A tiny blip in the continuum

Having being given a newfound sense of purpose, I set about changing the way the company presented inself in its media outreach.

By then, Tasha had joined the company, and together we set about changing legacy. Being a 30-year-old organisation – and being one that had undergone the transition from the analogue workflow to a digital one – meant that there were a lot of redundancy in the information that floated around the office, and our priority was to consolidate all the source files before we could even start designing a new look for the website and publications.

It took us a good 4 months to sift and collate all the information, and to create a new central database. And we lost momentum along the way, in the midst of all the chasing around the project leaders for the information and write-ups we needed to include into the publications. It was a case in which we were trying to throw legacy out the window, but we never did figure out how heavy it was until we tried picking it up.

Around the middle of the year, Tasha and I were privately commissioned to produce a corporate video for a client who was a friend of a friend. We worked many late nights; there we were, Tasha and I, slumped around her dining table, lethargic like a pair of slugs, smoking like chimneys, deprived of sleep and fueled by green tea.

We were nobody. Prior to this we had never done anything commercial. Right up to when we were commissioned, we had doubts about whether we could pull it off and deliver. It was a credit to the client to have taken a leap of faith with us; in turn, we held each other's hands, closed our eyes and leapt off the cliff.

We finished the video in time for an international conference that our client was participating in. While modest – it was the first time I had directed commercially – and made on a shoestring budget, the video was very well received.

Deliver we did. For the rest of July both Tasha and I rode on a high, pleased within that we took a gamble on ourselves that paid off. Picking up the ongoing work we had at the company felt like an anti-climax. It was just as well that whatever it was we set to achieve and complete was nearing completion, for we

Two months later, around September, I was hooked up with a media company via, again, a friend of a friend. Apart from that corporate video, I did not have much else to show by way of a showreel. I went for an interview, but I had not thought much of it, and certainly I had not imagined that the video was to be the calling.

They made an offer. I counter-offered.

And won.

I had arrived at a crossroads. In the week which ensued, I weighed my options. Part of me wanted so badly to grab that opportunity, and move into the industry I had always wanted to be in. To be doing real media work, instead of trying to impose media productions on what remained essentially an architectural practice. The other part of me – guided by the innate tenacity in me – resisted the offer, for it meant that I would be leaving things unfinished at the company if I was to leave.

I leapt again. But my eyes were wide open this time.

And what a sight it was.