Sometimes dreams do come true
The greatest treasure about founding Plank almost 20 years ago is all the wonderful experiences it has created. It can be too easy to forget to stop and appreciate the special moments and get wrapped up in the struggles of keeping an organization moving forward. Recently we started working on a project that twenty-something me would have been pretty darn impressed with.
In 1994, I decided to change my university major from Political Science to Communication Studies after a long discussion with a good friend in the program. As he went through what it had to offer, it was clear that I found my academic focus, finally. I was excited about all the different media theory classes on offer, not to mention the idea that I could choose a production stream of film, television or music (I chose music).
By the end of my 2nd year, a fourth stream was starting to develop, thanks to the efforts of a few professors. With the introduction of the “multimedia” stream, I suddenly found a creative outlet that also meshed with my 10+ year fascination with computers. It was a Hallelujah moment to realize that I could build a career that married my interest in creativity and the internet.
For our final project in my “Multimedia II” class, we were expected to present an interactive project using Macromedia Director 4.0. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember what projects others were working on while I spent hours upon hours in the Mac Lab, trading Photoshop and Lingo scripting tips with my peers. But I do vividly remember the project that I worked on.
Focusing on my interest in music, I put together an interactive retrospective of the previous four years of Lollapalooza, which I’d attended when it came to Parc Jean Drapeau the previous summer. I was then, as I am now, passionate about attending shows and loved the large festival format. So I spent hundred of hours on that project exploring different design aesthetics, to find a way to represent all the different artists and styles. In hindsight, I think the project was moderately successful but it really did set my career off in one direction and it was clear where my passion was.
Little did I know that this one travelling festival would become the model for so many other that would follow it. I also had no clue that, thanks to the passion and hard work of Dan Webster and Nick Farkas, Montreal would found in 2006 what would grow to become one of the most important and successful music festivals in North America: Osheaga.
I’m proud that twenty years later, my dream of working on a festival project has come true for myself and for Plank. Growing out of our long relationship with evenko, we are honoured to be working on Osheaga.com to support the festival in 2017. We are truly excited to build on the hard work that the evenko team has done for the past 10 years to develop this world-class event. I’m humbled that we get to be a part of their team and that they’ve made my university dreams actually come to life.
Feature image by velkr0 [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons
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