn’t simple, but painting was so relaxing and I have more ideas for the next photo/paint/stop-motion mashup.
Some things I liked this month:
Dumb Podcasts - Things have been a tad (understatement) stressful over here at the Sosa’s with the new job, that I am turning to my favorite dumb podcasts for that dose of nonsense that does wonders for my soul. Jordan, Jesse Go is a favorite of mine - it’s been an official podcast since 2007 and I have been listening for about a decade. This is very cringe of me to say - but listening feels a bit like hanging with friends, just conversations that are about mostly nothing and go nowhere and no one learns a thing- I fucking love it.
I also love Stop Podcasting Yourself - which is like JJgo but more Canadian. Side note - I use Pocket Casts as my podcatcher and their stats say I listen to the most hours of this podcast. I Said No Gifts which the delightful host, Bridger, reprimands guests that bring him gifts (and they all do), but is mostly just a chat. And lastly Baby Geniuses -it just had it’s last episode after a decade long run this month, hosted by two of the most funny creative ladies in the entertainment world -Emily Heller and cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt. The show has some industry stuff but also a segment on every episode on updates about Ben Chunch - Martha Stewart's pony.
I am only recommending dumb podcasts this month instead of three things because life is crazy.