Many of the points are just common sense and can be found on any business guide so I won't go into those ones at all. The one that caught my eyes was indeed Intuition.
The writer said that intuition is all you've got. Your feel of the flow of things, your projections of the future based on your experience, your faith to the yet unseen realities. The shape of things to come.
I remember my first forays into event production from like 10 years ago. All these impressive people were doing events and things and that set me off thinking, I'd like to that too. But I was very shy and felt it's never going to happen unless I find someone who's more talkative and would take care of the things I couldn't. That guy never appeared. And never will.
Why's that? Because people like that are too busy chasing their own dreams, that's why. =)
So there I was (and maybe you, dear reader are now) with all this ideas and plans but it didn't look like it would never work out. Everything is expensive, I'm shy, self-doubt, blah blah blah, the list of excuses kept growing.
At some point I had a moment of clarity. Actually I got quite pissed off about things not going the right way and I set into motion. I had a word with Kasai-san who runs this tiny little bar about having a club event at this place called Booty nearby. Kasai was really excited and said let's do it.
At the time, booty was the classiest joint in Sapporo. Maybe even now, I haven't been there for a few years now (anybody need a bilingual skiing guide in Hokkaido? will work for food and tickets). The advertising was the coolest and some of the DJ's I saw there were really hot shit. So I was a bit nervous to contact them about something I felt was nothing yet. Anyway, off I went.
The proprietor, Sebastian guided me to the back room with all these club posters and the DJ equipment, beer cases and things. We agreed on a rent, the top floor lounge area was too pricey for me so we stuck with the basement floor disco. Cash advance. I walked out with a receipt. That was pretty much all there was. Into the promotion. It was bewildering, I'd just talked to this guy I didn't know at all (and who parties with all the nice chicks in Hokkaido), do I have to talk to more people I don't know now? Gasp.
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| club owners can be friendly too =) |
Next goal was to get some art for the flyer. I wanted to approach Mr Kujiramori who's an established artist. We came to know each other via his restaurant (Talk about pervasive art man, he'd designed the lights, the sculptures, the tableware.. the works) where I spend many afternoons trying to communicate about photography with my then quite broken Japanese.
Talking to Kujiramori-san about doing an inexpensive illustration was no easy feat. The guy eminated sort of an Ernest Hemingway ouvre with his Canoes, freshly picked dead wild flowers and trips to Bimini. Sir, could you possibly design a party poster for us for next to nothing please?
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| 'the sea is my teacher' |
Kujiramori said he'd come up with something. And he did. He painted a curious image of an owl with some of his signature characters beating bongo drums. The title said 'PARTY'. It was the most awesome piece and also the furthest thing from a 'normal' club event poster.
The next thing was finding staff. I had never had anybody working for me ever. Who would like to join in with a broke-ass operation like this? Back to Kasai's bar that had become the unofficial event HQ (with opera singers). Kasai recommended this guy called Silver. We had a chat and silver was happy to join in. Now there was staff! Woo-hoo!
There were many twists and turns with the first event, trouble with printing, sponsors, advertising and so on. At one point I felt like just canceling the whole thing but I didn't. There was a date looming and people interested to have a good time. Pushed on.
And we did have a great event! Booty staff was super friendly, the DJ's were awesome and we actually got a nice crowd despite/because of the strange, strange, strange party flyer =)
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| Observe our sponsor logo, Timmion records! |
The guys threw an afterparty as well (surprise!), a night to remember. Message I got was 'Now you've done something In sapporo. Keep doing more'. More work after just surviving that one!
Looking back at the thing now, I acted fully upon my intuition there. And it worked. In games business, you're presented with all kinds of ideas and suggestions about where to go with your game and your audience. It's easy to get distracted. Who's game are you making eventually? And the guy in the article said: Intuition, baby. I felt more resolved to follow mine.
Last night we had a fun bunch of guys at the camp. They're forming the first roleplaying group at camp Hastur starting tonight. I'm really happy about that. We also talked about having a mini-version of assembly here in northern Finland, one of the guys is very keen to set things in motion. In a way I saw him as the guy who I was all those years ago walking up the stairs of Booty.
When in doubt, do something!
Sami
Hastur
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