I guess that I can thank God for the fact that I might have ADHD. Because if I didn’t daydream so often, I wouldn’t have came up with so many spontaneous ideas as I would have if I didn’t have ADHD or something similar.
Now, I will let you look into a bit of my life: I’m a 16-year old student, director, actor, editor, journalist, graphic designer and website programmer. I have tons of ideas that came as a result of just random impulses. Every idea that I’ve got is spontaneous.
For my actor life, I’ve been an actor for as long as I can remember. Since I was a kid growing up in the Philippines, I remembered mom getting me ready for an audition, usually every few weeks or so. Makeup (yes, guys wear makeup too, but only when necessary. 99% of the time, it isn’t. Usually used to enhance looks on the camera. Yes, it does add 10 lbs, and makes you look pale.), wardrobe, scripts and working with directors was part of my life back then. However, once I moved to Canada when I was 10, I gave acting one last shot at an audition in downtown Toronto, and retired. It wasn’t until The Swag Project started when I got back to acting.
However, believe it or not, The Swag Project isn’t one of those spontaneous ideas, primarily because of one reason: it wasn’t my idea. It was Joseph’s. I was just the editor with the video ideas. Joseph was the dude who wanted to partner up with me on a YouTube channel.
Directing is a major part of what I do. Thing is, I just have a natural instinct to get everything in order. Oddly enough, those times are the only times when ADHD does not bother me. Now, I do both kinds of directing: Film directing and project directing. When it comes to film directing, if TSP had all of the resources and time necessary, we’d have phenomenally better videos. Problem is, we don’t. TSP is basically dispersed into three cities: Toronto, ON, Brantford, ON (100 km from Toronto. No, not Bradford. Brantford.) and Buena Park, CA (33 km from Los Angeles). In other words, TSP’s major problem is distance. It’s not that we can’t do it. We can, but we just don’t have the time to travel great distances. That’s one of the reasons why we didn’t upload any videos for 2012.
Apart from my TSP life, I am a journalist. Since 2008, I have been doing in-depth reviews of various things, from electronic devices (in http://central.theswagproject.ca/, look for the review of the new iPad) to songs (in http://central.theswagproject.ca/, look for the review of “Person of Interest” by Rebecca Black. Yes, that Rebecca Black).
However, one of the few websites I didn’t design was the template our journalism site, Central, used. That was someone else’s WordPress template, “Vinica”. Meanwhile, TSP’s website (which has a whole lot of bugs to work out) is one of my first few graphic design projects.
Cosmos II, which is the theme used in TSP’s website (http://www.theswagproject.ca), was constructed around an impulse. I took another WordPress theme, “Greyzed”, and worked around it. (now, a warning: unless you code and develop websites and website templates, especially for WordPress, you would have no idea what I’m talking about.) I heavily modified the CSS code, replaced almost all the images, modified the PHP files, etc. After a whole midnight of restless work, I ended up with a working copy of Cosmos II. Well,almost. For reasons unknown, it would not seem to work on Internet Explorer. Worked everywhere else.
Also, I have clients. The CEO of a company (who told me not to talk about the details of my job, so I’m keeping the identity of some of my clients a secret) who is revolutionizing the food industry with a radical set of ideas. I learned about my client’s ideology as I was retyping their PDFs into their site. (for some reason, Adobe Reader wouldn’t let me copy the text of some PDFs)It also helped me to realize how much my client’s business made sense. Back to the graphics part: because my client’s business was such a revolutionary one, I had to come up with an equally revolutionary site. Well, revolutionary in terms of design for that market anyways. I have compared my client’s website to that of the competition, and, even though I designed the site, I’ll say this with an unbiased opinion: The competition can’t stack up on either front, websites or business. Now, I would talk more about my client’s business, but if I do, I might as well make a 5-page essay about it. I gotta stay relevant. Yep. Classic ADHD.
Now, not only am I a graphic designer for websites, I build them too. Back in the old ages, I built websites out of nothing but (not so) good ole’ HTML. It was slow, laggy and took ages to build. Eventually, (thank God) I discovered WordPress. And after that, life became a lot easier. It’s flexible, able to do almost anything, easy to use but friendly to developers. Again, it’s back to one of my clients. I have been hired to do quite a few websites for my client, and have been on the job since 2009. The boss told me that I exceeded his expectations for the website. He, as well as his wife, was amazed with the website. Not bad for a 16-year old.
Now, sorry for boring you with a plethora of sentences and ADHD-fueled writing. But, I felt like writing this article for reasons that even I can’t figure out. Now, I’m thinking of maybe taking on a new project: redesigning my Tumblr. You’ll know when it’s done when my page isn’t using “Vertigo” anymore.
Whoa. You made it to the end of the post. I’m kinda surprised you’d get this far.
