Building an Empire

By AA

In short, it’s all about beautiful and stunning videos.

I’ve been busy, real busy lately and the clouds of uncertainty are starting to break, the sunshine is pouring in and it is beginning to feel like I have something really special on my hands here and I am ridiculously excited about it.

I’m talking about a new Production company that I have started called OYFE Productions.

What the hell is OYFE Productions I can hear echoing around the chambers of the EiOK temple, well, it’s two guys who want to make awesome videos. Myself and a good friend who I have worked with for years are throwing off the shackles of our day jobs and pouring all our energy and heart and souls into something new, something special and something that will fire us up creatively and warm our souls with pure unadulterated awesomeness.

We are now open for business and looking for filming jobs to do!

The basic plan is this, we want to shoot Music Videos, Live Events, Corporate Videos and Wedding Videos – so lots of things really and we are totally capable of doing this so we are now just looking for the opportunity. It looks like a long road ahead, but we’re already off, we made our first fully produced music video for our friends, Circle of Rage and the video went live across the social networks yesterday and was well received.

It’s cool, you should watch it.

Our next project has already been filmed and we’re in the process of editing a mountain of footage.

So far, so good.

There are a number of other projects I want to film, just for the hell of it as well, stuff I may well have been thinking about for years so they are being storyboarded and planned too.

So I am writing all this because there is nothing else in my head going on to report on. Every night last week I toiled at my computer organising and building us a website to showcase our talents and wares and I have spent an inordinate amount of time setting up a social network for our business using Twitter (a little bit of sick came in my mouth as I typed that, but I recognise the power of this beast), Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube (obviously) and Vimeo so to coin a phrase that those goatee bearded assholes in PR and advertising use, “we have all our social media ducks in a row”.

Someone kill me now please.

I’m enjoying this immensely though and it’s giving me something creative that I can really do and something I can focus on. For many years I have worked in Web Design but really these web orientated endeavours, while commonplace and with plenty of work out there I am just bored, bored, bored. Bored to tears with producing the same old web sites over and over again, but with film making it’s a real clean sheet every time and I can start from the beginning and I am thirsty to make gorgeous and stunning films that blow audiences away.

In fact we benchmark ourselves, for example if we are going to shoot a wedding video for someone, we know we have succeeded if the bride cries after watching it. In a good way crying of course.

For music videos, I don’t really know what the benchmark is, but when I showed the recently made “Ignorance is this” film to Circle of Rage, their reaction was massive – they loved it and Tommo Rage the lead singer said;

“It was EXACTLY how I imagined it to be – you did it man, you did it!”

Which has boosted my confidence massively and I want to do more now please.

So we have a showreel in production for another band, the Crashers Party Band who do corporate events and weddings, they play covers and provide entertainment so we’re working on a film to showcase their talents and who knows what else might come our way.

They are even paying us to do this!

I was talking to my currently-missing-in-action blog partner, Agent J about my ideas for OYFE Productions just a month or so ago and knowing me as she does said, I bet you don’t do it, I bet it’s just more dreaming but here I am, I am doing it and we are off on a mission to make awesome films, so I guess I can really only thank her for the challenge.

Challenge TOTALLY accepted AJ!

Maybe I will challenge her to write something for EiOK too perhaps?

So if you need a film made or you are getting married or want us to make you something, a phrase I have been using a lot is “shoe-string budgets are our speciality” so come and see OYFE Productions.

Or of course you can hit us up on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr- take your pick!

OYFE Productions – Friendly & affordable filming services for everyone.

Everything is OK

AA

The Slave Society

By AA.

I haven’t posted on the EiOK blog for ages. I think I may address this point right… NOW!

It’s been so long since I posted that the WordPress dashboard that I knew so well looks all weird and unusual now!

It’s been funny though I notice as I dust off the stats and blow the cobwebs away, people are still hitting EiOK despite a four month writing hiatus. The Living Bridges article I wrote still gets a massive hit of people on a regular basis and there are 36 comments in my queue to read through – really quite amazing that all this EiOK stuff is still out there and people are still coming to find out about the cool stuff we’ve blogged. Erm, thanks I guess!

EiOK = Still worthy. Still valid.

Anyway back to the matter at hand here, today’s blog post.

I’ve been fighting and I don’t mean in a Tyler Durden, really cool and slightly grimy “Fight Club” kind of way, no instead I have been fighting to survive, fighting to keep the world I love and adore together and preventing it from falling into rack and ruin.

What the hell is this author on about I hear you ask?

I’m talking about the slave society that many of us can recognise, notice and agree that you’re a part of. This world, where we remember the decadent times akin to those happy halcyon times where it was cool to worship false idols, that world where you can in fact live your life happily without fear of the financial doubt, you could blow £100 in one nights drinking, knowing that you still had the coffers to make it to the next payday.

For me, like you, those days are long gone. If I was to draw a picture of a world where you have a week and a half before you get paid and yet your cupboard is bare and there are no pennies in your piggy bank – that’s the reality of where we are as a people, deeply entrenched in this slave society. Constantly hunting the next pay day and I know that I am not alone.

That perhaps I can strike a cord among you.

I see a news article this week where the Bank of England are investing £75 BILLION pounds into “The Economy” as times are hard, recession is very real, food prices and fuel prices are rising out of control. And as I read about this from our dear propaganda machine that is the BBC, this money will just be given to banks to enable them to enact some bollocks about quantitative easing – how does this really help the economy in real terms, I mean really?

If you were to invest £75 billion pounds into the economy of Great Britain, I’ve done some sums here, lets say Great Britain consists of 70 million people, that divided by £75BN equates to £1071.00 for every man, woman and child in this great country of ours.

Great, so that means for me, my wife and two children, we’ll be helped out by the Bank of England by a trifling £4280.00.

That seems like a small figure, but think about it, that’s a good few months of mortgage payment or if you base it on my family’s budget, that means we eat freely for 42 weeks, nearly a year. Why is this NOT being done? That’s the ECONOMY that they speak about.

Of course that’s not what this article was about though, it was in fact more complete and utter nonsense, where a privately owned corporation (The Bank of England Corporation) can just make money out of thin air – what a massive con our monetary system truly is, it’s frankly disgusting. It turns out that I am not actually part of ‘the economy’ like I thought I was and in fact I am a slave in the system the same as the rest of you.

Anyway, economics, quite a boring subject.

I’m really quite sick of chasing every single penny. As a proud man who goes to work, has a supposedly good job, why the hell am I penniless with nearly a week or so to go before my coffers are restocked?

Ridiculous and.. I’m sorry to announce this, but totally wrong.

I do a lot, I do my day job which sucks the very life force and superhuman powers out of me on a daily basis. When that’s done, I’m looking around for the next buck and I have several ways of creating money, out of a pure drive to feed my family, keep them safe and fed – I’m living a life without luxury and contributing to society that says I should be entitled to a life without worry, but I am not getting it – what has gone wrong here? It used to be like that didn’t it?

Those days are gone my friends.

What else can I offer, my heart and soul goes into my day job, then I create websites and short films, I do design work, I take pictures, I like to produce something you can stand back and look upon with a sense of pride and awe, that’s what this life should be about, and that’s what I should be able to do. I should be able to write words that inspire, that create awareness and oneness and keep us all together in unity but no, theres no time for all that now is there.

I have come to notice that we’re not looking to better ourselves creatively or artistically, we are fighting in fact, fighting with every ounce of our souls to ensure that we keep a roof over our heads and our children fed and it’s wrong and I’m sick of it all.

..and I am not the only one to notice this.

So this is one element as to why the EiOK blog has suffered from lack of posts, how can I honestly take an hour out of my schedule to write thought provoking and interesting posts while in this depression and fear of not being able to survive the harsh reality of the economic condition of the United Kingdom, where the rich are lighting cigars with stacks of fifty pound notes and laughing, while the common working man is scrabbling around for pennies in old cigar boxes just to feed the electric meter.

I’m not making excuses and really I don’t care anymore, its come to the time where everything we do, from manual work to creative endeavours, however it transpires there must be some money in it for you or you cant waste your time on it. That’s wrong, I hate it completely, but that’s the world we live in, people. I have so much to share yet it’s trapped behind a fear of making it to next payday and all that unenjoyable stuff we do is just to make it through the next month. The joy and fun takes a hit every time and it’s wrong.

Our brains are melting rapidly with the pressure and simple joys like amusing you guys with anecdotes from my life is a rare luxury as I need to get on, I need to do things to make sure my children can eat dippy eggs on Sunday and so that I can put petrol in my car, and so that the children don’t go without and that’s entirely where my focus is right now.

But I hope to amuse again one day..

…I hope to inspire and enthrall and I will, when I can.

Collectively and between us we can change this bullshit mess of a world that we’ve been left with and we can help each other, we can go beyond the slave society and break free from it and create a new world for us all with no fat cats, no fifty pound notes to light cigars with, one day we’ll all realise that this stuff truly, is simply paper after all.

Let’s hope so.

Everything is OK.

AA. #EiOK

Welcome home, darling.

By AA.

Two reasons why women get on my nerves.

So I come home from work…

All the women that read this are either going to slowly nod sadly or they are going to be angry and disagree with me, and call me a sexist bastard or something and will get their knickers all in a twist. Basically one way or another this is going to upset someone and there will be consequences, but to hell with that, blogging is a chance to say whatever the hell you want, which is a good thing right?

Yes it is.

Especially when it’s me doing the saying.

So earlier today…

A battle has been raging, long and hard for years between these two little boys and their loving parents, my Wife and me. The war is a struggle between good (i.e: my wife and me) and evil (my two children) and it’s all about having power and control in the family environment. You’re effectively fighting for your right to do something, be that squeeze an entire tube of toothpaste down the toilet or to be able to sit in peace and quiet with a nice cup of tea.

These are the values that you believe in and are fighting your opponents for and sometimes you’ll win and sometimes you wont.

It’s about having power.

Power to wipe chocolate covered fingers on fresh paintwork and get away with it versus power to take away the Ben 10 DVDs for a whole week. And enforce a chocolate treat ban, or bed without any supper, the list is practically endless on both sides of this war.

There are many, many weapons used on both sides.

Evil, good, good, evil – pick a team.

Usually it’s big people vs little people.

So today’s war was raging on apparently since school kicking out time and my wife was outnumbered and outgunned (which is presumably my fault) and seemed to be losing control of the war going on in my house.

So I walk in and there is tension in the air, and there are wooden bricks mixed with DVD cases featuring Kung Fu Panda and Fireman Sam liberally scattered all across my living room floor. The Go-Go’s, cheeky little Japanese plastic alien freaks that they are quite rightly have tried to escape the brick tsunami going on in the living room and are making a break for the stairs.

So it all appears to me anyway, doing my initial forensic analysis of the battlefield.

Wifey, quite rightly I might add is cooking the dinner and fuming. The two children are looking like they’ve just been told that Father Christmas isn’t real (he is of course, don’t start freaking out there) so it’s all a little crazy here it seems.

I ask wifey what’s going on, who, instead of telling me starts yelling at me at, I guess, in the same pitch and volume that she’s been using just now to yell at the two sad little monkey faces in the other room in explanation of what’s been going on.

To this moment, several hours later I am still none the wiser.

How come I am just a target, I’m supposed to be on the same team, yet I am getting yelled out just for arriving on the battlefield!

Woah, woah friendly fire !!

In fact that’s probably why I am being yelled at because I have been out having a ‘great time’ all day battling for my life and soul in the corporate jungle, fighting flying wildebeasts with bionic stapler guns and fire breathing dragons that attack from the boardroom. My efforts of course are done in order so that the rest of the people in my house actually have food and somewhere to go to sleep most of the time so why!

WHY do I get yelled at?

Makes me want to side with the rebels and join with the naughty boys if I’m going to get yelled at anyway. Why can’t I just be naughty on my own accord and get yelled at when I actually deserve it, why do I get yelled at simply by default?

I also don’t get it when my eldest son got a “Learner of the Week” award at school, surely it should all be happy days over here?

So that’s one reason why women get on my nerves. With all their yelling.

Love them so much as I do.

The second reason women get on my nerves is because on the one hand they tell you or yell to you about how annoying and frustrating it is trying to raise good, well-mannered children, usually in tears like a nervous wreck while on the other hand as soon as a small baby comes within a 5 metre radius of them – suddenly they say they want more children!

What the hell is all that about?

I love all the people in my house of course, and raising children is a very serious and important topic for me and I am doing my best to provide an environment that is fun for them, where anything is possible and to provide a place where they can be safe, warm and loved.

But when they are naughty and drive us all mad, why the hell would you want to add more of the cheeky, beautiful, angelic little horrors into the equation?

I don’t get it, must be a girl thing.

Everything is OK.

Now that they’re asleep in bed anyhow…

AA