Project Description/ Our Exec. Team Picture
By The Thousand Words Staff
It's our project description in a thousand words with a picture, exactly like our pieces from the site!
Welcome.
Here’s the short version:
We want to create a website/ social media platform, mobile app, and a published book that celebrates the collaboration of photographers and writers as they explore the question “is a picture worth a thousand words”? We think we can do this in an environmentally conscious, inclusive and creative community where writers and photographers collaborate to make mixed media art and explore their creative potential. We hope to inspire something in someone, somewhere. This is a threefold commitment to our future: our art, our youth and our planet.
Now, here’s the long version:
You’ll see this question a lot (probably from us): is a picture worth a thousand words?
We think yes. We want to bring photography and writing together, and create a place for people to tell their stories together as mixed media in the form of a photograph and one thousand words on a living website and mobile app that will make fine art photography and creative writing accessible and participatory. Our mission is to unleash the combined creativity of photographers and writers and create community from this collaboration of creatives.
It’ll be telling the story of two individual artists, inspired by each other. We have a vision for a place where photographers and writers can put their work into a social media platform where it will thrive and be celebrated. We think that this collision of artists will allow everyone to have access to ways to tell old ideas better, or come up with something new altogether. That’s art as social justice! We’ve already started building the foundations of this community, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive.
So what will this look like?
A social media platform and print publication where artists explore the connection between an image, and a thousand words. As a social media platform, we want to create a virtual community through a living website and a mobile app to let the community get their work into the public space while receiving feedback from other creatives. It will be community based artistic collaboration that can be both local and global. Then, we will publish a book containing the best of the site as decided by the community, to give our creators the chance at publication and start something that could open doors for someone.
That may not sound like much, but most of the writers and photographers that we’ve worked with over the last year have been young. They all are curious to see how far they can take their refined or newfound creative talents into their futures. We want to provide a place for these people to let their creativity explode and learn from others in the process. And, honestly, how cool is it to be published in book? It’s opportunities like this that can inspire futures, careers and passions.
Now, here’s why we need funding.
We’ve relied on donations for the last year, averaging about $1, each. We know that people are into this idea, but now we need a kickstart (see what we did there?) to get this project off the ground. We need funding to create and design the website and the app. The site we have now is only a temporary space to house the work we’ve collected over the past year. We need to get artists and creatives of ALL ages involved from as many places as we can think of. We need to be able to fund the production and publication of a book, which will come sometime after we get the site and app rolling. We want to offer training programmes for new artists, as well. We want to offer them an opportunity to learn the skills to engage in the conversation that is creative writing or fine art photography, skills that will be with them forever. To do this, we need equipment and trainers.
All this and more go into our startup costs. We are also trying to be a startup with a tiny carbon footprint, so investing in environmentally friendly products such as sustainably sourced and energy efficient materials and technology is essential as we make a threefold commitment to our future: our art, our youth and our planet.
At this project’s essence, it is: thinking wild, cultivating stories that inspire, and embarking on one heck of an adventure.
Here are our challenges:
This project is a work in progress, we know we will struggle to publish a book, and we have two competing visions for our project: a social media platform and a publication. We want both, don’t get us wrong, but one may naturally prevail over the other. It’s hard enough selling print media anything these days, it can be tragic to watch publications go digital, but we see the beauty in the accessibility of digital, and we can be an example of this in an iBook, and mobile app. We can always digitally publish to tablet and mobile friendly versions, but it is too early tell exactly which route we’ll commit to, right now.
We know it’s hard to generate that initial buzz of interest, but we think we can tackle this by having a strong (and environmentally friendly) marketing effort, and getting people psyched about being creative. We have the advantage of working in three large metro areas: Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.
We know that getting word out may be difficult given our digital-first approach to marketing. Why do we do it? It’s because we believe that environmental consciousness should pervade our entire business model, and digital is paperless. We are going to tackle this challenge by supporting local printing firms that use sustainable and responsible sourcing for their products, and the same is true for our merchandise. It may mean a higher price for us, but we are more than happy to take on that cost so we can have a smaller carbon footprint and also support products made in the USA.
Thanks for your support,
Kyle, Miranda and Claire
