This week, I had the unexpected pleasure of watching The Dwarvenaut, a fantastic documentary on Netflix charting the life and career of Stefan Pokorny, founder of Dwarven Forge. The product of a dalliance between a GI and a Korean, later adopted by an Italian mother and a Czech father living in New York, Stefan is arguably the world's best creator of scenery and terrain for tabletop miniatures. After struggling to find purpose in school and eventually dropping out, he went on to study art at the High School of Art & Design, where he discovered a talent for painting. Inspired by a lifelong obsession with Dungeons and Dragons, combined with memories of making models with his architect father, he took a chance on himself, and left a job creating miniatures to start his own business building the world around them.
You're probably wondering what this has to do with music, or Sound & ymmiJ. As I was watching Stefan's journey, I couldn't help but draw parallels to my own. To start with, I'm a product of a similarly diverse background - a Turkish father, an English mother, lived in the US, speak French & Italian. I may not have struggled in school, but I always knew music was my future, and I often got in trouble during lessons for drifting off or writing lyrics. What's more, I'm also an unabashed nerd and roleplayer, and have been for many years. My Warhammer 40K armies may be long gone, but my con days are not yet over (my Jafar made it into the official photo album for Dragon Con 2011).
Like me, Stefan is an artist and a perfectionist, more at home with the act of creation and world-building than the burdens of business or leadership that accrue when you turn doing what you love into how you make a living.
"What is money? Money's just paper. What matters in life is that you do something you enjoy. That's what matters, because that is your life. It's not what's gonna happen 20 years, 30 years down the road, what matters is you are what you are, you are what you do. That becomes you. So hopefully you do something you enjoy. So I'm doing something I enjoy, for as long as I can do it."
He relies on a steady blend of good humour, optimism, and generosity of spirit to keep his team flying in the same direction, something I've been accused of several times in the past.
"If I worried too much about the future, I never would have started this company. A lot of times, you think about "Oh my god, what if I can't pay this bill?" or "Oh my god, what if this doesn't succeed?"... You would be too paralysed to do anything. So instead, I just approach it optimistically, and say "Let's just try as hard as we can, and somehow we'll just get it done.""
Not only is there common ground between his art and our album Helen & I (Stefan mentions Greek mythology several times in the course of the film, including Prometheus by name), but in our methods too. The Dwarvenaut loosely follows the journey of Stefan's biggest ever Kickstarter appeal, with frequent forays into the history and character of the man behind the model. I won't spoil the ending for you, but the value of Kickstarter as a tool for reaching dedicated and engaged supporters, is evidence of the way the landscape of fandom is changing. Just as modern musicians don't need labels or publishers or any of the gatekeepers of the music industry 20 or even 10 years ago, artisans and craftsmen like Stefan can now reach anyone who cares about their product anywhere in the world with an internet connection, as I experienced first hand with my own Kickstarter project (more on that later).
I also saw a lot of crossover in our relationships to art and the world that surrounds it. Stefan draws from a wide pool of influences, thanks partly to his varied background, and partly to his wife-ranging interests. He took time to find his feet, initially struggling with the traditional route of making fine art and trying to get into galleries, before discovering his niche. Now having found his feet, accepting and being accepted into a world that appreciates his ability, Stefan's search for balance includes an ongoing battle with the party culture, one many creatives know well, and which was a theme of Helen & I.
"Drinking, doing drugs... Party hard, you know? I've always been an artist, hanging out with other artists and wild people, you know? It goes with the territory."
From a technical perspective, the film is a triumph. The documentary style reminds me a lot of another favourite of mine, Chef's Table - unobtrusive and without a narrator, director Josh Bishop draws the story from the footage like Michelangelo drawing a sculpture from a slab of marble. Bishop also provides the soundtrack, an acoustic romp through fantasy and metal that provides almost constant reassurance and reaffirmation to Dwarven Forge's likely fanbase that this is the film, and the product, for them. It's not a landmark soundtrack, but it does its job admirably, and is the sort of thing Sound & ymmiJ will be looking to do in the near future.
As much as we have in common, there's a lot I still have to learn from Stefan. He comes across as a purer soul than I, despite having gone through greater hardships. He's absolutely dedicated to his art, and delivers when it matters, enough to grow a thriving business that supports other fanatics like him. Creating that sort of community, one that can sustain not just me but anyone crazy enough to sign up, is a blueprint for what I want Sound & ymmiJ to become. Stefan also embraces the madness in following your dreams.
"Nothing in the world that is ever great gets done rationally. You gotta be a little bit nuts and prepared to go full throttle, and try to make it the greatest you can, whether you fail or succeed. A meeker heart would be like "That's insanity", and that person will never do anything great. The fear of failure is hard."
I might not have had the rough start that Stefan had, but I've had a fair few setbacks in my 30 years. I don't know if I started fearing failure because I failed more, or because now I have more to lose - my wife, our flat, my lifestyle. But with the promise of becoming a father beginning to creep over the horizon, Stefan's drive to make his parents proud really struck a chord with me. I'm lucky enough to still have both my parents, and they've given so much of their time and money and love that I owe it to them to succeed while they're still around to appreciate it.
The idea of legacy is at the heart of a lot of human endeavour, and art is no exception. We all have limited time on this planet to make an impact. It's not just about wanting to repay the people who got me here, and it's not just about getting the bulk of my failures out of the way before my children are old enough to recognise them. It's about being the man my children will need me to be. I want to leave them as much of me - my experience, my values, my heart - as I can. And, Stefan and I agree, there are few better ways to do that than through art.
"If you can do great art, well it's a piece of immortality. You can go on, your emotions, what you captured, that thing will continue to inspire people over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years. It's like a little piece of you lives on to keep inspiring forever and ever and ever. If that's not worth living for, if that doesn't give your life some kind of meaning, I don't know what does."