When I was 9 years old, I was sitting through yet another insufferably boring “educational” filmstrip in my fourth grade class. I was so bored, I began to daydream - and as I daydreamed, I doodled in the corners of my history textbook. The school I went to was literally right next to an Air Force base - the playground actually shared a fence with part of the base. Earlier that year, we’d taken a field trip (one of my favorites from my entire school career) onto the base and there we’d gone inside the monstrous B-52s and gotten up close and personal with the F-4 Phantom fighter jets - a plane some of my friends’ parents actually flew. Now that was history - and it wasn’t boring. I started drawing a fighter jet in flight.
“Ding” went the recording that played along with the filmstrip, letting my teacher know it was time to advance to the next uninspired frame as the narrators voice droned on about something - I don’t even remember what anymore. It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t paying attention to that. I was making my fighter pilot do aerobatics as I drew more pictures on the other pages of my book and flipped them back and forth. He had a lock on his target. Missiles away. And the target was… Film Strip Man, who even registered his surprise at the sudden attack in his monotone voice. This was fun. This wasn’t boring. It wasn’t boring to me and somehow I knew it wouldn’t be boring to the other kids, either. Film Strip Man, on the other hand, had most of the class straining to stay awake.
But I and every other boy and probably most of the girls in the class had also just been exposed to The Empire Strikes Back, and I knew I didn’t have the ability or the tools to make something as cool as that for everyone to see. So, I didn’t think much more about my little flip animation after that for a long time.
I did get to think about being bored and being boring again, though. The defining moment came a couple of years later, when a teacher said something that stuck with me. By that time, I was in “advanced” classes - whatever that means - so the presumption was that all the kids in the class were pretty smart. Our teacher told us one day, after hearing a complaint that some subject was boring, that intelligent people don’t get bored - they find a way to occupy their minds. I thought about that statement for a long time, wondering whether it could be true or not. I was smart, wasn’t I? But I certainly got bored. A lot, actually. Then it finally dawned on me - the statement is true for people who make it true. That’s when I stopped paying much attention to school because, as I’ve said many times, I was too busy getting an education.
I still did well in school, although my teachers probably wished I did my homework more often. I didn’t see the point. If I knew it, I knew it - doing homework to prove I’d done it wasn’t of much use to me… and it was boring. Smart people don’t allow themselves to be bored. I spent time learning and doing all kinds of things on my own and with my friends - inventing games, creating new comic book heroes (although I’m not sure Mr. Bendy-Thumbs was my best idea), learning to program computers, eventually, by high school, doing the fun (yes, fun) calculus problems instead of the ones that had been assigned.
It was all fun and none of it was boring, but it definitely lacked focus. Fast forward several years and I found myself as part of the team that founded AV Farm and later Infusion Web & Video, producing video for television and the web. I enjoyed what I was doing, but something was still missing. Then, one day, cleaning out a bin of old books (one thing I keep around forever, if I can) - I came across it. My fourth grade history book. I don’t know why I’d kept it - or how I got away with making my parents pay for a lost book at the end of the school year - but there it was - and inside was my little flip animation. That brought back a lot of memories - and it helped me realize what was wrong. I was doing very good work, high quality work, and getting paid for it. I’m still proud of all the work I produced over the decade+ that I was part of the Infusion team, but now I knew why I wasn’t completely satisfied with that work. I was producing good videos - but I was producing videos just like everyone else. That’s not what I wanted. I realized that I was boring other people.
I also remembered what I had thought about not having the tools, the techniques, the knowledge, to make something super cool for the other kids to see. Now, I had all of those things. That’s when Aspect+Angle was born, a video production company determined to do things differently, things that get noticed, things that break the mold, things that violate the schema. Our founding principle, our credo, our #1 unbreakable rule - we don’t do boring.
I knew that with this new direction and new core philosophy, we’d need a new name as well. I knew that to make things different than they had been, they needed to be seen from a different perspective - figuratively and sometimes literally. I went to the thesaurus (OK - thesaurus.com) looking for words that were relative to the idea of perspective and that might convey something of what we do. With my old history book sitting in my lap as I perused, two words caught my eye. I looked down and flipped through the scene of the fighter jet raining down a decidedly not boring payload on Film Strip Man and I knew I had it.
aspect: noun - element to consider
angle: noun - personal approach, purpose
Those fit perfectly with what I wanted to create, not to mention they are meaningful photographic terms as well, but the clincher was the fact that when you put them together you get -
aspect angle: noun - a term used in air combat to describe the number of degrees from the tail of the bandit to your aircraft
Film Strip Man was going down. This time, for good.
We don’t do boring.
