A Career In Rewind: Blueprint with the blueprints

Somehow I managed to squeeze in some time to write another installment of A Career In Rewind this week. First of all I want to give a huge thank you to the many Steemit communities for showing me so much love on my last installment of this series. In that post I talked about the making of my first big film project. Today I want to talk about how I got my start in music video production as both my film and my music video career started around the same time. Now, it's one thing to say that music videos was is what I always wanted to do with my career, and that I was inspired by all these great music video directors like Chris Cunningham, Hype Williams or Spike Jonez. I assure you, that is the case, but that hardily makes for an interesting story. The truth is I owe everything, literally my whole career's success to someone believing in me in a very early stage.

Bernie's and Restart at Bento Go Go

Blueprint was and still is one of Columbus, Ohio's most talented and successful Hip-Hop artist's. He has produced beats for some many incredible artists all over the world, formed Greenhouse Effect, formed Weightless Records and worked so hard that he landed a deal with the highly prestigious Rhymesayers Ent.. Over time he went independent as an artist and has been executing an entrepreneurial approach to being an artist since. Around 2004 I moved to Columbus, Ohio from Cincinnati which was a huge leap culturally. I was beginning to love Cinci and it's historically deep counter culture. But my girlfriend was going to OSU and Columbus was starting to buzz as a hotbed for talented people. I was DJing a lot of raves and electronic based events while I was starting to cut my teeth on producing hip hop beats. For the first several months of living in Columbus I spent a LOT of time in the local record stores. I didn't know too many people outside of the rave scene in Columbus and I tend to spend a lot of time alone anyways. This is what led to me becoming a DJ, I just spent so much time in record stores digging crates. Well, everywhere I went I saw stickers for this trip hop album Chamber Music by Blueprint. I grabbed a copy at All City Beats and played that jank until it broke. Not long after that him and Illogic released Celestial Clockwork. To this very day, this album, is my all time favorite hip hop record EVER!! Thankfully my girlfriend at the time forced me to go to the album release show, or whatever it was they did for that. I was mad shy and I wallflowered my way through that night. But man, what a show, they were right here in the city I lived in, and they were doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.... Making weird, obscure hip hop. Eventually I went to a Greenhouse Effect show at the legendary Bernie's where I worked up the courage to talk to Blueprint. Of course it was like any other fan meeting an artist, awkward, clunky, and quick. Not that it was terrible lol, it's was just ok. Every Wednesday my friend DJ Ororo threw a weekly house/dnb event called Restart that was pretty crucial to staying sane during the busy work week. One night Blueprint happened to show up. We remembered each other and wound up hanging out most of the night talking about hip hop and promoting events. From there we started forming a friendship that lasts to this day.

From Faith to Fruition

Many years had gone by after Print and I got to know each other and I had moved to Virginia. While I was in collage I stayed distracted by music and now my new hobby, filmmaking. Through making films and music videos I ran into some people who wanted to book Print to open for Lupe Fiasco. I helped them work that out and got a chance to hang out with my homie. We talked about possibly doing a music video and how fun it would be to work on some films. Eventually Print came across an idea he wanted to do for a music video. The original idea was a something Rhymsayers commissioned. But we didn't get it done in time. Unfortunately the video hung in limbo for a very long time. Print would apologize regularly, to which I assured him that I didn't care. I knew it would eventually get released. Eventually finally came and he got the chance to release our project on the Deleted Scenes album. We wanted this video to utilize simple VFX's but without smacking the viewer in the face with them. In the end the result of the overall project was very inspiring. It was the first chance I got to make a legitimate music video that wasn't controlled by maniacs. Print and I knew what we wanted to do and everyone worked super hard to pull it off. Our VFX team lost a lot of sleep painstakingly rotoscoping these shots frame by frame.

After some time the team I was working with had parted ways. I was still in Ohio going through a tough time when Print asked me to shoot a video for Just Move. His only note was that he wanted it to be really real breakdancing. This wasn't even close to a challenge since I dance and ran with most of the cities dancers. Luckily we got dancers from all over the state to show out for this shoot. We originally had a VFX heavy idea. But after we shot it I knew we couldn't go too crazy. The dancers were so talented that VFX would have been too distracting. So I went for a much more focused approach, slowing the action down so you could catch the details of the dancers. This video became important to me for a handful of reasons. It helped me focus through a tough time as I mentioned before. During the edit I moved back to Virginia and changed my entire business plan and restructured my goals as an artist. I used the video t o debut my new artist name Ason Intrigue, changing from the previous David Damen //. As an artist changing your identity is a pretty big deal. It's like reinstalling windows. Sure you have all your old files, but you are as new as when you started. In this process I knew it would be worth the work to start fresh. It turned out to be a very wise decision. I still work under this name for my main work. This doesn't mean I don't have 5 other aliases lol, nobody will truly know about all the work I have done. There is stuff out there that I have forgotten about entirely, under names I have forgotten about lol. This video was also important because I always told my friends I would honor the B-Boy community and I made good on that word. I hope to do another one soon.

I have very little to say about this video. I helped shoot it and it was a very fun period of working with Print. I didn't have much to do with much more than shooting parts of it. I am very proud of it though XD.

After a couple very busy years of working on projects all over the nation. I get this really long email from print detailing exactly what he wanted to do for his King No Crown video. Keenan Parry (@thelocomotive) and I had already been in Ohio working on a film. So we met up with him and we talked for a while about all the ideas he wanted to express in this video. I think for Print, he might have felt this was going to be complicated. And, technically he was right, it is not easy to make VFX's on this level. But in terms of his abstract ideas, we were right on his page. It made as much sense to use as it did to him. While working on this I would be in Virginia, Keenan would be in New York City and Print would be in Columbus. Print shot himself against a green screen, Keenan took that footage (which was 1 take if I am not mistaken), I drew and animated all the assets. We all worked effortlessly without seeing each other even once while making it. I think Keenan and I had like 1 video chat. It flowed right through us and into fruition. It came with great joy when Print's response to it was "For the first time someone made something exactly how I saw it in my head." As music video director who has made somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 music videos I can tell that nobody has EVER said that to me. That is not a bad thing, projects simply change and morph into something new, resulting in what comes out. But to make something that remained perfectly concise with the original idea never happens. I still have no idea how we will ever top this project.

Similar Interests = Longterm Bonding

There is nothing worse than someone who forces a fake friendship on you because they want what you have. Trust me I have to beat this off with a stick. Print had never been that dude. We genuinely had so many similar interests it was inevitable that we would work together. We shared mutual friends and even lost mutual friends. The most important bond we shared was a deep love for films. We talked technique almost any time we got together, still do. Now, there are a lot of music video directors who do not like the idea of their clients learning video production. Not me, I have encouraged every client I work with to learn the craft. I always had a philosophy that if they could make good videos they would use that to build a strong career. Then they would come work with me for the bigger budget projects. On paper that may sound crazy. But in practice it holds firm. Anyone who makes a music video quickly understands why they don't want the responsibility of a huge project with lots of moving parts. And to be honest, I am not going to spend all my time making basic music videos, which every artist needs. So they should know how to make some themselves. Print was the first person to take this seriously. He asked me if he could ask questions as he learned. A few questions always turned into hours of late night chatting. His questions lead to new questions I had about the craft, they helped keep my tools sharp and they kept me a little sane through a lot of terrible projects. I remember being more excited to get off a film set in New York City to talk about films with Print. He took the craft more seriously than the people I was making that film with. And that is probably the most important thing about Print. When he does something he takes it seriously. He will block off parts of his life to hone in and truly understand what he is learning. It's how he has been so successful and it is what made me respect him so much. Nowadays Print makes a lot of his own videos, he just made a film King No Crown, and even starred in an unreleased film my team made (we can't talk about that yet, it's still not done).

A Namaste and A Thank You

There is not a single project I work on where I don't think about how I wouldn't be working on it had it not been for Print's faith in me. He saw talent in me when I had nothing to prove I had it. Something I tell people when they are starting off and want to know how I got where I am. I say, "Be a better curator than creator." In time you will learn the craft if you take the technical side seriously. But that wont matter if you are not paying close attention to the best of the best, the rarest of the rare. If you have high standards people will know you by those standards and understand that if you are going to make something it too will have high standards. Print knew I had high standards and knew I would take his projects seriously. My team has always used these opportunities with Print to step our game up. Every project we made for him marked a new chapter in our skills and we applied them to his projects before offering them to other clients. I can't wait to see what we make in the future, I am sure it will be crazy. And I can't ever stop being thankful for how much Print believed in me and gave me my first real chances to prove myself.

Well that is that lol, another super long post, if you made it this far shucks, you deserve an ice-cream sundae or something. Thank you so much! Blueprint just announced a new album and I can't wait to hear it. I hope this post inspires you to listen to his entire catalog. Until the next chapter friends!

Namaste,
XD

P.S. If you aren't in the MSP-Peace Abundance Liberty Discord server you are missing out. Head over there and make some friends. They are having a great time and supporting active members. Join us
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P.s.s Shout out to my wife! She's my world XD