The Present from m ss ng p eces on Vimeo.
Role: Copy, Cameraman, Production Assistant, Interactive Consultant
While I started working at m ss ng p eces, I spent a lot of time getting to know one of the founding partners, Scott Thrift. Scott’s one Hell of a guy, clever, emotional, articulate, insane. He’s an artist in the truest sense of the word. I feel like trying to describe Scott is basically what Scott spends the majority of his professional and personal life doing, so any attempt on my part to do so in such a limited scope is always going so suffer by comparison. Immediately we established one of the most interesting dialogues I’ve had in years, discussing topics that flitted from personal to professional to emotional to artistic to moral and back again. Lunches and drinks with Scott became something akin to therapy, we’d both sit down and dissect things, take them apart and try to put them back together again in a more meaningful manner.
Somewhere among these conversations, we started talking a lot about time. Scott felt that time was an addiction that we spent the majority of our lives either embracing or denying. Time was something you perceived intimately or ignored completely and it left you feeling displaced when you finally woke up to it’s passing. It left him feeling like his life was being driven forward by a force that had little or no interest in his perception of it. He felt that if we could reminds ourselves that time is in fact, long, we’d be better able to understand why it seems so short, that this would allow us a more enriched concept of the Present.
So out of these conversations, he created the concept of The Present, a clock that gives us longer scale of time, to allow us to relate to our lives on a more practical scale. It says a lot about Scott that he could be one of the founders of an incredibly busy and prolifically young Creative Production agency such as m ss ng p eces and think that it was just as important for him to follow his personal passions with his professional resources. He pursued the production of this clock relentlessly. He and I researched the hows and the whys and the whats of clock making and we came up against one minor problem. Modern analogue clocks are given their sense of time by a microchip that’s pretty standard. They all have pretty much the same concept of time because they use the same microchip, time goes by second by second. If he wanted to make a clock that went around once a year, he’d have to find someone to make a new microchip where time went by day by day.
Eventually we found a guy at a truly unique place called NYC Resistor who made it for us. At this stage I went along as a cameraman to help Scott document the process. The next steps were sometimes slow, sometimes fast, we went from iteration to iteration, version to version, design to design before we eventually had a working prototype. It was then that we decided to sell The Present on the new creative funding powerhouse Kickstarter, which meant that we would need to finish the video and make it work for that audience. Scott made several versions, we discussed them, he made several more. I gave him an idea of what he needed to achieve and what constituted a “successful” Kickstarter and he finally put together something that I feel is now a model for the genre.
Personal and capable, emotional and articulate while also kind of insane. Scott made a video about Scott.
Our inital goal was $24,000, we sold over $97,000. I feel like that’s pretty successful. Now all we have to do is actually make time to make them.
