Our End-of-year Round-up

“Christmas is a season not only of rejoicing, but of reflection”

—Winston Churchill

It’s been a pretty amazing year for us at Sketch Videos. Since the beginning of January, we’ve produced 45 videos for 34 clients. That's nearly one video every week!

We’ve made videos for insurers, inventors, and investors; for people in transport, technology, telecommunications.

We’ve made videos for students, for superannuation, for staff; for hospitals, government departments and political movers and shakers both here and abroad.

We’ve made black and white videos, sketched with colour, stuck on real-life objects and used motion graphics like never before.

And we’ve loved making each and every one.

We’re also excited to say that our graphic recording and graphic facilitation services have taken off in a big way.

We’ve grown from just our Chief Doodler Matt, to an ever-increasing team of trained and terrific graphic facilitators. (And just what is the collective noun for a group of live sketchers? A constellation? A design? A flourish. A slate?)

We’ve made wall-sized posters, postcards, discussed ideas, debated language and found creative and insightful ways of telling your messages. And we can’t wait to see what’s next.

We love a challenge. We love seeing what’s possible and what we can do together.

2016 has been a good year. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Test your Doodling Skills

There's a fabulous new app that's sure to amuse: Quickdraw with Google.  

Pit your drawing skills against Google's artificial intelligence and see who comes out top.

Make Your Dreams Come True

This year we’ve learnt a lot about following dreams and working hard to make them happen. We’ve worked with dreamers and planners and adapters and thinkers and makers and believers and changers. And we’ve learnt lots along the way. Including…

1.     Dream Big. If you’re going to dream, you may as well dream big. Have something ambitious. Set targets for yourself that seem a little out of reach; not completely out of reach, but just enough so you have to stretch yourself to reach them.

2.     Plan It. Whatever it is you want to do, before you do it, you have to plan it. While good things might happen to those who wait, great things happen to those who think about it, plot about, and plan about it. Come up with a strategy. Talk it through. Sketch it out. Follow through. There is a saying that having a great idea means you’re half way there. But currently, let’s face it, you just have a great idea. You have to act on it. Put the proper things in place. Plan your plan.

3.     Be a Disciple of Discipline. Ahh, the tricky one. You need to set a routine. To do what you said you’d to. To be a person of your word. To get up in the morning, set yourself goals and do your best to achieve them each and every day. Even when you don’t want to. Even when there is something better on. Even when it’s a really nice day and going to the beach would be much more fun.

4.     Persevere. In the face of rejection, of doubt, of shiny objects that take your attention away from your main focus, it’s hard to persevere. But you have to keep going. This is your dream remember. No one else is going to make it happen but you.

5.     Adapt. Life is messy. It generally isn’t linear. It’s all about curves AND curveballs. About going with the flow AND fighting the tide. You had a great plan and now you’ve had to rip a page out and fold that one over and cross that bit out and add a section here. That’s not failure. It’s not changing the game. It’s adaptation.

6.     Enjoy. Because surely that’s what it’s all about. At this time of year and all the other months too. This is your DREAM. And it’s coming true. Smell the roses. Bask in the glow.

Oh, and we'd like to congratulate you on following your dreams.

A Perspective on Perspective

If you Google the word perspective, you’ll find it means…

1) The art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface so as to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other.

2) A particular attitude towards or way of regarding something; a point of view.

At Sketch Videos, we like both definitions.

The first one is about what we do each and every day.  We draw people, objects, places, squirrels, buses, sheep, electricity grids, you name it, on a flat white surface. We draw them for videos or posters, on a notepad, a whiteboard or on a wall at a live event.

The second definition, the one that talks about “a point of view”, well, we do that too. We take your point of view; what you see about your work that is unique and different, and we showcase that. Because your way of looking at your work, at what you do, is special. You do it better than others, you do it with a twist. You focus on different elements, you have a unique selling point. The way you interact with your clients is unlike others. You are distinct. You stand-out.

It’s all about how you see the world.

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” 

—Abraham Lincoln

That’s perspective.

Follow along for your sketch fix on Twitter or Facebook.

Wishing you health and happiness throughout the festive season,