04 Collective closed down, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy working on the visuals and a couple other things to help the label grow to what it managed to become.
I don’t think Twitter will let me screenshot a single tweet that exceeds the limit so… here goes nothing:
The way I got hired in the first place was pretty unusual, or at least it was for me. When XODUS by Famous Spear was premiering in a label called “04 Collective”, I just didn’t want to miss the chance to catch one of my favorite artist’s tracks premiere live on a Discord server.
The track was pretty good of course, and when I go to 04’s socials I notice a logo animation for the track’s teaser. Call me selfish but I honestly thought it looked pretty bad.
At this point I was used to working for free, do what I do for free, for other people.
I had nothing to do that day, so I just did a slightly smoother version of the logo animation, and DM’d to Dan (Paper Skies) through Discord, just for the laughs. I thought Dan was one of the staff members, but not the actual owner of the label.
When I realize he loves it and he’s the owner of the label, I was kind of surprised, because at that point I just showed my videos to my friends and that was pretty much it, nothing outside that circle. Then he offered be to work on a project for the label.
“If you can pull this one off I’ll definitely want you to be in the label” said Dan, or at least that’s what I remember him saying. My first project was an ENTIRE ALBUM, and it has been by far my largest work ever done in 04 Collective. It was Midnight Sun LP by Shwin.
The amount of time I spent on that video was tremendous, especially due to my really lacking computer at the time, it took like 4-5 days to render the entirety of the album’s visuals, but in the end that work alone got me hired in 04 Collective, and I was honestly impressed by someone liking my work outside of my usual experimental style. And from there on I kept working for 04 for the remaining of 2019 and all the way until BURN by eliderp & Knoir. That closing video was edited by Dan, you can tell because I’d never use Red Giant Universe.
I will be perfectly honest here, I didn’t get paid all the time for working on the visuals, it only became a little annoying after 6 months of not receiving any kind of income from the label where I actually had deadlines to meet and video quality to keep. I honestly was still grateful for the minimal, yet still meaningful amount of promotion my work was getting anyways so I didn’t really mind. In the end I started getting paid constantly, so Dan wasn’t lying when he said the funding for the label was starting to lack.
It was a ton of fun, it affected a small bit my school performance, but nothing I couldn’t recover from, I managed to graduate from high school with a really good average grade. And yes, school has to do with this, 04 Collective was the only proof I needed that my work could actually be valuable in money, in cash. And that just makes me very proud of all the progress I’ve been able to make in my creative career so far, yes, I am calling it a career now.
And from there on I’ve met a lot of cool people as well as pretty disgusting people, but that’s of course nothing out of the ordinary. Lastly, I’d like to thank a ton of people who I could honestly consider my friends (even if it’s not reciprocal):
Sorry for the unnecessarily long thread, but I really wanted to express my enormous gratitude towards @04Collective , and I won’t hesitate to work again with the staff on another label in the (hopefully not) far future. Thank you.