Entrepreneurship

This weeks lectures allowed us to be a fly on the wall whilst a small group of designers discussed their own entrepreneurship and how they embrace the challenges of building their business.

Whilst discussing what they believed to be the ‘core pillars’ of their business, they mentioned that they quite often find that ‘happy little mistakes’ that they make within the business later become a permanent feature. I really liked this as it shows that not only does everyone make mistakes when first forming an idea, but it shows that a positive can come from something you hadn’t planned. Lots of small mistakes or ‘quirks’ quickly begin to form a realised characteristic business, and it’s these that are more approachable and friendly – in my opinion.

They also spoke about how it’s important to keep balance in your whilst working on a project – although it’s extremely important to have passion about what your working on, you must always be wary that this passionate drive doesn’t make you become narrow minded, making you blind to areas of the project that aren’t working. I think this is one of the hardest things for myself, I can sometimes find myself putting plans together completely in my head without putting elements of it to practice. This usually results in me feeling let down and demotivated when my ideas don’t realise the way I had hoped.

 

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What is an Entrepreneur?

I wanted to represent what I believe makes an entrepreneur using a short animation – partly for the selfish reason of wanting to improve my skills within After Effects, and partly because I always find animations one of the easiest methods of digesting information.

Typically when someone thinks of an entrepreneur, you visualise a person. However the form of said person varies from person to person as they’ll typically imagine someone they admire or a type of person that appears ‘successful’. In this animation I wanted the key point to focus on the fact that I believe anyone can be an entrepreneur, and this is regardless of their appearances – so to achieve this I decided to not include any visualisation of a person and instead I would use shapes or objects to be the main focus.

Originally I played with the idea of using a light bulb to be the metaphorical entrepreneur – but as I wanted my core focus object to be able to reflect many different characteristics of an entrepreneur, I decided to go with something a little more simple.

I’m pretty happy with the outcome of this video and I’m actually pretty proud of myself for making myself simplify the task by choosing a cube rather than a light bulb to animate. I think the message is clear and is delivered well – the only thing I would of changed was the editing of the soundtrack as there are some points where you can really hear the cuts and overlaps – but perhaps this was one of those ‘happy little accidents’.

This was one of my first times working with After Effects and although I did initially struggle to understand the mechanisms of it, once I got a core understanding of the basics I found it easy enough to make this animation. After Effects is something I certainly want to invest some more time in as I think it will come in handy with future products such as app or video designs.

I really liked Mollies approach to the task, I love the simplicity of it. This is something I can actually see up in an office somewhere to act as a reminder on ways you can work together or as an individual to get to where you want to be.