Jay and Nigel are Tired

It is day one of the workweek after a long weekend here in BC, Canada. Nigel and I were up until 3 on Saturday night and up until 7 am on Sunday night/Monday morning along with about 20 various other assorted hooligans and riff raff. Now, you may be asking yourself "What are these girls doing? Are they crazy, mad cap party people of the type I would prefer not to associate with?" To that I answer: "No, Silly - if you've been following my other blog when I have been directing you to it you would surely see that Nigel and I were busy making a movie"

It's a short film - when it's completed it will only be about 20 minutes long. For that 20 minutes though, we had to shoot 5 hours of footage (which will later be edited down.) Filming that five hours of footage took approximately 30 man hours over the weekend, and countless man hours before. I won't bore you with the details here, as you can read all about on the Ratball Productions blog. Needless to say Nigel and I, along with about 20 other people, are very tired today.

The great thing about taking on a big project that you don't get paid for is that you know everyone involved is doing it out of love: They might really like you, the project idea, or the other people involved around them, but whatever it is, everyone is drawn to work together by something other that the old "what's in it for me." I think you can capture this sort of love in a paying job but it is an extremely rare thing. Problem is, most companies don't know how to motivate employees through love or passion and frankly not all jobs involve work that is inherently easy to love. I do think that passion is the secret both to building a great team and retaining one - so managers, you've got your work cut out for you :)