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I have been collaborating with Steve Brown and Steve Newman for a long time now. Steve B is an amazing photographer who as a fan of Collings and Herrin offered us a free photo session and created those amazing shots we used for PR back in the Noughties and Steve N had been designing my posters and flyers and tour programmes for a decade too. Together they have created the images for all my shows since Hitler Moustache. Which shows the benefit of giving the first hit for free. I bet Steve Brown doesn't even like my podcasts. He saw me as a mark and then took me for all I got and all I got in return were excellent images that made my shows look much better than they were and sold me 1000s of tickets.
Steve B also did my wedding photos. So that decision to email Andrew Collings and offer some free work led to something pretty special.
Today we were doing stuff that was largely too silly for these excellent professionals to be involved in, creating some images for the upcoming Kickstarter campaigns that we have planned for Stone Clearing and Self-Playing Snooker.
So we went up to the field to do some moody shots of me clearing stones and then went up to my attic to take photos of all 32 self-playing snookerists and also the two commentators and two referees for a Panini-style sticker album that we're doing. We also did some shots of Ally and Herring while we were there and a couple of shots of Ally on his own. I asked Steve B if this was the highlight of his career and he agreed it was. That's better than a shoot with Slipknot or Doctor Who isn't it?
I was in two minds with the snooker photos and was quite tempted to just use the same photo 36 times. Or I could go to town and try to get different costumes to represent the personalities and nationalities. In the end we mixed it up so that they were basically all me, but with little hints to their personas. It's hard to get across over-sharing in a still photo.
I know these guys will do a brilliant job with these even though an item like this will be of fairly limited appeal. But I think that should make it a pretty collectable item. It's always my mission with the kickstarters to give the backers something that might well be more worth more than they pay for it. This is borne out by the prices items like the Rubik's Cube and signed books and T shirts have gone for on eBay.
So I hope this will be a nice way for people to show gratitude for the last four months of online content, get something collectable and provide us with funds to make even more stuff (though I suspect a lot of the money this time will go to the costs of producing the rewards- but that's cool too).
It's been quite an intense week of creating stuff and doing interviews and podcasts and it was a real struggle to get through my afternoon with the kids, but we made it through to bedtime and a nice meal and a couple of glasses of red wine made me feel a bit better. We watched “This is Where I Leave You†on Netflix, which we'd never heard of, but which had been suggested after yesterday's viewing. It as a stellar cast including Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Jane Fonda, Kathryn Hahn, Timothy Olyphant and Jason Bateman which is impressive in itself. We really enjoyed it, though maybe because it reminded me a bit of “You Can Choose Your Friendsâ€. It seems critical reaction to it at the time was underwhelming (so it's really like You Can Choose Your Friends) and perhaps the pace is a little slow and it's got a lot of chat in it, but I like both those things. Certainly worth a look.
