**Behind the Scenes: Upcoming Artist Series**

I'm excited to share with you guys that I've got a confirmed artist lined up for our upcoming series, which I'll be reporting back on as we go along. This is a huge milestone for us, and I'm thrilled to have someone of such caliber on board. As some of you may know, I've been working with artists and photographers through this show, from John Free to my friend Frank Lopez, among others. My experience working with these talented individuals has taught me the importance of scheduling, reputation management, and overcoming hurdles to get people on board.

**Scheduling Challenges**

One of the biggest hurdles when it comes to working with successful artists is finding a time that works for them. Many of the artists I've worked with have busy schedules, with some spending half the year in one country and half the year in another. This can make it challenging to find a mutually convenient time for filming, but our new budget will give us more flexibility when it comes to travel and arrangements.

**Reputation Management**

Another challenge I face is reputation management. When it comes to artists who are already successful, they often receive numerous requests from others looking to collaborate or feature them in their work. This can be overwhelming, and it's essential for these individuals to manage their reputation carefully. By working with a platform like this, we hope to demonstrate the value of our show and help artists align their reputations in ways that benefit both themselves and our audience.

**Building Momentum**

As more artists get involved with our series, I believe we'll see a snowball effect where others become more willing to collaborate. The success of this project will depend on our ability to build momentum and create something special. With your support, I'm confident that we can make this happen. Our community has been instrumental in helping me grow as an artist and filmmaker, and I'm grateful for your enthusiasm and engagement.

**A Heartfelt Thank You**

I want to take a moment to express my heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you who has supported our show. Your generosity, whether it's through monetary donations or simply sharing our content with others, means the world to me. I've been fortunate enough to work with some incredible people over the years, but your support is what makes this project truly special. I'm excited to share more updates and behind-the-scenes insights as we move forward.

**Behind the Scenes Insights**

As I mentioned earlier, I've had the opportunity to work with a wide range of artists and photographers on this show. Each experience has taught me something new about the process of creating engaging content and building relationships with talented individuals. From navigating scheduling challenges to managing reputation, these insights will be invaluable as we continue to grow and evolve.

**A New Chapter**

This artist series represents a new chapter in our journey, one that I'm both excited and nervous about. With your support, I believe we can create something truly special and push the boundaries of what's possible on this channel. Stay tuned for updates, behind-the-scenes insights, and more as we embark on this exciting new project.

**Community Engagement**

I want to encourage you all to continue engaging with us through the comments section, Twitter, or email. Your feedback and support are crucial in helping me grow as an artist and filmmaker. I'm always happy to chat about our show, share behind-the-scenes insights, and hear your thoughts on upcoming content.

**Looking Ahead**

I'll be doing update videos periodically to keep you informed of our progress and any new developments. For now, I just want to say thank you again for being part of this community. It's been an incredible journey so far, and I'm excited to see what the future holds.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso if you've been following the show you know that last night the crowdfunding campaign that I've been doing for the last month for the artist series of videos that I'm going to produce for the show came to an end and 30 days ago uh we started this campaign and I was looking for $5,000 to essentially cover the travel cost to do another video or two to keep the series rolling and the outpour of support from you guys as a community is simply humbling to say the least we ended up 348 overfunded this means we have a budget of $1 17,39 that came from 309 people and I know those sound like numbers but this is amazing because and this is what I want to talk about today is where we're going to go next with this what the next steps for the artist series are um what this crowdfunding means for the show and where the money is going to go and I want to talk about that because you know crowdfunding is it's very interesting and it's something that this is the first time I've ever done uh just asking for money is not something that I'm particularly comfortable with and and crowdfunding to me has always seemed a little bit like pandering to some level and what I learned through this process is that crowdfunding is not about me crowdfunding is about the community around this show and that was a real eyeopener for me and that's why I'm humbled with this you know the actual project when all is said and done with the artist series is something that is available for everybody to watch for free and I realize that not everybody can donate money um people show support in various ways I realize that people are not in a financial position to help out and I realize that some people just are not comfortable helping with crowdfunding and the special thing about all this is that those 309 people funded and made this possible for everyone to enjoy it wasn't about me it was about making videos that mean something to everybody else and so that's why I want to just take a second and to those 309 people and I'm addressing Everybody by email separately but you know you made something happen is a huge turning point for this show artist series videos these documentary shorts are something that I've wanted to do from day one and when you have a YouTube channel that you run with essentially no budget at all um it's really hard to make those things happen mainly because the travel costs involved and we were able to overcome that hurdle through this and you know when I do these photo lit shows that was kind of when I started those that was the best I could do in place of actually doing something on an artist was to talk about them and so that's what we've been doing and I'll still continue to do those as well as all the other programming that we do on the show but what you guys have enabled us to do on here is to do something new with this show and take it to a level that we've never been able to do and I am very humbled and extremely grateful for that and I wanted to share that with everybody because it's just it's amazing um you know what originally I thought and one of the reasons I shied away from it for so long was that crowdfunding was a matter of coming up with the right idea and putting it on Kickstarter and then if you were lucky enough to get featured on a big website like that there's all these people out there just waiting to give money to stuff and what I learned is it is not that at all crowdfunding to me represents the relationships that I have with you guys as an audience and not just to the people who gave money I mean I had conversations over email in person on Twitter with people who didn't have the money to give but still were offering support in whatever way they could and just the fact that you guys enjoy and watch these videos and keep coming back to see more more um is enough support and the fact that there were 309 people that stepped up and went beyond that to benefit everybody else is just I mean it's amazing and it's very humbling to me so just real quick I want to talk about some things with next steps and what this is going to look like uh I want to talk about where the money's going too um the budget that we have for this is essentially $177,300 rocket Hub does take a percentage of that and Rocket Hub have been amazing through this whole thing um I did this with it was part of a partnership between rocket Hub and Ovation TV uh called creative studio and that's what I participated in uh the support that I had from all those people are amazing and Rocket Hub takes there's basically 4% for that's a service charge for you know supplying the website and all the stuff that they do there's another 4% that goes into credit card processing which actually is not that expensive and so they take 8% at which honestly I am so happy with the whole experience with ro rocket Hub that that is nothing and it's a lot cheaper than what you have on other crowdfunding websites and so that brings us down to roughly right at $116,000 that we can do um there will be some expenses in there involved that are pretty small with mailing out thank you cards and stuff like that that has to come out of that budget but this still leaves us with a gigantic chunk of money to make videos with in my eyes and what I'm going to do with this and I I don't have my budget exactly figured out yet because there's a lot of factors that go into this it'll depend depend on who I'm able to get where they're located and what we're able to do with this but my feeling moving forward with this is that we'll probably have to deal with a lot of the logistics and trying to get people on board and in the next month or two and then we'll start releasing videos and I see this kind of going throughout the year next year as many as we can I mean I'm put every dollar back into this and we'll just see where we can go with this and there are other things that I can do too for instance if there is an opportunity to work with a known photographer who's in New York let's say then is it possible that I could get maybe two or three other photographers involved to maximize the budget from that trip to be able to get more videos out of one trip in the budget and so there's a lot of things like that that I want to do to try to stretch that even further and so we're really just going to put everything back into the show and you know the 30 days that I crowdfunded was a ton of work I also had no idea how much work crowdfunding was and it is a lot um there's all kinds of things to sustain that for 30 days and to raise the money you need and and what I'm realizing now is that was just to get the money to do the work now and this is the real part and but I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I'm really excited about it as far as the next steps go on this I've already started reaching out to two photographers that I enjoy their work and I look up to and I want to be as transparent about this process as possible because I think one it's useful information and I think it's pretty entertaining to see how we're all doing this project together but I'm a little bit apprehensive about mentioning every name I'm reaching out to so I really only want to talk about people once they're confirmed and we have it set up um but the people I'm reaching out to are all living photographers obviously many of them you guys know through the show and the photoed episodes that I've done and I have one that I'm meeting with this weekend and hopefully that'll be our first confirmed artist for the series and so I will report back on you with you guys as we have more information to report on that and so I'll do these update videos every once in a while to let you guys know where we are in that process and I am so excited about this and so looking forward to it um I will give you a little behind the scenes here um you know in the time that I've done this show and the artists that I've worked with in this show um everybody from John free to my friend Frank Lopez to to other people um and then also with my time at the Dallas Museum of Art where I worked at with larger name visual artists uh painters um you know wasn't limited to just photography when you reach out to artists there are several things that are involved there're the hurdles that you need to get past to get them on board to do the video and the first is fairly obvious and it's a lot of scheduling um people who are successful are very busy and I understand that and so the biggest hurdle um you know to start with is just getting people on board with the schedule and finding out when is going to be a good time to film them a lot of artists in fact two that I've talked to uh spend half the year in one country and half the year in another so the exciting part about that though is we have a real budget to work with on this and so this gives us a lot more flexibility with travel and it's going to help make things happen in that regard the second hurdle that you have to jump through with artists and getting people on board for certain things like this is It's a term that I like to call reputation management when I talk about it and it makes sense and what I think is going to happen with the artist series or what I hope happens with the artist series is that the more people we get involved and the bigger names that we get involved the easier it becomes to get other people involved and so you know with reputation management whether artists know they do that or not um you know artists who are successful get asked to do things all the time whether that's charity events whether that's shows whether that's video documentaries like I'm doing and you know if somebody approached you to do a show you'd probably look at some of the work they've already done and see where that gets you um and you're going to manage your reputation and align it in directions that you think are going to help and so I think this will be really interesting I think the the things that we have going for us on this channel right now are the number of views we get per video the number of subscribers that we have and the types of content that I've done in be here before and as soon as we are able to get a name or two involved with this I'm hoping that it snowballs into something that's larger and more successful I mean the whole idea of doing this is to be able to take the show in a direction and do something that we haven't done before and you guys have made that possible and I just want to take a second and say thanks I want to let you know where we are on this moving forward I'll do update videos as I have more information and I'm so excited and from the bottom of my heart thank you guys I always say this is the best community ever and it really is and not just the people who gave money support but everybody who helped by retweeting getting the word out supporting me watching the videos just enjoying them it all helps on some level and like I said with with people who gave money um I want to say that there you know there were a lot of people who gave just like a dollar and that is so special to me because yeah it's a dollar but it doesn't mean a dollar to me what it means to me is that somebody who gave a dollar just went to the trouble to get online pull out their credit card and do something that expressed their appreciation for the show and it communicates to me that you think that this is work worth doing and this is work worth doing for me and I've done it for seven years now and to see that kind of reaction with the audience really deepens that engagement and I just want to say thanks to all of you uh for helping me out on here if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section below wherever you happen to be watching this video or hit me up on Twitter or shoot me an email I'm way behind on emails right now as you can imag imagine but uh anyway love to continue the conversation and I'm looking forward to doing more videos with you guys until the next video I'll see you laterso if you've been following the show you know that last night the crowdfunding campaign that I've been doing for the last month for the artist series of videos that I'm going to produce for the show came to an end and 30 days ago uh we started this campaign and I was looking for $5,000 to essentially cover the travel cost to do another video or two to keep the series rolling and the outpour of support from you guys as a community is simply humbling to say the least we ended up 348 overfunded this means we have a budget of $1 17,39 that came from 309 people and I know those sound like numbers but this is amazing because and this is what I want to talk about today is where we're going to go next with this what the next steps for the artist series are um what this crowdfunding means for the show and where the money is going to go and I want to talk about that because you know crowdfunding is it's very interesting and it's something that this is the first time I've ever done uh just asking for money is not something that I'm particularly comfortable with and and crowdfunding to me has always seemed a little bit like pandering to some level and what I learned through this process is that crowdfunding is not about me crowdfunding is about the community around this show and that was a real eyeopener for me and that's why I'm humbled with this you know the actual project when all is said and done with the artist series is something that is available for everybody to watch for free and I realize that not everybody can donate money um people show support in various ways I realize that people are not in a financial position to help out and I realize that some people just are not comfortable helping with crowdfunding and the special thing about all this is that those 309 people funded and made this possible for everyone to enjoy it wasn't about me it was about making videos that mean something to everybody else and so that's why I want to just take a second and to those 309 people and I'm addressing Everybody by email separately but you know you made something happen is a huge turning point for this show artist series videos these documentary shorts are something that I've wanted to do from day one and when you have a YouTube channel that you run with essentially no budget at all um it's really hard to make those things happen mainly because the travel costs involved and we were able to overcome that hurdle through this and you know when I do these photo lit shows that was kind of when I started those that was the best I could do in place of actually doing something on an artist was to talk about them and so that's what we've been doing and I'll still continue to do those as well as all the other programming that we do on the show but what you guys have enabled us to do on here is to do something new with this show and take it to a level that we've never been able to do and I am very humbled and extremely grateful for that and I wanted to share that with everybody because it's just it's amazing um you know what originally I thought and one of the reasons I shied away from it for so long was that crowdfunding was a matter of coming up with the right idea and putting it on Kickstarter and then if you were lucky enough to get featured on a big website like that there's all these people out there just waiting to give money to stuff and what I learned is it is not that at all crowdfunding to me represents the relationships that I have with you guys as an audience and not just to the people who gave money I mean I had conversations over email in person on Twitter with people who didn't have the money to give but still were offering support in whatever way they could and just the fact that you guys enjoy and watch these videos and keep coming back to see more more um is enough support and the fact that there were 309 people that stepped up and went beyond that to benefit everybody else is just I mean it's amazing and it's very humbling to me so just real quick I want to talk about some things with next steps and what this is going to look like uh I want to talk about where the money's going too um the budget that we have for this is essentially $177,300 rocket Hub does take a percentage of that and Rocket Hub have been amazing through this whole thing um I did this with it was part of a partnership between rocket Hub and Ovation TV uh called creative studio and that's what I participated in uh the support that I had from all those people are amazing and Rocket Hub takes there's basically 4% for that's a service charge for you know supplying the website and all the stuff that they do there's another 4% that goes into credit card processing which actually is not that expensive and so they take 8% at which honestly I am so happy with the whole experience with ro rocket Hub that that is nothing and it's a lot cheaper than what you have on other crowdfunding websites and so that brings us down to roughly right at $116,000 that we can do um there will be some expenses in there involved that are pretty small with mailing out thank you cards and stuff like that that has to come out of that budget but this still leaves us with a gigantic chunk of money to make videos with in my eyes and what I'm going to do with this and I I don't have my budget exactly figured out yet because there's a lot of factors that go into this it'll depend depend on who I'm able to get where they're located and what we're able to do with this but my feeling moving forward with this is that we'll probably have to deal with a lot of the logistics and trying to get people on board and in the next month or two and then we'll start releasing videos and I see this kind of going throughout the year next year as many as we can I mean I'm put every dollar back into this and we'll just see where we can go with this and there are other things that I can do too for instance if there is an opportunity to work with a known photographer who's in New York let's say then is it possible that I could get maybe two or three other photographers involved to maximize the budget from that trip to be able to get more videos out of one trip in the budget and so there's a lot of things like that that I want to do to try to stretch that even further and so we're really just going to put everything back into the show and you know the 30 days that I crowdfunded was a ton of work I also had no idea how much work crowdfunding was and it is a lot um there's all kinds of things to sustain that for 30 days and to raise the money you need and and what I'm realizing now is that was just to get the money to do the work now and this is the real part and but I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I'm really excited about it as far as the next steps go on this I've already started reaching out to two photographers that I enjoy their work and I look up to and I want to be as transparent about this process as possible because I think one it's useful information and I think it's pretty entertaining to see how we're all doing this project together but I'm a little bit apprehensive about mentioning every name I'm reaching out to so I really only want to talk about people once they're confirmed and we have it set up um but the people I'm reaching out to are all living photographers obviously many of them you guys know through the show and the photoed episodes that I've done and I have one that I'm meeting with this weekend and hopefully that'll be our first confirmed artist for the series and so I will report back on you with you guys as we have more information to report on that and so I'll do these update videos every once in a while to let you guys know where we are in that process and I am so excited about this and so looking forward to it um I will give you a little behind the scenes here um you know in the time that I've done this show and the artists that I've worked with in this show um everybody from John free to my friend Frank Lopez to to other people um and then also with my time at the Dallas Museum of Art where I worked at with larger name visual artists uh painters um you know wasn't limited to just photography when you reach out to artists there are several things that are involved there're the hurdles that you need to get past to get them on board to do the video and the first is fairly obvious and it's a lot of scheduling um people who are successful are very busy and I understand that and so the biggest hurdle um you know to start with is just getting people on board with the schedule and finding out when is going to be a good time to film them a lot of artists in fact two that I've talked to uh spend half the year in one country and half the year in another so the exciting part about that though is we have a real budget to work with on this and so this gives us a lot more flexibility with travel and it's going to help make things happen in that regard the second hurdle that you have to jump through with artists and getting people on board for certain things like this is It's a term that I like to call reputation management when I talk about it and it makes sense and what I think is going to happen with the artist series or what I hope happens with the artist series is that the more people we get involved and the bigger names that we get involved the easier it becomes to get other people involved and so you know with reputation management whether artists know they do that or not um you know artists who are successful get asked to do things all the time whether that's charity events whether that's shows whether that's video documentaries like I'm doing and you know if somebody approached you to do a show you'd probably look at some of the work they've already done and see where that gets you um and you're going to manage your reputation and align it in directions that you think are going to help and so I think this will be really interesting I think the the things that we have going for us on this channel right now are the number of views we get per video the number of subscribers that we have and the types of content that I've done in be here before and as soon as we are able to get a name or two involved with this I'm hoping that it snowballs into something that's larger and more successful I mean the whole idea of doing this is to be able to take the show in a direction and do something that we haven't done before and you guys have made that possible and I just want to take a second and say thanks I want to let you know where we are on this moving forward I'll do update videos as I have more information and I'm so excited and from the bottom of my heart thank you guys I always say this is the best community ever and it really is and not just the people who gave money support but everybody who helped by retweeting getting the word out supporting me watching the videos just enjoying them it all helps on some level and like I said with with people who gave money um I want to say that there you know there were a lot of people who gave just like a dollar and that is so special to me because yeah it's a dollar but it doesn't mean a dollar to me what it means to me is that somebody who gave a dollar just went to the trouble to get online pull out their credit card and do something that expressed their appreciation for the show and it communicates to me that you think that this is work worth doing and this is work worth doing for me and I've done it for seven years now and to see that kind of reaction with the audience really deepens that engagement and I just want to say thanks to all of you uh for helping me out on here if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments section below wherever you happen to be watching this video or hit me up on Twitter or shoot me an email I'm way behind on emails right now as you can imag imagine but uh anyway love to continue the conversation and I'm looking forward to doing more videos with you guys until the next video I'll see you later\n"