PIXELS is Patrick Jean’ latest short film, shot on location in New York.

Written, directed by : Patrick Jean
Director of Photograhy : Matias Boucard
SFX by Patrick Jean and guests
Produced by One More Production

ThinkGeek, that delicious haven, destination and veritable year-round Christmas morning bonanza, also sells tshirts! Geek tees. Usually quite clever, witty and terrifyingly geeky.

As I’ve designed a tee or two and once in a while am known to get my geek on, I was excited to note that ThinkGeek has a ‘Bounty Program’. In a nutshell: you can earn cash by submitting ideas for tees. I like cash!

To sweeten the deal, you can earn double the cash by also submitting artwork. I love double cash!

What could go wrong?

As it turns out, plenty. Now, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. But see for yourself: the terms and conditions include this particular nugget:

13. General Conditions (c) By submitting Entry, You hereby agree Design will be deemed a “work made for hire”, as that phrase is used in the United States copyright law, and all right, title and interest in and to the Design will vest automatically in Sponsor. To the extent the Design is not deemed to be a “work made for hire,” You hereby assign, transfer and convey, and agree to further assign, transfer and convey, to Sponsor any and all Your intellectual property or proprietary rights in the Design.

Did you catch that? Normally (in Canada and the US) when you create work, it’s automatically yours. You, the creator. But at ThinkGeek, when you submit artwork, you implicitly agree to automatically give away those creator rights. Those rights now belong to ThinkGeek. Forever.

Then there’s this other nugget:

(g) Entries become the property of the Sponsor and will not be returned.

In other words: when you submit artwork, it’s not only theirs, ThinkGeek doesn’t have to give you anything. Click ’submit’ and you’ve just flushed your IP and/or artwork away. Wheee!

Artists be warned!

As much as you and I might be scratching ourselves raw for cash, hardware and self-respect – ThinkGeek’s  bounty program will cost you your artwork and creator rights to that artwork in exchange for nothing. As much as you can, protect your creative work by knowing your creator rights.

“The fire’s in their eyes and their words are really clear “

Excellent presentation of (what I call) layered authoring: it all comes together in my head the way Photoshop comes together in the layers control.

Always a fan of Simon Tofield’s animation. Be sure to dig for more.

Of the many things that tickle my ears or dry out my eyes, I had not until now seen tee shirts and stop motion combined. The comedic artists Rhett and Link were hired to produce a television commercial, the behind-the-scenes goodness you’re about to watch.

Here’s an idea that came to me; bear with me while I lay the groundwork:

Producing art requires time, effort and resources; three things this artist does not have in abundance. Time-to-create can usually be found by sacrificing time-spend-on-other-things. Effort, like opportunity, wears coveralls and smells like hard work but love is blind. Resources like money, software, hardware, motivation, reward, desire, organization (yup, all those are resources I use) are the fuel burned over a time period in order to ensure effort gets put in.

Now, I like to think that taking care of two of these three will free you to just worrying about the third; it’s hard to win a war on multiple fronts. I also like to think that money can be thrown at a number of problems and that getting hit with money really can make those problems go away. If I didn’t have to worry about effort (you love what you do, right?) and if resources were taken care of for you – then you’d just need to buckle up and put in the time. So how do cover your resources when you don’t have the resources to buy resources?

Hey, I have this idea

1. Artist builds studies of work he’d one day build when time, resources and effort align just right – and posts online.
2. Attached to this post is a dollar figure representing the estimated resources needed to actualize the work and their dollar value.
3. Time passes, other things happen. Some interesting, some not.
4. One day, someone sees the preparatory work, study drawings, notes and learns they can actually make this project happen–make it start tomorrow–by paying today for the resources needed. So they do just that.
5. The artist receives payment and the work is begun in earnest.
6. When the work is completed, it is made available for purchase online in print-on-demand format.
7. When a sale is made, the individual who paid for the project receives a percentage of all or time-limited sales transactions.

Some notes

The artist is motivated to produce saleable work because residual income is a key component for survival. This program would also provide up-front money for the production of otherwise expensive or out-of-reach projects (not to mention incentive to start and complete works)

However, what makes this really interesting is that being a patron of the arts can be realistic, achievable, financially rewarding and still viable in the 21st century.

The patron is motivated to put their money to work in a manner that stimulates culture, toward projects that already have personal resonance and has the promise of future income. Even at conservative rates, investments could be doubled over the long term. E.g. $2000 is needed to realize a work under the terms of selling POD product with a $10 payable-to-patron for each sale; 20 sales a year over 10 years would repay the patron and 40 per year average would double their initial contribution.

It’s time to hang up the tee. Having created a new tee design every Saturday for six months, I have met the best success anyone could ever meet: the fact that I did it.

“Tee of the Week” was fun, it was challenging, it was easy and it was hard. And now it’s time to give myself a break.

The current plan is to take July and August off, get some studio renovations started before winter sets in and enjoy the summer. Perhaps read a book (which I haven’t done yet this year) or cut the grass (which I also haven’t done much of…).

For those who have been enjoying the desktop calendars, I think I could be convinced to continue those for the remainder of 2009. But you gotta let me know – leave a comment below!

Hope you got a few laughs from my work and thank you for visiting every week,

Carl

PS – Don’t think for a moment this is the end of carljagt.com The urge to create will keep me busy and new projects are bound to spring up. There are still a bunch of tee designs I need to wrap up (both in preparing print read masters for PrintFection and/or Spreadshirt) as well a few ideas that didn’t really fit with my sci-fi/monster threads.