Whew! What a week it was last week… Last Wednesday, I brought pal and photog instructor guru Zack Arias into my studio for another episiode of chasejarvisLIVE. We chatted photography for 2 hours and took questions from the live Twitter audience via #cjlive. Was a blast. While about 20,000 of you caught the interview LIVE–it seemed like I got at least that many tweets/emails/fbook requests to post it again here on the blog, so… As you wish. Here ’tis.
From there, we shipped Zack and his crew into our creativeLIVE studio where he put on one heckuva studio lighting course all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Hopefully you saw the interwebs booming, especially with the @creativeLIVE and #askzack tags. I’m pretty sure Zack swiped some ratings from the World Cup. Or at least we had fun trying. I wanted to give a huge shoutout to Zack and his team for an amazing effort. You guys and gals nailed it. Also a shoutout also to all the manufacturers that kicked in gear for Zack to give away, as well as uber thanks to B&H Photo Video for their support of the creativeLIVE studio and G-Technology for keeping our gobs and gobs of data safe. They support us, please support them. I hope lots of you tuned in. And if you didn’t but wished you had, the course is available for download here.
While I’ve got you, I wanted to ask for your feedback. Not somebody else’s…YOURS. In the comments below, we’re looking to find out a few things with the goal of making creativeLIVE the best it can be. Tell us whatever you want, but please help us by answering some or all of the following particulars about our LIVE, free, worldwide creative education platform:
1. What makes the creativeLIVE approach different, better, worse? How does our class format compare to others?
2. Where do you live? We want to understand the breadth of our audience with the comments on this post. Where are you from, and when are you watching the LIVE feed?
3. Does this live worldwide format really work? This is the important part. What does the experience feel like to you? Can you help describe this format to someone who’s never seen it?
Thanks for taking the time! If you’re new here, I invite you to subscribe/follow via links above and to the right. Lots more stuff heading your way soon on all our channels…
1. What makes this class better than all others is I get to see it before I buy it. In your chat with Zack, he discusses the “Look at me, I’m great” photographers out there. Many of them have overpriced and minimal content training seminars and DVDs out there. Even with a small “preview” of classes, it doesn’t give you enough to make a decision. I know what I’m going to get from your classes.
Which leads to the next part. You guys are using the best educators out there to do your workshops. Not photographers trying to advance their own career, but rather open and bright photographers who are definitely out there and ready to help us.
Also, what makes it great is the live chat. It’s nice to ask questions of the educators, something you don’t get with a DVD. It also allows for the educator to reexplain some key concepts that the audience may not have gotten. This chat could be improved upon slightly by having some experts in the forums answering some of the questions..
2. I’m a wedding photographer out of Orlando, Florida.
3. The live worldwide format works great. I can definitely see a global community coming together as the result of these classes. Also the recasts are nice even for US, for those that may have other obligations during the original airings.
1. Using the twitter feeds to share questions and comments all while in real time with a live world audience was simply incredible to be a part of and totally different from other online seminars, training and workshops I’ve been a part of.
2. Pennsylvania
3. The format totally works! You reach such a greater audience using the internet. The live feed was really stable and strong as well which made it that much better. And actually having a small in-house audience made it feel more like I was there, rather than having the workshop in front of 200 people and just having a video feed. Thanks CreativeLIVE! Thanks for empowering the small guys and the beginners who don’t have the money to invest in big conferences and expensive workshops.
> 1. What makes the creativeLIVE approach different, better, worse?
Good that you’re trying to offer multiple classes. I think you should do more classes and cover more subjects and many aspects of photography. When Chase Jarvis will be giving a class???
I like that you’re broadcasting in good quality, almost HD. I like that you have higher standards regarding sound editing and video directing (of course, there’s no limit to improvements). Nice idea.
> How does our class format compare to others?
It’s better because it forces me to watch/listen. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do that.
> 2. Where do you live? We want to understand the breadth of our audience with the comments on this post. Where are you from, and when are you watching the LIVE feed?
Redmond, WA. Originally from Siberia, Russia. 🙂
> 3. Does this live worldwide format really work? This is the important part.
Live is good since you have to watch it. I can’t figure out how to post a question to Zack — it worked much better with Art Wolfe.
3-day weekend workshops are hard. It’s not easy to spend 3 days laying in front of your tv to watch this. 5 workdays*4 hours would have worked much better for me!
> What does the experience feel like to you?
Tedious. Very. And very frustrating since whole weekend was destroyed. And still, I missed half of the show 🙁
> Can you help describe this format to someone who’s never seen it?
Online classroom.
1). The live aspect – it felt like zac wasnt running to a set schedule, he was just teaching in a loose way as things came up or occurred to him and he was prepared to just go with it. To me, thats the mark of a true expert – those people who can just start teaching, or talking about their subject, and know it inside out, backwards, forwards… it shows in a format like this one. It’s the instructors that make the format work (vince laforet one was great also).
2). Perth, Australia. +8 GMT, live started at 3am, replay at 11am. The replay was the perfect time for me.
3). As above – yeah the live format is good.. you have to be prepared to invest some time, and i was doing other things around it but whenever i sat down to watch i learned something, so knowing i missed heaps of good info, decided to invest in the download.
1. Yes. I think it works quite well because it really does feel like being at a workshop. And you don’t need to travel anywhere. All the other training sites I’ve tried are good but they don’t have that ‘hands on workshop’ style atmosphere that Creative Live is bringing.
2. Japan. I’m British but have been in Japan for 9 years.
3. Yes it works. I was able to catch the end of the live stream when I woke up in the morning and then catch up with what I’d missed easily during the day. It beats having to wake up at 3 a.m.
But if the course was shorter it would be better to decide on a definite schedule for each region of the world. A specific re-run time for East Asia, Europe, etc. I think it would be better than just re-running it once and hoping that it suits everyone’s time zones.
I’ve bought the download anyway. Well worth the money.