Live Screening Q&A xx

Dear Eggulate Angels,

I know I've been a long time away on here, with so much focus having to go on Kickstarter and making sure we fulfilled all our promises on there. It was quite the feat of Admin, which I will be the first to admit does not come as naturally to me as the Creation, so I'm very grateful for your tenacious support through the wintry tundras.

To those of you who support me on here and also donated on there, you are absolute treasures and I am so very grateful. We managed to make something I feel so proud of - in fact, probably the most proud of anything I've ever made, in terms of what I set out to achieve, and what I ended up achieving, lining up really very closely.

It's always an odd feeling putting out a huge project which has had so much effort and love poured into it - a sort of uncanny adrenaline comedown of flatness, and the ominous hum of directionlessness. This is especially sending work out online, where you receive feedback in a sharp spike, then quickly in small dribs and drabs; and the sort of faceless feedback never quite feels real. That was why being able to do a live screening of the film was the most special thing - having a few hundred people in the room enjoying and engaging with what we'd made was really quite something to behold. So, as a special Patreon treat (well, this is also going out to the Kickstarter backers who attended the screening), I wanted to give you the Q&A from our London showing, which will hopefully give you a bit of a glimpse inside the way we worked and the fun we had putting it together.

I'm very happy to be able to have a small moment of artistic reset at this point. If I am being honest, the growth of Jazz Emu Enterprises seems to have plateaued around two years ago now - in terms of cold hard Stats and Finances, and I have struggled to expand it beyond the admittedly lovely thing that it already is. Trying to work out the direction of the whole project sometimes feels like an unsolvable puzzle. It seems to me like there are so many paths that it could take: scale up the live shows? Try to adapt to a scripted format in an already floundering TV/film environment? Keep hammering the short-form CONTENT to build build build an audience there? I'm always sort of torn between these three modes, and all their subsets, and it sometimes feels a little overwhelming trying to divine the perfect path. I'm also aware of my stamina with it. I hope to keep making things my whole life and keeping myself interested and inspired for decades to come seems like a mammoth task now that the initial thrilling rush of it Sort Of All Working has dissipated.

This is why gut with Ego Death was to make something really personally expressive that I felt extremely proud of (which short-form content never quite lets you do), and I really scratched that itch. I hope to keep following that gut instinct. And I know that for me, the answer to feeling a little stuck has, and always will be, Keeping On Making. So that I will do! But I can sort of feel a vibe re-set cooking in my subconscious. I think I've maybe hit a skillset ceiling, as it were, and it's time to turn something on its head to see what happens. I don't know what that's going to look like, but I hope I receive some potent inspiration from the mighty Muses soon to sustain my energy in this wonderful and fun game.

In the meantime, THANK YOU for sticking around with me to see where all these things go, and giving me a cushiony blanket of support.

I've got some gorgeous really fun new music in the oven for you.

Love
JE x