Blackstone Media Blog

In reading Balind Sabiers blog “Interactive Hug”, who is the Art Director at Red Interactive (http://www.ff0000.com) I found several snippets interesting explaining his mindset for conquering the industry and helping to become an industry leader in the field of interactive multimedia websites.

Here is the snippet:

“Through this logic my number 1 goal is to win awards, through that I achieve both my personal goal of effecting the industry and my professional goal of contributing to the growth of my company.”

(You gotta love this mindset)

Here is the article:

http://interactivehug.com/2007/08/27/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-employer/#more-46

After realizing the huge profit margins of Flash I’ve decided to spend some of freetime at home getting to know this complex beast of an application. Before I wanted to dive into this venture I decided to get the right “footing” from some of the best in the industry. So, I wrote Shane Mielke, 2Advanced’s Art Director, to set me in the right direction.

Shane work includes sites from Adobe and Nintendo, to Ford and Motorola. the interesting thing I came to learn about Shane is he came from a troubled home, a family of alcoholics, which I’m sure he wouldn’t mind us mentioning as he has discussed this further in other public interviews. He claims that his passion for beautiful work comes from his ethnic background by being a hard German worker and building his career through motivation from tragedy, and a lot of late hours putting those final touches on his designs.

Shane isnt one of those guys that says “Hey, its good enough, lets push it out the door.” No Shane’s work means something more to him that just a paycheck. And if you glace at his work it shows! Everynight he spends from 11pm until 2am putting the final touches on his sites, not to mention after his gym routine, coaching football, and putting his daughters to bed.

He is a professional bodybuilder, high school football coach, professional photographer, and parent of two. One wonders how he gets it all done. He says its a balance of all his passions from developing his photography site, keeping in shape, and creating the interactive peices.

This kind of dedication makes me want to try harder. It makes me think about having that “vision” for a complete showcase peice, then having to sacrifice the design and its functionality to push it out the door. The more I listen to the uber successful the more I hear about putting in those extra hours to set yourself apart from the crowd.

So out of the conversation I didnt learn that some people just have pure talent, nor did I learn that its about who you know, I learned that its about hard work and sacrifice. And I hope that one day we too can be considered the next 2Advanced.

If you would like to view Shanes personal website here is the link:

http://www.shanemielke.com/

Social Media Explorer (which is run by a local guy) has an excellent post up regarding web video editing. Check it out.

This blog post and Youtube video got me a little choked up. Very awesome!

http://www.churchofthecustomer.com/blog/2008/04/how-free-goes-v.html