Thanks for your comment. Lots of participants are being mature about it, I'm sure. This post was never about them, however.
The fact you are participating in Gishwhes in a mature way has nothing to do with the fact that other participants are harassing published authors who by the way, AREN'T participating. I trust you see the difference.
I also trust you understand that for every person who falls victim to the "free exposure" ruse, it causes the price of our collective day rates to drop.
Put another way-- you just admitted you'll do the work for free if it means exposure. So why the should anybody pay you from here on out? Seriously?
This is the prevailing thought we are experiencing in advertising, too. Case in point, I've lost freelance clients who just three years ago, used to pay my not outlandish day rate, and now want to pay me thirty percent less, but expect the same amount of work.
After fifteen plus years in the business, my portfolio speaks for itself, and I don't need 'free' exposure. Also that's a big misnomer, anyway. It isn't free. I don't care how much experience you have-it costs you because now you have to work twice as hard to make ends meet. Put another way, if Neil Gaiman espoused free exposure as you do, he would have participated.
Again I ask, why should a client pay you (or an illustrator or musician) ever again if you can be coerced to do it for free? And now because that precedent has unfortunately been firmly set, if you don't like it, or say no, I need to make a living, that's your problem. Clients can now find another person (a naive college grad most likely) who will fall for the free exposure angle. And fangirls who never heard of you, will beat you up in the comments section for not being down with Misha.
And there goes all of our livelihood.
So yeah, no thanks to free exposure. That's a crock.
I don't know Misha Collins or his show either, but I have been harassed enough on twitter by the slavish legions of fangirls who continue to promote him (and Gishwhes every so often) to know I don't care for his way of using people to promote him, or his so-called charity. And I say so-called because more than a few people now written us to express their feeling that charitable aspect to this whole thing is nebulous at best.
As to your point about self-fulfillment, in this participation, I'm glad you're getting something out of it. Hopefully it will teach you and a lot of other people that you don't need a megalomaniacal sci-fi actor to steer that ship.
You don't need a list. You can make the world a better place with your friends, or down at the soup kitchen or local church. No youtube video necessary.
A few people are crawling out of the woodwork to tell me this.
And while I understand that this may or may not be aligned with the actual Random Acts charity or that over the years, the actual dollar amount of money they've actually donated to charity is nowhere to be found on their website or anywhere else for that matter, I purposefully chose not to dwell on that point.
For one thing, all I have to go by are whisperings in emails. For another, I have no interest in taking down Misha Collins although he certainly seems like an annoying publicity hound. I'd rather just point out the dude's stupid list of things includes begging for content for free as that's something I can see.
It actually wouldn't give me pleasure if the people who participated in this over the years suddenly discovered there was no charity attached. For one thing. I doubt the majority of people would care as a lot are Misha's fanboys. For another, if they got something meaningful out of it, charity or not, good for them, I suppose. But mostly, I don't want to shatter anyone's reality any further than I already have.
Judging by some of the twitter comments and comments on other sites, Misha's Fan Club are already angry zealots. I don't need angry phone calls in the middle of the night from anyone who watches CW.
HA! I love that. It's a nice, scratch your back, scratch my back. The uber Misha fans, seem to be avoiding this point. They like to point out everyone is volunteering and paying to be part of GISHWHES, and so therefore it doesn't matter if they give up their content for free or not.
Unfortunately that's only one component to this story-- the other component, which many are ignoring, is the fact that a bunch of scavenger hunt nutters have been bothering the shit out of authors for free content. And lest you think it's only a few people, it's enough people that Misha had to remind them to stop being so annoying in his updates page.
"Take the brochure item you mention. Some random person is going to sit down with MS Paint or a box of felt-tips and fill a sheet of paper with something vaguely resembling a brochure. It's not spec work. We're not submitting mock-ups. The result won't be evaluated for its suitability for future GISHWHES marketing -- assuming GISHWHES ever actually does any marketing beyond Collins' blog and fan word-of-mouth."
Judging by the way Doritos’ crowd sourced campaign winners are usually done by professionals, I wouldn't be too sure. Also, you'd be able to speak to that better than I could as the Terms of Service is only divulged after you've registered, but if you read between the sarcastic lines of their Commandments, I would suggest you might be incorrect.
Take Commandment #2:
2. Rights - We intend to share your spectacular item submissions with the world. Therefore, by competing in the contest, you agree to the rights stipulations as detailed in the “Rules and Regulations” which you will agree to (or have agreed to if you’re an eager beaver) when you register. In addition to agreeing to these rights, you also agree that we may use your submissions as wallpaper and/or prayer flags for Misha’s moon castle (currently in development).
Also, if you look farther down the list, Commandment 17 shows that they are hosting your submissions on youtube and Imgur. Last time I checked their Terms of Service are uh...more lax.
17. Submission Formats - You need to submit your videos by providing links to them at http://www.youtube.com. Photo links must be submitted via http://imgur.com. Be sure to mark your videos “unlisted” on Youtube so that we can see them but no one else can. Unless otherwise specified video submissions can be NO LONGER than 15.7 seconds. They also can’t be boring or “artificially intelligent”.
Lastly, should you think i'm just trying too hard to prove a point, let me point to Commandment 37, or as I call it, The Terms Of Service Loophole:
37. Arbitrary Rules and Constraints - May be placed on the Updates page during the course of the Hunt. Watch it daily.
By the way, I respect your not wanting to divulge the list as a participant. you don't have to, as its already been posted elsewhere, and I've taken screen dumps of it. To that point, #183's response to NASA was particularly flippant.
Sounds like it's just Stefan being Stefan.
I do think that "storyteller" is a phrase that is overused, especially by a group of more mediocre leaders who somehow feel that doing the same thing with a different name is akin to becoming more current. Let's face it, if you're making a thirty second spot it's a spot. You can call it a "film," because it lives on Youtube, but it's not. It's a TV spot on Youtube. And just because you suddenly decide you are a brand 'story teller,' it don't make it so.
A lot of people in advertising live by the lexicon and therefore get called out by it, too. Rightly so, in my opinion. Some call it out more harshly than others, but not without reason.
To your point though, it's not exactly inspiring to be shat upon by an elitist designer who is wealthy enough to take a year off every so often.
From my perspective, it would be better if we all spent less time trying to come up with clever names for what we do, and spent more time actually doing what we do a whole lot better.
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