SUBCASTS

Preface

I would like to take you on a 14-day multimedia art adventure. You can choose to play along or digest all of this in one sitting. It definitely took me more than one sitting to create. Many sittings actually, and my butt does hurt. My goal is to get you to pay closer attention to your subconscious mind so you can create art that gives you goosebumps.

What kind of art?

To answer that, we first need to ask: what kind of artist?

To answer that, we first should really ask: what is an artist?

Artist (noun) – anyone who knows their intended design and chooses to craft their entire life around it, excel at it, and become the master of it!

Artists are not just actors, musicians, or painters. Those are stereotypically lazy label limitations that society sometimes foolishly places on that word. An artist—is you. If you pursue the above definition, you’re an artist—end of story.

Multimedia performance art.

That’s my art but what’s yours?

What are you working towards becoming its master? Be thinking of that while considering my 14 examples. You may not be a multimedia performance artist but the technical, philosophical and especially the storytelling approach I use is applicable across any art you want to amplify to its fullest potential.

ShhpeakUp!

I blame ShhpeakUp for the many explosions that have happened so far and for what’s about to explode below. So consider me both whistleblower and CEO of my own crazy company.

Shhpeak.com is a service I created with the sole purpose of helping you:

Trust Your Voice so You Can Give Voice to Your Dreams

We achieve this in many ways including ShhpeakUps. These are 30 day speaking + storytelling community challenges that meet three times a year.

The sequence of explosions leading up to the birth of this book are as follows: Shhpeak.com 🧨 ShhpeakUp.com 🧨 Podcast 🧨 Episode 7 🧨 Trailer 🧨 Subcasts 🧨 Book 💥 The Art of Finding Your Own Subliminal Messages in Their Shadows And Using Them in Your Art.

Below you will see how a podcast episode evolved (assembled and then disassembled) into 1 trailer, 13 subcasts (to be defined shortly) and many subliminal surprises that generated more multimedia and opportunities.

You’ll also encounter some invasive questions (prompts) in most sections. These questions are meant to provoke us into malaise and out of societal sleepwalking defaults. They are both individual AND collaborative in nature and are a window into the types to expect in any ShhpeakUp gathering.

Subcasts 👻 What Voices?

Like subliminal messages? I do. These are often ghosts of yesterday that were never meant to die. I find many that go unnoticed and unanswered, at least—consciously.

Subcasts 👻 (noun) – tiny parts of video podcasts with subliminal messages of imperfect ion hidden under layers of animation, music and voiceover. Also referred to as subs by the lazy.

I refined the word Artist for our benefit earlier. I completely made up the word Subcasts for my benefit now. Just need an easy way to refer to the above idea without having to restate the above idea over and over. If subcasts exist in any of my podcast episodes, you’ll find these subs immediately under their parent videos. Subs are usually just backwards, ffwd, warped, isolated or highlighted chunks of an episode. This is my weird way of resurrecting these subconscious beings to our consciousness. I strip them bare naked and raw of all distractions and say

I see-hear you!

Anything to learn from these? … or

Are you not [just] entertained?!

Epigraph

That’s not my shadow dancing in the sun …

Parent Podcast

As mentioned earlier, podcast episode 7 ended up becoming the trailer for Shhpeak.com and the genesis of my subcasts idea. This was a subconscious decision 1st and then a conscious decision 2nd, once I realized I had already made it. Very strange, but normal for me. I’ve come to recognize my artist-architect brain seems to work this way by now so I decided to consciously document my process for all our benefit in the subliminal study below.

Subliminal Study

Subliminal messages are everywhere. It’s cool to notice them and an art to hunt for and answer them. What does it mean to create art? Use your right brain to recognize and make something that gives you goosebumps? What does it mean to create architecture? Use your left brain to organize and optimize little pieces of art lurking within an overall BIG piece of art? This recursive art often gives me more goosebumps! Not sure why, maybe it’s the infinite possibilities available in this process. Although this process has been known to cause hair-and-time-loss in all 51 states 🙂

At some point in every project, we need to call it done and move on. But before we do that, it can often be very helpful to look at our project as many potential mini projects. Some for future development, some for right-now development. Why? For at least these potential benefits:

• Time-savings
• Reusability
• Precision
• Multi-repurposing
• Advertising
• Subliminal Inspiration

As a storyteller of any kind, video is a great canvas for us. However, in our fast paced content creation-age, everyone’s expected to be a 24-7 “content creator”. Don’t disrespect yourself like that. Don’t add that title to your LinkedIn or other resume. Definitely don’t give your work away for free to every algorithm out there. A better approach is to first—know your “why”—and then ONLY create content that gets you closer to your why.

Since it’s very difficult to create video without getting sucker-punched into endlessly wasting time on the content-hamster-wheel, I tend to look at every single piece of video—every frame—as a potential piece of art in its own right. Not all of it gets used in the end, but it’s helpful to look at video creation like this. As a musician and software engineer for 3 decades, I tend to look at video creation from both a right AND left-brain perspective: artistically and architecturally. Artistically, I see (and search for) “hidden” moments that could live as their own mini videos and thumbnails, and then create them. Architecturally, I organize these moments into nested video sequences and use the relationships between them to devise an easily reusable naming convention. Many video apps exist, each with their own way of letting me do this. I purposefully skip app-specific terminology here because that stuff is boring to me and not what I teach 🙂

This artist-architect approach gives us the opportunity to split larger videos into many cool reusable components (ex: I reuse a text outro component in most of my subs below). These reusable components save time by keeping something the same while opening up time to make something different. Building off these components allows me to focus more on the part of the video that’s different, the value-add, the single message hidden in that part of the video.

This reusability also allows me to focus on precise messaging:

What single point am I trying to make at this singular moment?

When using voiceover, this forces me to say only that which directly supports the current visuals without detracting or distracting from them. If this seems like a limitation—it is! A purposeful one. But this temporarily forced limitation is a tactic one of my favorite bands (NIN) has used to create so much beautiful art. Independently (although it would be so cool to collab one day), both Trent and I have discovered:

• drive impact = precise limitations
• dilute impact = unlimited options

Reusability also frees my mind to come up with multiple creative new uses of these reusable components, aka: repurposing content. Several examples:

• 14 future blog posts (including this one)
• 14 future emails for my mailing list
• 14 future ads and social posts
• A boooook? 😉

Initially dividing a huge problem (video) into smaller difficulty-level problems, ultimately makes it so much easier to sum all the parts in the end. It becomes easier to see the trajectory, the big picture, the 30K foot view. Where are we going? What’s the arc? Where do we want the story to end? What feeling or message do we want to part with?

When these questions are easily answerable, it gets easier for our brains to go in both directions: assemble and disassemble. It gets easier to add parts together and reverse engineer these parts into even more reusable components. Reusability begets more reusability. This is true because your previous left brain organization now frees your right brain to recognize creative opportunities within this organization. Example: all subs below (except 2) are 15 seconds or less. Why? Ads 🙂

Our attention-span economy is another reason for the architectural approach of dividing up your big videos into smaller ones. Info-overload is unfortunately here to stay and get worse. I believe we all have something impactful to share and contribute to making this world better. I also believe that most people dilute their impact by dumping garbage content on the internet in an effort to game the algorithm. I don’t argue against this tactic working. It does work for some or they wouldn’t do it. The issue I take with it is one of chasing money over value. Money eventually comes when value is persistently pursued. Chasing money first creates so many problems, including trash, noise and info-overload.

Info-overload is not an easy problem. I went on a 3 year tour to solve this problem … and am still working on it 🙂 A short-term workaround in 3 uneasy steps:

1. Own your story
2. Find your service (parts of your story that serve us)
3. Make short-story ads from your service < 15 sec

You never know which of your videos will be discovered or resonate more than others. Dividing up your larger video into smaller clips helps you cast a larger net to answer these questions faster. The smaller you make them, the quicker you can introduce yourself and your service to the rest of us. This might feel awkward at first because you’ve put so much effort into your larger video. You want people to watch that one damn it! Yeah, I get it—trust me 😉

But not everybody is gonna have time to watch that one—not until they realize what they can get out of it. Until they see how it can help them, we’re just another useless distraction competing for their divided attention. We cope with info-overload by shallow-scanning—so give us something shallow to scan. Not shallow in value, shallow in duration. Give us just enough to imagine how your service might help us solve a problem. As you help us imagine the solution, we become more willing to invest more time.

I said “help us imagine the solution”. I could have said “share the solution with us”. I did not. Don’t do that. At least not with your shorter clips. Here’s why: Imagination is active. Receiving is passive. Imagination creates stories. Receiving consumes information. Imagination remembers. Receiving forgets.

You want people to actively imagine and remember a story, not passively receive and forget more info. The first treats us as creators. The second as consumers. We’re tired of consuming. Info-overload remember? For better or worse, you want to get us to actively use our imagination to decide whether your clip propels us to learn more or repels us in disgust. This helps you find your interested peeps faster so can focus on the stories that best serve both you and them!

This is cool because it opens the door to so much creativity and gives our overjudgemental left-brain a chance to take a backseat and a chill-pill. The large video is no longer the focus. It’s done. Now you can do some really weird shit that seemingly breaks all the rules and previous limitations you might have set up for yourself. Tease us with something abstract that still relates in some curious way to your service and we might become curious to investigate further. Use the elements of intrigue, mystery and surprise (examples in my subcasts below) and surprise us into a state of WTF? Be covert about your intent until the punchline. Don’t spell it out until you get us to wherever it is you want us to go. Shorter clips make this more possible since the odds of us watching all the way through are much higher.

You can try all kinds of experiments. If you’re excited by each of your 15 sec clips, there’s a chance some of us might too! Just be sure to always link them to the parent video!

Once you’ve divided your larger video into enough of these clips, your “content creator” game is mostly done. All that’s left is to schedule publishing for each of these (and include the parent video link in them).

Now you can focus on the next important thing that’ll get you closer to your why.

Child Subcasts

Benefits of dividing video projects into many mini projects:

• Time-savings
• Reusability
• Precision
• Multi-repurposing
• Advertising
• Subliminal Inspiration

We’ve discussed all of the benefits above so far except Subliminal Inspiration. I intentionally conclude with this one as it’s my favorite. It’s the parting message and feeling I want to leave you with.

It’ll be more relaxed and whimsical as I capture the trains of thought that generated these.

Sub1 👻

After 30 Days of Speaking … Something Strange Happened

I always seem to do the first parts last. Easier to build the skeleton first and add the skull-cherry-on-top after? Maybe, and ouch!

I take a step back, see what I’ve created and then add a finishing touch. What? A skull is not a “finishing touch”? A head is kind of a requirement you say? OK, then how about setting the Christmas tree up with all its lights first, top it with a star last? Another bad analogy? OK, I give up.

But really, it’s quite helpful to behave backwards when creating anything, especially intros. Intros are way easier to do when you know what you’re introducing. You’ve got the barebones idea (back to analogy #1) and you build that beast while teasing out connections you find (subliminal or otherwise) between the body parts. After a bodily form becomes visible, you’re better able to identify your animal. Build a bear or brontosaurus? You’re better able to see what’s there and what’s missing. What’s missing after all this work is done, is usually the crown, the decor, the wrapping, the lipstick, the intro.

As further evidence of this (at least in my case) it looks like I’m at it once again: I’m editing this section last—even though it’s sub1! I’m realizing again and in real time how often I behave this way on auto-pilot. It’s not a conscious choice. As I consciously think about it right now and ask myself:

Why did you start mostly at the end and work your way backward?

The only real answer coming to mind is:

overwhelm!

I think that’s weirdly true. I felt (and always feel to some degree) overwhelmed by starting at the beginning of anything.

So much to write before I get to the end. I don’t wanna think about that.
Jump to the end.
Write that.
Yeah, almost done by starting at the end!
I feel better now!

Now did I actually say all those things above in my head? Probably not but that’s what I’m now recalling as the feelings I had when I first began. I’m now just trying to use the best words to describe those feelings that subconsciously informed my intro-last actions. So weird but beneficial to realize this—yet again!

Some folks call this reverse engineering. I call this reverse messaging. What did I set out to say? Did I say it? Did I say it incompletely? How could I say it more completely? Did new unexpected messages emerge from my original intention? What introduction would wrap these together beautifully? What animal or beast did I just build?

The animal I built in this trailer is a beast. A beast we all deal with: our dreams. Do we trust them and speak up as their spokesperson or do we silently let them haunt us until we die? A bit morbid, maybe, but not untrue.

From one of my courses:

That’s the main message I set out to convey!

It combines the beginning with the end: our dreams as a kid + our fear-induced regrets as a deathbed non-enthusiast.

The solution I found was scarily simple, but scary nonetheless:

Speak

We each have a dream requiring us to speak it into existence …

My solution to the problem was also part of the message I wanted to convey. A problem without a solution is just a complaint—no sense in conveying that hopeless message! We see/hear enough of those every day 🙂

The best intro for this message had to combine me as both a kid and adult. We needed to be mirroring each other somehow. Our dreams, fears, speaking, silence, life and death all needed to be viscerally present in some medium. Lastly, none of this could be explicitly stated. I didn’t want to serve this explanation up on a silver platter (as I just did now) for you to just passively swallow now and excrete later. I wanted your imagination to run wild with what you thought was going to happen—just before hopefully catching you off guard in the next section.

Satisfied after meeting these requirements, the intro now seemed to seamlessly dovetail into the next section, feed the entire body and repeat in the tail at the end (the stinger, hehe 😉

Are you your dreams’ spokesperson?

If not, do you trust your voice … or do you waiver when you hear it out loud. No judgments. I used to mercilessly s-s-stutter (now I just drop frames).

Sub2 👻

I Remembered My Why and Took Back the Role of Storyteller—of My Own Life

Full disclosure: all audio consciously intended in this sub. No surprises. FFWD was intentionally applied to shorten it for a 15s ad.

The “intelligible”-speed audio is in the trailer version. That’s where subconscious surprises abound!

Rene! Go home! … and I … FUN! … and I obeyed!

[MORE IN BETWEEN]

For whatever reason … it’s a good … trial …
I am probably … tired of living up!

This subconscious collection of “incoherent” statements eerily strung themselves together into a coherent story. Let me explain. Starting with “Rene! Go home!”, we see/hear an eerie double entendre connection with the previous intro.

More examples can be teased out of the rest of these “incoherent” coherences but this one’s my favorite so I’ll stop there. No need to belabor a point when made. But did I? Did I actually convince you of more subconscious art? I don’t think so. It’s way more reasonable to explain “Rene! Go home!” as a conscious selection of audio.

But here’s the thing, I created this sub before the intro existed. That still doesn’t mean much because I could have had the intro in mind already. True. That’s why I want to share the cool experiment that generated this montage next, emphasis on the word generated. It’s an experiment that’s sure to help you in ANY of your creative projects:

Limitation

Give yourself a limitation. If you ever feel overwhelmed by a project, intentionally apply a limitation. These are awesome! Not only do they add chill to your pill (so you don’t have to stress over everything all at once), but they also have a knack of generating creative results! Why? Because limitations produce less noise. Less noise produces more form. Whether this form is seen, heard or both … the results can be quite spooky.

I had this idea of montaging my first 30-day speaking challenge experience. I wanted you to know what I got out of it. I wanted you to know how it improved my life and why I was now offering it to you as ShhpeakUp, a core part of the Shhpeak.com service. More importantly, I wanted you to feel the emotionally propellant force that has continued to push me forward after a long life as a mute. Easy—yeah, right! 🙂 I was actually quite stressed by this idea the more I thought about it!

Great idea, but how in-the-h…?

Each of my 30 day videos was anywhere from a couple of minutes long to a whole hour. A lotta footage to go through. It would take forever to watch all those and choose only the best parts. How would I decide the best parts? What did those even look like? What would the limiting factor be? On top of that, I obviously have way more tolerance for watching longer sections of myself than a complete stranger would. Can’t afford to bore ya. If I’m making a commercial to convince you of the value of my service, it’s gotta be punchy and as-to-the-point as possible.

Shit! I just screwed myself again!

No, I did not. I’d just simplify by sampling only 3 seconds of each video. That was great. I had my first limitation: 3 seconds. It wasn’t the best limitation though. I’d still need to manually go through all the footage to find and choose these 3 seconds.

Wait, maybe I won’t do it manually?!

Here’s where I need to remind you of my software engineering background and encourage you not to think:

Screw the rest of your idea dude, I don’t code

Like paint, video, Photoshop, etc … code is just another tool to make art. Our artistic tools may vary from one person to the next but all our art can benefit from limitations. That’s what I’m selling here: limitations. So don’t let my ensuing code example dissuade you from using the power of limitations in your own work. Continuing:

Manually searching for the best 3 seconds wouldn’t solve anything. Super slow. I began thinking about how I could automate this. How can I get the computer to find the best 3 seconds for me? Theoretically, what would these best 3 seconds look like … to me? Easy, the spots where I’m the most excited! OK, that made sense to me—a human! But what would make sense to a computer?

What does excitement look like to a comp—Volume!

I would have the computer find the single point in each video containing the largest spike in volume and have it generate a 3 second video from that identified point. This was a much better limitation. It was specific, easily identified by a computer and easily agreed upon by a human. I promised myself not to argue with whatever the computer found. This last part was arguably the most important. If I wanted the speed of execution that this limitation would provide, it would be foolish to waste time asking the computer to look again if I didn’t like what it found.

In the end and all tech aspects aside, the computer spat out 3 second chunks from 30 videos in under 30 seconds on average … using peak volume as the limitation. That opened up my time to refine and rerun this experiment further. I still didn’t argue with the computer’s findings but I did discover something cool: 1 sec/day chunks were punchier than 3. This was important to keep the trailer moving along.

My focus, while creating this part of the trailer, was speed. I had a lot of work ahead of me which was why I chose a limitation in the first place. I needed to be strategic with my time. I needed to not waste any. I needed to accept whatever the computer found. The coherent story generated from this seemingly incoherent mess only started to become apparent on later listens.

While editing later subs, I’d often replay the whole trailer from the beginning to see how it flowed from one scene to the next. Then I’d stop, hear something I hadn’t realized as being so symbolically appropriate and get goosebumps. I hadn’t intentionally selected these but somehow they had selected themselves. Did I accentuate and better synchronize these findings? Sure. But I never really found them, they found me. They asked for my attention, I gave it.

Ever use what you know how to do to avoid doing what you don’t have to do?

If you’ve lived a little life, you know a lot already. What do you know that you could use as an intentional limitation to improve your life? Your art? Limitations provide not only generative but time-saving power. These free your time and mind to be more creative.

What can you start doing today that will allow you to stop doing something tomorrow?

What is that something? What do you want to stop doing?

The more time you reclaim, the more you reclaim the role of storyteller of your own life.

Sub3 👻

I Took My Story to The Stage

Powerful Insecurities. Man, vulnerability, when shared, brings people together. The opposite is also scarily true: vulnerability, when hidden, pulls people apart. We don’t wanna feel like the only stupid in the room with our childish worry about [fill in your own blank].

For me in this sub, my worry was playing the guitar for the 1st time in public and messing up. I did. No more worry. I now know what messing up sounds and feels like. Not too bad. Creatively imagine and practice a humorous recovery act beforehand? Even less bad. Kinda fun, actually.

Editing the video portion of this clip so many times before, I hadn’t thought about any of the above in a long time. Then I unmuted the audio and all its imperfections reminded me.

I’d say you’re in for a treat but I don’t know how this will turn out

Especially that statement. Not part of my recovery act. Sincere fear under a nervous smile. I love how it repeats throughout the sub as if to warn and remind me:

Y’almost never did this. And everything after wouldn’t have happened either.

I see my life as a trilogy: Before (I), During (II), and After (III) mental health drugs. This performance happened in episode III along with many other difficult decisions including becoming my own life’s storyteller instead of letting the world narrate. Under a completely unrelated context, a speaking coach once told me to “fire the narrator”. I loved his advice so much I applied it quite liberally across other facets of my life.

How much of your life is narrated by you? Others? The world?

At what point does helpful overlap become a hindering encroachment?

Are you holding anything back?

What?

Why?

Sub4 👻

I Risked Being its Fool … to Become its Master

I have always had a love/hate relationship with my youth. What it should have been vs what it was vs what I reimagined when I returned. I love life now although I see through its many cracks. So I’d say I’m not disillusioned any more but I’m also not naive about just how fubar our current world really is.

I think that’s where Mickey comes in.

Huh? Did you just WTF me? Excellent! Intentionally invoked 😉 Mickey would be proud!

More seriously, Mickey (and Donald) are two characters that got me into a lot of trouble growing up. Mostly because of my “unnecessary noises”.

Unnecessary Noises (noun) – constant vocal vomit of character impersonations and beatboxing imitations of the weird world around you without regard to proper enunciation, time of day or your tired target audience. Perfect-pitch not required.

To this day, imitating these 2 remains a fun “childish” activity I use to defuse the unnecessary stress and absurdity of adult situations. The fact that my daughter enjoys this too was quite a vindication. Zoe’s 20 years old at the time of this writing and still engages in “unnecessary noises” with me at times! And sometimes (more importantly) when she thinks she’s alone—hehe! Although I don’t think she cares who’s watching anymore.

This sub is an adulterated mashup of 2 vids: an old performance ad + my voiceover reel.

For the performance ad, I’d commandeered my daughter’s graphic design and storyboarding skills for a week. We spent a lot of time asking each other questions.

What do you mean when you say you want [insert stupid animation idea]?
What if we tried this?
Wanna make the heads drip like syrup from the ceiling?

A tremendous braindump-and-storm later, we’d feverishly synced animations (including the Mickey-Mouse-Mistake-shaped pancake) to the insanity of my previous middle-of-the-night inspired wake-up to record a 6 min Italian Mickey impersonation. Why Italian? I don’t remember. But it was stupidly sublime and we had a great time! The Italian is buried in the FFWD. What you do hear mostly is the voiceover reel with a few interjections from Italian-Rene-Mickey in between.

This sub doesn’t have much subconscious going on at all, at least not where the audio is concerned. I purposefully mashed these 2 for both their video AND audio content. I became somewhat saddened (almost immediately) as I realized this wouldn’t work. The audio would overpower the trailer’s voiceover. Most of the audio would need to be muted. I smiled (most immediately) because I knew I would just need to share it as a sub later!

The value of being a fool first so that you can become something’s master is a lost art. Today’s fast-paced disposable society causes this to be true. We worsen this truth by valuing answers way more than questions. This ironically produces less experts with deep knowledge: if there’s no time for foolish questions, there’s no time for using creativity to produce masterful answers. Creativity takes time but can create lasting value. Widgets are quick but can quickly fill a landfill if no one stops to question why we’re making them.

I wasted most of my life running away from my “foolish” strengths because the world I lived in didn’t directly value these. I realized 18 jobs later that every employer had made excellent use of my fool.

Have you risked being a fool for anything to become its master?

If you think you have nothing, know this: you have your unique life story. No one else has yours. Master that and mine all kinds of valuable sub stories from it.

Sub5 👻

I Saw My Lies from 30K Feet

The garbled audio mess in this sub was so satisfying to hear when I found it.

Ended up making …
[Vomiting Squirrel Sounds]
I chose everything … decisions
Decisions? Decisions!?

Having mastered “decisions” after spending most of my life being a slave to “choices”, it fed my soul to feel the awkward refrain of the word “decision” across multiple octaves. I use the word “refrain” here instead of “repetition” because of its extra wink towards refraining from too many choices 😉

My lies are my many half-ass begrudging commitments—too many choices.

Do you know the difference between “choice” and “decision”?

It could save your life, or someone you love.

Sub6 👻

I Published My First Book But Missed the Bu—

Abrupt cut-offs! Love those. This one, unintentional. Just where I happened to stop sampling from an older video, but sooooo appropriate given the sentiment.

No to my dream, I missed the bu—

I was so late, I didn’t just miss the bus, but the word too. (sampled from here)

In the trailer video, this sub only showed the book part. In the unmasked/unmuted sub itself, the full glory of this awkward moment was revealed. This subconscious moment drove me to intentionally look for and use cut-offs in other subs, especially for those that could become ads.

This is something I 100% attribute to learning from Trent Reznor. This dude has used the art of the cut-off and silence so masterfully in much of his music and sound design. It’s just jarring when you subconsciously expect something obvious next and then—it doesn’t happen. Or worse—nothing happens! Vacuum-sealed confusion. All of a sudden, you’re awake in your conscious mind thinking

What happened?
-OR-
Why is nothing happening?

Used sparingly and in different ways, this tactic lends itself really well to immersive storytelling. It causes the audience to participate in the journey with their own creativity. Remember what I said earlier about imagining vs sharing? I didn’t share something so now you have to imagine what might have happened. Well, not really in this case because I just spelled it out—sheesh!

In my life, I’ve engaged in both silent and verbose forms of communication.

Somewhere in between is the fulcrum but I have found silence a much more powerful ally and tool for most of life’s applications.

Have you ever intentionally used silence to improve your life?

Do you see the juxtaposition of these two in the name ShhpeakUp? Cool, me too 🙂

Sub7 👻

30K Mile Tour – I Hit the Road and Toured the Nation

This one’s audio is all over the place and almost sounds demonic. Almost? Yeah, it kinda does 🙂

But I know where those groans are truly coming from. There’s something very soothing about deep dark sounds. Not dark as in evil but as in low frequency. These penetrate as much as they emanate. I find myself often humming in a “throat voice” as this relaxes my body. Definitely not saying this sub sounds relaxing! Combine the disturbing audio with the disturbing visuals, and this just sounds … disturbing, to the unknowing ear 😉

To my ears, this is just more of the “unnecessary noises” I was often called out for as a kid and sometimes still do as an adult. Wait, when did I sign up for adult? Don’t recall that subscription.

Besides weirdly twisted harmonic “demonics”, this sub had a larger twist up its sleeve. When I discovered it, it gave me both goosebumps … and tons of extra work.

30K Mile Tour – I Hit the Road and Toured the Nation

That’s the title of this sub, but the original was only 10K miles. The larger twist that caught my attention was the map animation in the full trailer video just before this sub. At around minute 1:26 I thought:

Wait, how can this be just 10K? Add these up in Google Earth …
[1 hour later]
Whoa!

Somehow in the business of life and touring, I had stopped counting after 10K and that number had accidentally become a permanent resident in my memory, books and posts. A “little” cleanup was in order. This wasn’t fun but truth seldom is. The payoff, however, was. Not only does triple the score sound cooler but it also leant itself well with the phrase “30K foot view” and other artsy symbolic hints I definitely peppered in.

My epic tour now seemed way more epic to me. Not that it wasn’t already before but insecurities abound in every human as time elapses and we forget our accomplishments. 30K definitely boosted my confidence and excitement!

What don’t you give yourself credit for?

Why not?

Should you?

Do you ever slow down enough to reflect on where you were before getting here?

Sub8 👻

30K Mile Tour – 3 Intense Years

After listening to my chipmunks on meth, as if they needed any more stimulants, man, my coffee is strong today! And then—

Bang! I was shot!? WTF? and ROTFLMAO!

That was my first thought! What was that sound as I fell? I never used this part of the video in the parent episode. I didn’t choose against it. I just didn’t know it was even there until I went diving into my subs and unmuting stuff. The extra audio AND video this time gave me quite the chuckle. Still does. I’m easily amused.

The original audio never had a “gun shot” sound because the music had always played at normal speed in the older video I sampled. After sampling, slowing, silencing and syncing it to the new video, it had gone unnoticed. Shh! Unsilencing it now—bang! Definitely shot. And me falling forward? Uh-huh! Not sure how subliminal this one truly was anymore!

Ever make a purposeful mistake and wonder which it ultimately was?

Are your subconscious and conscious mind working in concert? In conspiracy against?

Sub9 👻

30K Mile Tour – 13 Conferences

Happy accidents! Funny, these were some of the things I was teaching that day. How to use these happy accidents to your advantage when technology craps out on you. We definitely had a few tech crap-out moments that day, including my “air clicker”:

Air Clicker (noun) – A last resort virtual clicker to be used ONLY when your bluetooth clicker gets hijacked by other devices in a confined space.

Step 1. raise your hand during a live performance
Step 2. make a polite “clicking” gesture with your thumb and index finger to the DJ
Step 3. DJ now knows to advance the “slides”/visuals behind you

It’s weird how that happened again during the video editing of this sub. Not the “air clicker”, another happy accident—my editor crashed.

Normally that’s not a happy moment in any video edit but after my expletives subsided and my file wasn’t corrupted, I noticed a cool glitch. Of course, I decided to bake that in and add 2 more glitches on purpose!

Ever see something sweet after swearing it sucked?

Sub10 👻

30K Mile Tour – 10K Students

Ah, the hidden audio track—unhidden. Like many of the previous subs, I fall in love with the brilliant stupidity of out-of-context audio. Especially when it’s not straightforward, as in, mixing forward with fast-forward.

In making the trailer, I used snippets from so many previous videos. Because I was telling a story that lasted 3+ years, I would obviously need to carefully curate small chunks of this timespan. Even then, I would still need to speed up a lot of it to keep from losing you—from losing me too!

It gets tiresome real quick when editing the same video over and over. One way to combat this fatigue is pick only the juiciest visuals that I don’t mind seeing over and over. But even then, these need to be shortened to sync with the current message. Enter FFWD.

I love painting with FFWD when appropriate. When the audio won’t be used, perfect. When you unmute, surprise! A mix of memories and blood flush and flood my cheeks

They told me I was too hyperactive!

What are you “too hyperactive” about? Hyperfocus on it.

Sub11 👻

Here’s How ShhpeakUp Will Help You With Your 30 Days

This sub’s a little longer than the rest. It’s the infomercial. No need or sense to disassemble further. It shoots straight from the hip. Point by point, I wanted to clearly answer:

How will ShhpeakUp help you with your 30 days?

Done. Or is it? It’s amazing how imprecise language leads to ambiguity. Was it just 30 days that I was talking about? Yes, One (1) ShhpeakUp does last 30 days. However, that’s not the actual offer. The offer is a 365 day adventure with many things, including three (3) ShhpeakUps.

And what’s up with 1125 days in the video? A SurPrize awaits the 1st to answer correctly 🙂

I love the audio breakdown at the beginning. This subliminal message was definitely intended after I became conscious that I was building the Shhpeak.com trailer. Synchronizing seemingly disjointed and jarring sound effects to visual scene breaks captivates me. Especially if the soundscape leading up to this break was subliminally building up to this point. Hint: it was 🙂 (see/hear full video just before this sub)

Sub12 👻

Adventure Awaits … What Will You Do With Your 30 Days?

From the very beginning, I looked forward to creating this sub the most because I’d need to wait until the entire video was complete before this sub would even be possible! Delayed gratification? Check. Or is it masochism?

Honestly, this kind of thinking is dangerous if not checked against reality’s time constraints. Deadlines. You got’em too? Yup, then these kinds of subs tend to un-deaden deadlines, or at least, bump them.

Adventure Awaits … What Will You Do With Your 30 Days? That’s definitely the question I wanted you to answer in this one but … then I saw my inner child staring me back in the face at frame REW 1125. He was once again asking me that.

Forget 30 days, what will you do with your today?

I was sluggishly downing another coffee and scanning my todo list when he asked. I remembered the adventure, snapped out of my stupor and saw many of my todos for what they actually were: busy work. Useless busy work taking me further away from my why. Delete.

Damn, that felt good! Now I don’t even have to do those before I can cross’em off 🙂

But more importantly, with as conscientious as I’ve become since sobriety, why the heck does self sabotage continue to creep in? Must make less decisions when tired.

Are you your own assassin? Do you see you coming before it’s too late?

The thumbnail in this video doesn’t exist. Not as a single frame. I combined frames REW 1125 with REW 630 after my little inner child chat to remind all 4 of us of our dreams. Yes 4. You have an inner child too 🙂

Sub13 👻

Welcome to The Concrete Forest

Of course a Stinger, Sequel Hook, Post-Credits Scene, Easter Egg—whatever you wanna call it … these always tease the genesis, future re-genesis or back story of a story. This one’s no different.

Welcome to The Concrete Forest. My Concrete Forest. You have one too. Where’s yours? How often do you visit?

Man, this one’s so overtly subliminal to me. A place where my subconscious and conscious mind collides every time I go. Attacks … are expected. Often invited. Relax, I’m not talking about the occult 😉 Just my imagination running rampant as I trust God in this desolate place.

Too much symbolism to capture in a simple blog post. A mini video documentary makes more sense. Looking forward to making it. Stand by…

Afterword

Subliminal inspiration is amazing. I opened the beginning of our adventure with this:

Episode 7 ended up becoming the trailer for Shhpeak.com and the genesis of my subcasts idea. This was a subconscious decision 1st and then a conscious decision 2nd, once I realized I had already made it.

It’s crazy how creativity works. Especially when you combine humility, collaboration and feedback. This combustible combo causes creativity to explode! … in a good way, mostly 😉

I began E7 with the sole intention of helping you understand exactly what you would get from the Shhpeak.com service. That’s it. It was supposed to be a followup (and Part 2) of the previous E5 whose intention was to explain how the ShhpeakUp part of the service works. But in the process of making E5, I also made a mistake. As I began describing my first speaking challenge experience towards the end of that video, I got hungry. It showed. Yes, I sometimes get “hangry” 😉

When I replayed that part of the video and saw how uncomfortable I looked, I got even more “hangry” and I was like:

Dang it! I gotta reshoot all that shit!!? 💩
I’m gonna have to wait until tomorrow since the sun is already effing gone!!!
[expletives partially deleted]

Nope. Didn’t reshoot. I realized how boring it would be to hear about an experience instead of experiencing the experience—duh!

As I recreated this experience in E7 and combined it with my original “what you get” intention, a subterranean trailer for the service slowly emerged … and I slowly realized it. When this happened, both the trailer and the above subcasts moved from a subconscious to a conscious decision. Circuit completed, I pursued this decision with reckless abandon.

Humility, collaboration and a family feedback session later further fueled this decision. These three will be fuel for future stories, I’m sure. For now, and before I wish you well with yours, I want to:

Revisit Limitations

The word limitation has appeared 22 times so far. I first used it negatively:

Artists are not just actors, musicians, or painters. Those are stereotypically lazy label limitations that society sometimes foolishly places on that word.

I used the remaining 21 positively, ending with:

Limitations provide not only generative but time-saving power.

The difference between the 1 negative and 21 positive uses of that word is a question—who?

Who is imposing the limitation? Is it a societal or self-imposed limitation?

I’m not claiming all societal limitations are bad. The “spirit of the law” and most laws generated from that spirit are initially intended to help humans flourish. But like all gardens, including human ones, if we don’t prune, growth withers. Some “laws” become choking weeds. Some limitations need pruning when they no longer apply or become applied unfairly or incorrectly, whether accidentally or intentionally.

But seriously, who? Who is narrating your life story?

Decision

The word limitation has an uncanny connection to the word decision—another word I’ve learned to love late in life. You might have noticed that in Sub5 👻 🙂

Decide to limit yourself and the result is: you end up spending more time on less stuff. You maximize your potential for becoming the master of this “less stuff” because your time has now opened up to hyperfocus on it and thereby gain deep knowledge on whatever thing you’re trying to master.

Want your 10K hours expert status?

Self-impose a limitation.

Stand out from the crowd in your subject matter expertise?

Self-impose a limitation.

Don’t like limitations?

Society will decide them for you.

Subliminal

Self-imposed decisions and limitations have an uncanny connection with subliminal messages, our conversation’s focal point and full-circle ending.

The more you decide to limit yourself, the more you will see these subliminal messages. If you’re a sleep-walking busy-body, distractedly running from one place to the next, you’ll have no time to ask good questions about society’s current answers. Subliminal messages will fly under the radar. If you’re awake, and intentionally slow down to use time for the tool that it is, you will begin to ask awesome questions about society’s current answers. In asking these questions you will see more of what’s “hidden”. As you consciously observe more, these “subliminal messages” will occur more and will propel you forward as allies in amplifying your art. As these amplify your art, they will seem less subliminal, more otherworldly, and be replaced by goosebumps. Yours.

May your art give you (and others) goosebumps.

P.S. I said earlier that I discovered the power of limitations independently of Trent Reznor. However, I think it’s important to note we both have this in common: software development. For what it’s worth, I think this may have helped tremendously in appreciating the value of limitations, especially in art.