Transcripts
1. Introduction: I've had this interesting experience of having my work shared across the world, my creative digital storytelling, or creative content. In this Skillshare course, I'll take you through why that happened and why those topics mattered at the time they did. I used emotional based content that connected with a global audience. In some cases it broke through international borders and languages, but it always spoke to a global conversation that was already happening in real time through social media. I'm Michael Rage and in this course called going global, I'm going to review why those topics connected with an audience on an emotional level. How from a range of topics from the World Cup to Jurassic Park to the Malaysian airliner that went missing in 2014. In all these topics beared emotional weight, they were timely and they struck an emotional cord in the viewer. Their visuals also broke through the noise they always did it in an authentic way and I think that's the key to a lot of this. I found opportunities to story tell, where to create visuals, to celebrate, and add something authentic to the conversation that was already going on in social media in real time. I've created work that caught the eye of the right audience, editors and people in major publications like the Guardian. I've worked with the CNN, I've worked with the National 9-11 Museum. What I did with them is I made relevant content that was unique, it was visually interesting and it was engaging. That's something that if you're at the Guardian, they're gonna want to put that up because that's a great fit for their coverage of the World Cup. That's the experience I've had with a posted my portraits for the World Cup. They put it up to the audience of 1.2 million followers. Now, that's an honest I never could reach on my own. But through having the right work and putting up in a timely fashion, amazing things like that can happen. I'm going to walk you through some of those scenarios. Why some topics did really well, why some maybe didn't? How you can connect with a global audience and once you find that your work hits a global stride like that, you know the creative in your work and really thrive. It's quite an amazing experience to connect with people across the world. I'll be walking you through those scenarios and the various techniques I did to accomplish that in this class for skill share. Thanks for watching. I'm Michael Rage.
2. Topic and Content Selection: All right, this is class number 1 in Going Global. Thanks for joining me on skill share. For class 1, this is only going to focus on topic selection and what content you're going to go after. I spend a lot of time thinking this over and considering what to go for and why to do it. This first phase is really just about watching the world just the way you would on social media, and you're really just looking for moments that are unfolding across the globe. Things that are rallying people together. Current events tap into that. Look for that, look for the depth and the richness of a story that's going to fuel your creative. Really you're just observing, you're watching, you're considering, and you're making a selection again, that's going to offer you depth of a story. Topics that offer depth generally have an audience that they can connect with on a deeper level. This is like a fan base that's already associated with it, or maybe even a whole generation of people. Topics also that take on big issues that's critical, that gives you the depth and the emotional value that I think fuels it and propels it into the world. For over the years, examples I've done, like I said in the intro from Jurassic World to the World Cup to the World Trade Center. These are always have been key moments across the world. Examples of these, I've said worldwide trends, something that's globally captivating and gripping. There's a tragedy with the Malaysian airliner that went missing in 2014 but people were generally very gripped by the story and of concern or wanting to know what happened. That was a good area to work with. Moments that have become movements in our world, like the women's marches, we've seen beautiful artwork inspired from that. We're living in a time of global change. That's like Brexit to Trump. Global sporting events, that's another good one. The World Cup, it's got a duration, it's a month long event. Global conversations happening in the real world. It's like the Tokyo Olympic 2020 logo that I had preschoolers redesign. Film premieres happening across the world. Jurassic World, like I said, was great nostalgia for Jurassic Park. Good tie in there. That movie in 1993 was a huge hit across the world. Again, global audience could stuff there. Another one is historic anniversaries. I've found are interesting to work off of. One of my earliest pieces I did in 2012 was just looking at the connections of the Titanic topic very close to my heart, like many other people. I connected it to New York as a place, point of destination for the ship that never made it, of course. Film series, finale, those have been good for me. Used once the Madmen finale and tied it in with my wife's grandfather. We actually ran an ad agency in Manhattan through the '50s, '60s and early '70s. It was a good fit in terms of real history and personal thing, of course of Mayan. I want to move on to timing. Other things I've done also had been really critical with timing. I used recently the 15th anniversary of 9-11 to revisit some sketches I did in 2001 and expanded them with gifts through the 9-11 museum to tell a story through memory by doing animated gifs of rescheduling an experience I had in the city after the attacks. Then using real sketches I did in 2001. See that ties into authentic topics. I'll come back to that in another lesson. I mentioned the World Cup. This is a key sporting event happening in real time. Now what I mean with timing with that is there's a big window of anticipation leading up to the events. That's a great area to build in some of your content, and then you have the duration of the sporting event to continue to roll out a series piece. I mentioned Jurassic World that came out in June of 2015. Again, great timing for people reliving Jurassic Park is a franchise. Great memories with that nostalgia, that's great, that was great for my video tape stuff in the '90s. Timing is critical for the conversation. It makes it relevant. They always say timing is everything. That really does count here because you have this window of time. It makes a self-imposed deadline which I always felt were good in my experiences. It just gets you to get that work out there and keep it going. I talked about handling topics with sensitivity, honor, and respect. I think the Malaysian Airlines is an interesting example of this. I never want to do something that was too exploitive, but it was clearly becoming a global, worldwide topic. CNN was constantly running pieces about it for over a month. I actually waited a little bit. I waited until about a month out and then I even found that some of the networks that I later connected with in Kuala Lumpur were doing basically one month anniversaries at that point, so it was too soon to jump on it. Again, you want to be careful with those topics and treat them with respect. But what happened with the MH370 story is by telling a narrative of a memorial through time I documented the plane as it flew through different continents and major cities across the world. That connected the world back to the singular plane through the photographers that took the pictures. I talked to the guys that shot the real thing. It was a story told through the lens of photographers [inaudible] very interesting memorial for the plane, if you will. Because of that authenticity and honesty, it really connected with people in Southeast Asia. I understand it did go trending there in terms of that area of the world and through Facebook, and it offered an interesting place for memorializing the plane on the Internet. None of this I could have expected to happen. I just thought it was interesting and connect photographers and a global story and have them participate together in one singular timeline. That was an interesting area of both global event unfolding and then doing it on a very personal, smaller level. Through that global story, MH370 taught me how to break down these story elements, these emotional aspects into these certain ways and here's how I figure they go. It's realizing there's a connectivity to the world. There's an emotional weight in a topic or a story. It's captivating. It's a sense, like I said, if you build it, they will come. It became a memorial place on the Internet, which was unexpected. It was engaging to people. It cut through the noise of many stories covering the same thing, instead of focusing on where the plane wasn't and looking for the plane, I focused on where the plane had already traveled through its lifespan. That was a different way to look at a topic. Then like I said, it's breaking it down and sharing it on a personal level. This [inaudible] instincts with your own fascination for topic selection, your own passion and knowledge, it's going to fuel the lifespan and your own interests in the project and moving the project forward. I know that may seem really obvious, but again, always these topics have been great interest to myself, either aviation or the World Trade Center, Jurassic Park, but it's something that I haven't been hugely passionate about myself, and I've just share that with other people in that organically found its audience because of the largest of all those topics. Look for that common bond in a story. I think through the wide range in connectivity to the Internet, you can really harness that and find stories and topics that connect to our most biggest and common humanity. I think that's an interesting time we live in where you can put out something, really produce it on a very high level, but do it that it's very relevant and it connects with an audience. That's the biggest things that I think about with topic selection. That covers selecting your topic. In the next course, we're going to look at research and visualizing your project.
3. Visualizing and Research: For this next class, this is all going to be about developing the visual style of your project, an area I call visualizing in research. I like to use the mood boarding technique, something I've pulled from logo design and things I do with that. It sets a tone. Obviously, you're going to tear sheet around and pull a little bit of this and go to various Behance or dribble or illustrators you've seen through social media, you start finding the voice that could be historic things and it could be current things. In the case of Oxfam, when I worked with them on the sharing hope campaign, we looked at mood board graphics from around the world, protest graphics particularly were great because they expressed a mood or feeling of social change that was great. The madman piece I mentioned, we looked at vintage pieces of illustration work through original Time Magazine and Life Magazine. These great illustration points to jump off of to tell that story historically. Sometimes I found that some of the best stuff reads it a visual glance, so a quick read on social as a matter of seconds, a lot of those things haven't even been fully immersed in language. They're just visual reads of a quick thing. This was the case with the football Atlas. Obviously, the shape of countries are common across all languages and cultures, and these famously known football star is playing in the World Cup where a great combination. People instantly got it. It was a quick read, so that's a great way to certainly hit international audiences. Things didn't need to be translated. We talked about roughing it out, visualizing the concept, this is a lot of time also where take some time with it, kick it around, work it out in your mind, and getting immersive in it. They think about the value of shower thoughts, a moment of here and there, and you think of things organically and think it's a great way to work out a topic in your mind. It's next there I want to talk about is staying inspired, going deep on something. Again, in the case of the World Cup project, I used international radio stations. There's a satellite to direct friends who it's called radio garden. You can spin the world like a globe and pull out streaming radio stations across the world for free. It's a cool way just to get full immersion. I firmly believe that great art is made and the enjoyment of the art it comes through in the work itself, so your enjoyment, your pleasure in doing it, I think creates a great field in the yard. I certainly think that was the case with the football Atlas was fun. That also spins out to the idea of authenticity. It goes without saying, but I've mentioned before working with your own knowledge and passion is great. It'll feel the project going forward. But what I think it also makes like the enjoyment of the piece, it makes authentic work. I think there's something to be said about honesty. I think people have a very quick read of it on social media. I think all the work I had done had struck people in a very honest way. It was done promotes too hard, he didn't try hard. I think it was enjoined on the merit of how it looked, how it read the people, a tone it gave. In this phase, that's where it's great to just develop that voice, find the creative style that is going to create the whole vision or series or however you're putting out the work. But this is the time to do it and feel it and find that voice, and the next course, we're going to be looking at creating the art itself and putting it out there.
4. Developing Art and Visuals: This is class 3, this is developing the art, creating the art, developing it, executing it, creating your visuals. In this phase, you've been influenced by your visual research, your mood boarding, now you're going to really create the visual voice, you're going to find that style, you're going to marry up with the story you're going to tell, the tone you're going to set, the medium that often I've paired with it. Best told that story in an artistic style, sort of linking the medium with the content was always great for me. Just gave it more meaningful, just gave it more visual meaning because much of this phase is about art creation, it's going to relate a lot to the techniques specifically in the medium that you're going to work with like I said, I've done a range of time lapse, illustrations in pen and ink, and watercolor. Time lapse cameras setups alone is a whole thing, charcoal portraiture. So I'm not going to be going into these specific techniques of any of those medium or various styles of drawing I did, or our creation or design, it's really going to come down to linking it, this is really just about finding the best style of art creation to fit your content. I think that's what matters here. As the style and the voice of it visually starts developing your project is you see it come to life in front of you. One thing I've found is I've kind of branded it, I name it, I give it a interesting, kind of intriguing title. I shorten it, I make a concise, consider making a good hashtag out of it. We're talking about like basically just branding it with a basic word mark is what I've done. You want to stick to short names, nothing too tricky, just kind of intriguing, concise. Ideally it's short enough, it fits at the end of your website, just your site.com slash that, no to hyphens, nothing you have to say verbally. So when you're doing maybe a thing like an audio podcast or an interview, it's a very short, memorable thing you could say it, people be able to find it that way, it's easily searchable, that's good. Another experience I've noticed is the creation for artists is just an organic normal thing of life. Generally, if your work is in a broader public sense, people are very fascinated with seeing how it was created, how did it come about and how did you do it. Documenting some of that process to your phone shorthand is kind of something cool to put back later and look back on how it's made. Another interesting example I've had with this is the guardian came to me with the World Cup project, the football Atlas and I had gotten enough ahead of the project initially to start doing some overhead time lapse drawings when I had drawn them by hand with the charcoal pencils and sped that up in just a few seconds. I did a handful of them. Well, I had time before the project really escalated, but what came from that is they took those time lapse drawings, combined it with the iPad Pro time-lapse sketching and made honestly which was a much more media rich piece than arguably some of the drawings I did. They put that up on their Instagram account. To their one million followers, I think it got something of 28000 views and just a lot of activity, a lot of interactions and things like that. So there's a lot to be said with not only doing it, but showing how you did it becomes more of depth to that. Working with different media and combining and selecting the right art style are creation on our medium with the voice you're kind of creating and the tone you're setting with the work is, I find that nothing's really repeatable. In other projects I did really could take from one style to the other, I always made them varied. I think interesting mediums told certain stories better than others, so that's why I chose a watercolor thing over a pen technique and in that, you have a lot of success and failures. It's interesting to learn from that and kind of push yourself to create something new each time with each story. That covers a lot of the things I've noticed as you're delving into the project, you are immersing yourself, you're creating it, it's coming to life. This is generally enjoyable, kind of you're breaking new ground phase of the project. We're just going to look at class 4 and that is one of my most interesting things that combine social media back into the equation and that's trial ballooning. We're going to talk about putting your work out there and kind of gauging a response.
5. Trial Ballooning and Putting the Work Out There: All right. We're up to class four. This is what I like to call trial ballooning. It's really about putting the work out there and seeing what happens. That sounds really simple, but let's go into the trial ballooning thing. That's going to be how you put it out and how you test it, how you start feeling out, gauging a response. Also, this is the discovery and pitching phase. This is where you hope to be seen by the right kind of influencer, editor, blogger, that kind of thing. One thing I look for is early indicators, and those are defined as, broadly, it's the audience embracing the work. Yes, it's the likes, it's the comments. Sometimes you get direct messages from colleagues and that's great. Validation or confirmation of what you're going down is a worthwhile path. But one of the most rewarding things I've found in here is people across the world are finding the work and re-posting it. This is some of the best indications you can get. Often I've found that the most rewarding thing is seeing some of the work retweeted back to me in foreign languages, I think it's thrilling. Another rewarding thing I've had happen is people have taken the work and put it up as their avatars or profile pics, headers, things like that. These are great indications that you're going down the right path. It's encouraging. It's great to see the work connect with in that way. It's personal, it's nice to see people use it. So in this case, stealing in that way is a really good thing. Another experience I've had is targeting a specific story about a region. In this case, it was the Tokyo 2020 logo and how I asked the preschool class to redesign it for me. I had that project up within six hours, I was starting to get pings from the mainland of Japan. I thought that it was thrilling and a really good indication where things were going to go with that. I later got on some major Japanese websites and some huge influencers put it up to their huge audiences. So this stuff is great. In this phase you're really gauging interest. You don't want to live and die by the numbers. It's easy to look at that. My wife has often joked me and she asked, "How's your popularity contests going?" You can obsess over page views and things like that. But you're generally just getting a sense of if what you're doing is encouraging to you or you find that it's really hitting its stride. It's a great discovery phase to be and it's great. While you're putting the work out there in this trial ballooning sense of the word, and it's you using your social media account as a test case or a test tube and you're trying stuff out, you're seeing what sticks. In the case of the World Cup Project of the Football Atlas, as I develop the idea through, it was Thursday before the Memorial Day weekend break and I was trying out, working out the idea of how the player would integrate with the map. How much should the jersey would see your cities through his jersey? How I would overlay? What would the scales be? After drawing it I also used the iPad Pro and really worked the idea. I did it in a hasty way, I didn't perfect it, but then I just put it out there. I didn't say anything like, "Well, what do you think of this?" I just went with it and I started developing a name for it which I actually switched later. But to my amazement, this first test for this England player, Harry Kane, got over 12,000 organic impressions. I only have 2,000 followers. The numbers didn't add up. Something about it, with all the likes and the interest it got it just hit a massive stride within three days. Like I said, that was a Thursday night, winding down for the night, maybe put it up at 1:00 AM. By that Saturday, yeah, it had lapped 12,000 views. It was encouraging to see that I was onto something. That was the early test idea that became the Football Atlas. Those areas are great and social media could show me that and show me I was onto something. I want to talk about positioning the art, really putting it out on social. Using top hashtags, works of course. Go for that. In the case of the World Cup it was actually spelled a handful of different ways in different languages, which was great. But also go deeper, use foreign language, different hashtags in Arabic or French or whatever works there to really find that audience, it has been helpful. I've also targeted football writers, influencers in Egypt, particularly with the Mo Salah drawing. That was really helpful. Little things, little things. You can get picked up and retweeted it. That is good stuff there. The other area I want to talk about is email. Pitch your work in the most concise way possible. Target the right kind of editors or bloggers or influencers on sites, but make the email concise. Write it like a scan read. Figure it may not even be read. Just get to the point, put up the link and stay brief, stay on point, say concise. Now, my experience, unfortunately a lot of my cold emails have never been read. They're often ignored. This is normal. I think people don't know me and they get a lot of emails through the course of the day, that's fine. But on the encouraging side, some of the best publications I've landed on like The Guardian and how these things unfolded were organic and they discovered my work through other interviews that were aggregated up to The Guardian. So there's all different ways to do this. Like I said, some of the best opportunities I had were when writers and influencers found the work organically. Almost all the open submissions on sites that aggregate creative work or artist's work, I never got responses from them. Maybe once. One group from France got back to me. I'd say it's still worth doing, but it has a low return. That's just been my case. Not to discourage you. Also consider targeting your work and creative content to a very specific audience. If it's a very specific fit. In this case, when I worked with the 9/11 Museum, I noticed that the president of the museum is very active on Twitter. So it seemed appropriate to ping him a link of some of the work I did. I kept it very concise. I had on archives, some of the original sketches and art I had done in art school and the aftermath's reaction to the 9/11 attacks. So this was authentic. I thought it was a good fit. I tweeted out, did not think much of it. I never really heard back. I didn't get a response from the tweet, no favorites, likes, nothing. Number of weeks passed, then get forwarded email through the 9/11 Museum that is really a forwarded email through Twitter because he had email notifications set, that did not occur to me, and had pinged him this message. Now it wasn't relevant for him, but he forwarded it to the curator. This was great for me because it opened up a dialogue, created a conversation with me and the curator at the 9/11 Museum directly. I had gone down to Lower Manhattan and met up with her. She was very interested in how I showed my work. She was interested in acquiring my blood donor card that I used and donated blood on 9/11. Now I did actually donate some of my photography in the aftermaths of the attack. I went down to Lower Manhattan and that was a very moving experience. It was a huge honor to have my work included in the 9/11 Museum. I also then indicated that I was interested to still tell more stories with the 9/11 Museum going forward. So we developed a project that fall that included some of the original sketches I had done in 2001. We were doing gesture drawing and figure drawing at the time of the attack, so I had a lot of that original content. Then I went into the museum to see everything firsthand in that fall, and then I later sketched my memories 15 years later, but did them through an animated GIF sequence. So very engaging media, very interesting animations of how the sketch forms. The museum was really interested in developing different ways to story tell through their museum blog. Together we worked on that. I called it New York, a City United, and that's on my site as well. It was a huge honor to work with the 9/11 Museum. Targeting specific tweets and messages that's a good fit can work out for you. I've talked a lot about getting your work out there, having it happen organically, and I've also noticed in the course of doing this that I've never needed to promote my work by means of payment. I've never paid for promotion. This has always happened organic. I talked about the honesty in a good fit of work, authentic work. I think that's what worked with the 9/11 Museum. They saw original work, they considered a coming of age thing, being in college during the 9/11 attacks and how the world changed. I had responded to that with original art, so that's a great fit. No paid promotion, that's been great for me. I think it's also worth mentioning that I don't really consider myself to have a large audience. In terms of measurement of social media today's days, in today's age and things like that, I have about 2,000 followers. That's not a lot. I don't think. It's some, but it's not a lot. I certainly don't have much of an Instagram either, it's a few hundred. Again, I've been amazed to see how you can get your work out there. In the case of my audience, that's one thing. But when you get up on a major publication, like in the case of The Guardian, their audience of 7.2 million people saw the Football Atlas through their tweets and promotions for their article about my work. That's where you're really making huge strides and really getting the work out there in the world. So one other smaller area I'm going to just mention here as we wrap this up is I've also experimented a little bit with Reddit. I've had some of my work posted by other people. I've posted some of my own work on Reddit. I've had mixed experiences with it. It's certainly a way to get it out there quickly. Sometimes it doesn't stick. However, I have noticed that NBC News, for example, does aggregate Reddit and look for stories and review the feeds to find interesting stories to aggregate. I have noticed them on my site and they have directed link through Reddit, so I know that. Wrapping this up, I'd say another interesting experience I've had is timing. A lot of times, creatives work into the evening hours and some of them are night owls and things like that. As I've developed ideas and I talked about trial ballooning, when I put the Harry Kane sketch up that was probably 1:00, 1:30 in the morning. I was wrapping up for the evening. Enjoyed the experiment, trying the new medium out. The iPad Pro was great. To my amazement, I've woken up the next morning with quite a lot of responses, notifications and things like that. So that is to say that, think of I'm here in the Eastern Seaboard of the New York area. People are coming online through Europe and starting their day, and sometimes you can hit an interesting cycle there where you could get discovered in those ways. So a lot of that stuff is in waking up to international interactions and things like that. Timing wise, consider even putting an international clock on your phone. Take note of the time in London, the other side of the world in Kuala Lumpur or Australia in that case. That's the amazing parts of social media, of course it's going on at all times around the world. They may seem obvious, but it's interesting the interactions you can get overnight. We've covered a lot of this in trial ballooning, putting the work out there, finding interesting ways to have a connect, find the stride, find its stride, and seeking the right influencers, right bloggers, right writers. In the next class we are going to go into critical mass. That's going to be the final phase in this series. It's going to take you through a lot of the interviewing techniques, ways to keep momentum going and different experiences I've had with interviews and getting large publications to then run the work. Thanks for watching. We'll see you on the next one.
6. Critical Mass: Final class, is class five, what I'm calling critical mass. At this point hopefully the projects gained momentum, it's rolling forward, you're hitting your stride with it, it's finding its audience, it's doing all the things we talked about, connecting emotionally. But now the interesting part comes where you're getting interest, you're getting some interview requests. One thing I've noticed here, as things really start hitting their stride and the duration of how far that'll go, just has a lot to do with the merit of the idea, the original creative voice you develop the style and how far it'll take you. I just find that that has a lot to do with that, timing fit all those things we talked about. Another thing here I want to mention is making the work easily curated and available for discovery on your website. A lot of times I've gotten published. People don't really approach me. They don't ask me like, oh, I'm going to ask you permission for this. Sometimes they do. It's a nice courtesy to know what's going on. Oftentimes, I've just wound up on websites. I once wound up on BuzzFeed, they didn't tell me and suddenly I was on BuzzFeed. So that's about making your site really well curated and laid out as a lot of designers do, and creatives, and why I say this is you're really just setting up the publisher to easily retell your story without even talking to you, and that's the key there. So that's the ease of discovery and that's going to lead more likely to you getting published. That's a great thing there. When you start sizing up an editor and you start talking to them and maybe they'll reach out either through direct messaging, some emailing back and forth. A couple of thing I've just noticed is excited I am to get published. Just notice their demands. They've like an editorial schedule where they slot you in, how long that takes. I've had a lot of editors come to me with such excitement, and an interview and then they'll sit on it for a week, week and a half, and then it'll run later. That's fine. I think that's all pretty normal stuff. So just be patient in there. Again, it can take them a little bit of time. They have to put an editorial team on it, things like that. The next thing I would just talk about is it's the first time around at having this experience certainly for the MH370 thing, I never expected the kind of attention I would get. I understand it generally went viral in Southeast Asia it got picked up on Astro Awani. They did a piece on that. It generally happened through Facebook, I could see the referrals, but I was never sure exactly how it started. But just for a little example story, and again with timing being Kuala Lumpur's starting their day as we're going to bed in the United States here in the East Coast, is that the length it took me to take a shower on one morning at 8.00 AM or something. I don't take long showers, but in the course of that, the project jumped to another 800 hits on my phone between checking it going in, and checking it coming out. At that point, I knew something was going on. So it was really quite amazing, actually, how fast once it really finds that audiences it's on a roll, the lengths it could go are really quite amazing. Another experience I've had is larger publications will aggregate stories of smaller news outlets, maybe local or regional ones. So take all and any interviews that come your way. Of course you would, but my point is, you never know where something smaller could go. For example, with the Jurassic Park remake with my friend that I from the nineties on VHS and all that. We did a small interview here on nj.com that also went on to print in the Star Ledger. But then within a few days, and with Jurassic World coming out, People Magazine aggregated the entire story and put it on their site. So one morning I woke up and the hits shot up and the view shot up on the video, in quite an amazing way and they never really reach out to me nor do they tell me and they also didn't tell the NJ people. So this all just came as a surprise. So again, you really never know where something small can lead to something really quite large. Same thing happened also with Jurassic where all of a sudden as it escalated through social media, we were suddenly in the print edition of the USA today. So probably a lot of people in hotels saw that, so that's cool. But overall, some of the best publication opportunities I've ever had, is people came to me, they found the content organically and they approached me for an interview or permission or what have you, and that's flattering. It's really great when that happens. So moving ahead when the project really gets into this phase of interviews and getting published and links going out on these major websites, and then their social feeds with very large audiences. One thing I've noticed too is, though is great and all that echoes your efforts in the kind of audience you reach. Of course, there's a huge way to reach a big audience through someone like The Guardian and their 7.2 million followers that they had at the time that they post my World Cup portraits. One thing I did notice during that series is still some of the tweets that I would generate with the original drawings as I continue to develop the illustration piece, just kept all the momentum moving. So in other words, not one website is going to just make it go viral or make it hit a big audience. It's the combination of you creating it, willing it into the world, and those major news publications coming in behind you. It's an interesting thing I've noticed. Another thing I've had happen in my experience, is something I'm going to call being in the spin cycle. You're so immersed in the story, and interviews with people who are coming at you, and you're so compelled and focused on the projects. Sometimes I've just had people step back in interviews, asked me, why did I do it? Sometimes I've fumbled to tell a good answer. Sometimes a lot of cases, like I said in the whole outline of this series is I was compelled to tell a story in an authentic way, connect on an emotional level. I think there was always a great opportunity to tell a fascinating story that connected with an audience. I think that's a hugely rewarding thing that I've enjoyed through social media, that's the positive experiences I've had with that. My thought here is just take a moment to reflect on what it's been like, why you're motivated to do it. It's good to have some of those things in forethought of your mind as you get interviews. So again, if everything is going exceedingly well, again, I can't guarantee really any of this. I've always found this a little both enjoyable and a little stressful at times. But you never know, you never know really what hits, and when it does, it can really happen in a big way, and during the series there I of course had the football Atlas going. That did so well that the phone on a given Sunday afternoon, it got so many heads and yeah, I left the notifications on, and yeah, that was fun, but it got so hot that I had to take the battery and take the phone and just put it in the freezer briefly just to get it to cool down, and then went on to momentarily forget about it and came back to a very cold phone. So these things are interesting and they unfold in unexpected ways. At this point in the project is, you probably going to hit the kind of audiences you're going to hit in the scope of the project, in the window of the time that it's still relevant. It can have a cycle. Sometimes you're watching the wave crest and peek and sometimes it's flowing out and it's over, but enjoy the run. I guess my point is enjoy where you're out with it. Sometimes you think, oh, I'm going to get on the next biggest thing, or maybe the last site you got on was the biggest one. But enjoy the moment you've done a lot of hard work. I know I have. I got champagne the last time this happened when I got on The Guardian. It was a lot of hard work. I didn't do it to get on The Guardian, but it was a great reward, and it was great to be recognized, and part of the conversation, and part of the World Cup celebration. It was really fun. So that's what it's like. I think I've tried to outline my own experiences, what I've gathered from them, things and insights I can offer ways that things have worked out for me, and ways things didn't work out as well. I hope you found this class useful on skill share here tonight. Thanks for watching. I'm Michael Raisch.
7. Conclusion: This has been going global on Skillshare. We looked at this in five parts. We discussed how storytelling, creative, and interesting unique visuals can connect with a global audience and how that happens through emotionally based content. We covered this in five parts. The first one was Topic Selection. We reviewed why to pick the certain topics to go after. They're timely, they're unfolding across the world through social media in real time. Then going on to visualizing your style of art, you're going to do a lot of research here and we talked about the mood board, tear sheeting technique to go about this, you're finding the voice visually. Then it's going about developing the art, this is immersive. You diving in deep. You're going all in on a style of art. You're picking a medium that best fits the way you want to set a tone and create it and then visually communicate it. Trial ballooning. That's a lot about using your audience and gauging a response, you're hoping to connect with the emotions in your audience and finding the right group then fan base and hoping to look for those early indicators I mentioned there. Then on to critical mass. At this point the project hit its stride. You timed it within a measure of event across the world. It's been of interest to people. You're fielding interviews and hopefully it's taking off further from there, but it's all been because of your hard work. These have been in my experiences. I hope you enjoyed me sharing them from everything from Jurassic Park to the World Cup to the Tokyo 2020 logo and the pre-schoolers I had redesign it. It's been really fascinating for me personally to connect with people across the world and made some great friends and had been exposed to different cultures. That concludes our course, Going Global made possible by Skillshare. Thank you for that. Thanks for joining me. I'm Michael Rash, wishing you the best. Thanks.
Michael Raisch, Content Producer and Brand Designer
