I’ve been thinking over the last while that I might need to somewhat alter the way I have things set up here. Over the past number of years I’ve been getting more and more involved in composition and sound design for film and recently had to update my CV for a potential sound-design job. As I was adding the more recent film work I noticed that I’ve now worked on 11 films since around 2004, varying from sound design, to sound editing, to composition, to all of the above. On top of this I’ve done a number of mixing and mastering jobs on music releases as well as a variety of theatre productions and one exhibition.
It has been occurring to me that it might actually be time to set up a dedicated portfolio detailing this work and really there is no better place for this than this domain, alex.leonard.ie.
I have no fear of this blog coming across badly in the eyes of a prospective director/producer but at the same time it feels as though I should (once again) attempt to separate work from play. Initially I started a blog over on Vox just because it seemed like something I should be doing.
After running the Pixelapes blog for a while it felt quite nice to be able to speak a little more frankly on my personal blog without feeling that I would give the wrong impression of our business (utterly professional it is too, if I may say so). Often the lines blur between what is more suitable for which website, and a number of the blog posts I’ve written here could very easily have been slightly adapted and published over on Pixelapes.
Now I’m faced with a different question, the answer to which could leave me with a veritable dirth of websites. There are a few approaches I could take.
- Continue my personal blog here, but alter the site to be more focussed on my film portfolio and maintain the blog as it’s own small section.
- Move this blog wholesale to another domain name and set up a simple portfolio site on this domain.
- Move this blog as above, but start a new portfolio site along with yet another blog, but one which is wholesale concentrated on matters relating to the film industry in Ireland and beyond, with some intention of actually assisting my search engine results.
Option 1 is certainly appealing from the point of view that I would only need to maintain one WordPress install and could update both portfolio in blog from the one place. However there are certain drawbacks to this option. Firstly I think I’d desire to do a complete redesign, on top of which there’d be some major restructuring of how this site is laid out. Also, I would probably still feel that I would be a somwhat restricted in what I could say on the blog section as I would need to keep in mind that potential employers might be looking over the site. You know, nothing beats a good rant every once in a while, but it might not convey exactly the impression I’d desire to give.
Option 2 is quite doable. I already know what domain I’d be buying and it’s relatively straightforward to wholesale move this site to another domain (just a few find and replace operations on the database and some quick file moving). However this also results in another new design being created just for my portfolio (although could be nice to play around with some PHP coding, unless I install WordPress – which I probably would do).
Option 3 means that I’d be committing to attempting to maintain content creation on yet another blog/site and would bring the number up to 4 websites actively in need of maintenance: pixelapes.com. ebauche.net, alex.leonard.ie, and mysterynewdomain.com
Whilst anything that increased my potential exposure as a composer and sound designer would be good, I’m not sure that I could really afford to look at a film portfolio as anything other than a handy reference guide for potential employers which might allow them to get a better idea of the work I’ve done – basically an online CV.
Slowing the decision
I would think that the main thing that is slowing me down from making a decision is the fact that I barely have time to do anything extra at the moment and right now it doesn’t feel like the highest priority thing. However it would be very easy to continue saying this until another producer contacts me asking to look over my CV. At which point I would be most likely to start ‘considering’ the transition again desipite the fact that it would once again be too late for such a transition to make any sort of difference to the decision making process undertaken by the producer/director.
Anyway, it being after 1am I think I’m going to call it a night. I think I mostly just wanted to get these thoughts all down somewhere so I could come back to them again and work out what I really wanted. If you have any thoughts on what I should do, just drop a comment down below !
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