Among A Crowd Of Supporters, The Vivid Life Became Realty
A Moment To Take In: Reflecting On What Made Vivid Nights A True Moment For Me As A Creator.
Tampa, FL - It's July 6th, 2023 and I'm already amazed at how fast time has flown since Vivid Nights: The Storytellers took place just 8 days ago. 8 days prior, on June 20th, the days were coming down to a slow trickle. I wasn't necessarily scrambling, but I felt the fire under my feet to get last minute edits in for The Perfectionist.
Go figure, the song is titled "The Perfectionist" and there I am tweaking details so small I'm not even entirely sure anyone would have picked up on it. The details in questions, if you're wondering, was the color grading of the video. But it was also the how strong the contrast was - but also it was a little bit of the overkill on the red in the second half of the video. It was a lot of other things that, had they been done wrong, would mean deleting the render, going back into edits and editing each individual frame one by one all over again. I had been excited that I was done with the video probably about 6 or 7 times, even telling the ladies and having a watch party for the video.
However, the final video that debuted on June 28th, 2023 was Final Version #5, completed in entirety around about 4:39pm.
The different between Version #4 and #5 are likely so small that someone might say it makes no difference. Realty tells me, it 1000% does.
"The Perfectionist" was shot on my Google Pixel 7 Pro. I'm not only battling the obvious here, which is that some professional or social media entrepreneur guy may say, "That's fine that you did that but no client is going to take you serious shooting with your mobile phone". The second obvious battle is that I shot a music video on an Android phone. I was shooting for all of us, and that meant that final quality had to be immaculate.
I watched the video on my phone, then on my laptop (via Google Photos), then in a media player, then on my 72" projector screen, then on my 55" TV - and it almost passed the vibe check.
Almost.
Later on that night, it passed every vibe check with glaring appreciation. The crowd at Vivid Nights went completely quiet and completely still, phones out, pointing to the two monitors in Insomnia ISG, watching Version #5 (or Mark V, if we want to stay in theme. A week later, and in the distance is a night that meant everything to me.
And in the 8 days since the release and the event, I haven't heard a single remark of negativity, or even opportunity.
The Name of the Game Is Consistency. The Secret Is Iteration.
I stood as the featured performer for Vivid Nights, performing 7 mainly unreleased songs showing that first, "The Perfectionist" isn't some one-off project that just came out of nowhere. Second, that there's more of where that came from, and third, that music can serve whatever intention it is intended to serve.
All of the 7 songs but one demonstrate a very important lesson that I learned, and probably only could have learned as the owner of MRVL WRLD, experiencing the journey that brought the brand to life. That is, up until recently, almost none of those songs were ever written down. What lead to the creation of those songs was repetition, and what lead to those songs being performance ready was taking the iterative approach, understanding that good things deserve to have versions that get better with each new iteration.
Proof? Sure. Both the Scientific Method and the Writing Process both support this idea. Since science isn't a real thing in America anymore, I'll remind that the Scientific Method is broken down into five main steps, with one of them being "Test With Experiment". The Writing Process requires that Editing be done and then Revisions. No creative project should ever be limited to one version, one take, or one iteration.
And when I look across every single MRVL WRLD project over the past two years, I've never settled on one version, and the beauty to that is that it has been the #1 ingredient to forming consistency mindsets and consistent habits.
A Boy Bathed In Blood? 3 Versions. Origins24? Multiple versions of background, character development. Plots. We Missed A Meeting? 4 Versions of the manuscript for Some Assembly Required. And for those songs, "Left On Read" only had its second version performed that night.
What we beat ourselves up about as being a perfectionist, might easily be pivoted as creating a variable - managing an iteration of the project.
I didn't have a set list. Instead, I chose songs that I had rehearsed almost religiously, after having to re-record them in 2020 because of them not being back up to the cloud, and then again in 2022 after having to release stolen equipment, and again in anticipation for Vivid Nights. The third time was the charm. Sessions that took hours or days took just a few minutes.
Bringing the four areas of focus together was one thing. Bringing those elements while incorporating Vivid Life Apparel and the Vivid Life Tour - was really a blessing. With over 52 attendees, and with the video now eclipsing 100+ Views on YouTube, and over 7600 plays on Perfectionist content over the last week, I've seen nothing but positives from situation and am excited to continue creating projects like these and sharing with for the enjoyment and consumption of my audiences.