I'm an American composer for film, television and video games, and a session and live drummer for radio and records.
As an international speaker and author, I'm passionate about talking to Creatives about the convergence of art and business and the strategies behind building a thriving and profitable creative enterprise as an artist.
I'm the founder and editor-in-chief of SCOREcast, the popular online consortium of worldwide film music and post-production professionals.
I author the creative resource The Conversation, which is distributed monthly to more than 550 subscribers across all disciplines of the creative arts space.
My company, Deane Ogden Creative, Inc., is a global organization that handles my music projects and advocacy endeavors, and also administers my Imaginator Music production library throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
I never worry about whether I can do something — I just tell myself it needs to be done and then I strike out to do it. It might take a team, it might end up being just me and a partner, or it might just be me flying solo. But what it isn't is me wringing my hands and worrying about if I can actually do it or not. I don't worry about the possibility of a challenge. Am I scared? Sometimes. Am I unsure? Frequently. But am I worried? No. I am a composer. I am a producer. I am a drummer. An author. A speaker. I don't just do all those things, I AM all those things. I realize who I am, and I target my goals accordingly. I stretch myself to tackle things that aren't in my usual comfort zone, but even that is more about...
It's tough out there right now for Creatives. Hell... It's tough out there for ANYBODY! But as artists, we tend to let our own self-defeatism do our bidding, and that can be creative and career suicide. If that's you right now, here's a little pep talk to talk you off the ledge. If you cannot see the video below, click here.
I had a pretty sizeable (and awesome) post planned for this morning to start the week, but when I got up and out of bed, got showered, and began thinking ahead to the rest of my week, it dawned on me how great it is to be doing what you love, with people you adore, working on things that, when released, are going to bring other people a lot of joy and smiles, and loving every damned minute of all of it. A comparative list started running through my mind about all the things that COULD be going wrong... but aren't. I know. Usually it's the other way around—we tend to think about all the things that should be working out, sans kinks, but aren't, for some god-awful reason. That's the more frequent thought, isn't it? But not today. This day—this M-o-n-day—let's focus on the positives. You're alive, you're loved,...
Sometimes people write and ask which people I get inspired by and if there are resources out there that really light me up and stoke my creative fires. I wrote about a few of them before, but there's another person I watch closely who I think you'd be wise to pay attention to. Meet Jason Jason Jackson (or "JJ", as I've always called him) and I played bass and drums, respectively, in a handful of hard rock bands together between 1992 and 1995, and became as close as brothers in the process. In those days, we both had hair down to our asses, shared a penchant for slashed acid-washed jeans with holes in the knees, and trashed more than our share of perfectly good dwellings as young idiot rockers with way too much freedom on our hands and huge arena-sized dreams in our back pockets. As it goes with great bands, everything went to...
A couple of weeks ago, I told you about my annual ritual of choosing a Word for the Year (WFY) to help guide me in my personal and professional endeavors. You can read my original post about it for a complete explanation on each of these, but to recap, my WFY's since 2005 have been: 2005 // RESET 2006 // AWAKE 2007 // CHANGE 2008 // FUCK IT 2009 // PURPOSE 2010 // MANAGE 2011 // EXPANSION My Word for 2012 As I mentioned in the original post, I usually start to think about and contemplate my WFY around the beginning of every October, but refrain from making the final choice until the week between Christmas and New Years. At that point, normally, I would set my WFY in stone, and run with that word as my point of focus from January 1st through December 31st of the following year. However, the original post...
