"How work became joyless"

As recently seen on the Telegraph, I spoke in depth about today’s climate for creatives, the negative impact of Marketing work within Agencies, AI and the reason I pursued creating videos as my full-time craft in the first place.

This conversation came with the momentum of me falling out of love with storytelling & making videos whilst working under Agencies or “Startup companies”.

When I first started making videos, I learned the parts some would consider “boring”. Codecs, frame rates, resolutions, ratios & formats. I was 12 at the time.

By the time I was at University, I had been filming with my own camera for 2 years and I was shooting short videos & albums with models and photographers from Sheffield. Some of the videos I created from these days, I still watch today.

I couldn’t even choose 3 favourite parts of making a video. From agreeing on a concept to planning the shoot day, even going on location and capturing special moments, the connections you build, the feelings and experiences with people on set, normally going somewhere straight afterwards to look at the footage and share the excitement with people watching it all back.

Living, capturing and experiencing adventures like these became an addiction, ultimately I missed celebrating moments like these properly, instead of racing from one meaningless social media advert to another.

Chasing trends, doing what someone else has already done, trying to make it “Cool like this, but more.. us” has ended up on a path of aimless creation, with a lack of heart in the content. The words below are written by Josh Kirby.

Laurence Ellis, 30, from Manchester, was a videographer for a dental marketing agency until he handed in his notice last month.
While nobody had directly replaced him, artificial intelligence tools had hollowed out his work, meaning he was doing less filming and creating himself.
“It almost feels like being a hamster on a wheel, where you’re just running and running and there is no end point, no goal,” he says. “The most fun and human parts of creating videos are being lost. There seems to be a lot less risk-taking.”
Clients, Ellis adds, are much more reluctant to take risks on projects: “Everybody is now trying to just fit in the same box.”
- The Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/jobs/work-benefits/how-work-became-joyless/