National Geographic...An old goal? A new one?

So, today as I was going through old email which I seem to never bother to sift, I found a bunch of National Geographic emails. The one on great migrations caught my interest, and when I went to the site, I was hooked by this lovely extras "music" video:

If you know me, you probably know that I love butterflies. I think it's the little girl in me who for some reason always wanted to be a tomboy but could never fully shake my love for beautiful things. Though I have grown up in both the proverbial and physical sense, I do still have a deep love for beautiful things - nature fitting right in to that category. Working for National Geographic was a goal for me not so many years ago, and though I do forget about my job-related desires when living the everyday work lifestyle, I wonder if I haven't lost some of that mystery and I wonder... how do the people who work for NG keep that mystery alive? How does anyone keep that magic alive in the everyday mundane "I get up, I eat, I go to work, I come home..."?

And now I'm reminiscing upon my little-girl dreams of becoming a marine biologist, my young woman dreams of working in the peace corps or for greenpeace, and my mid-twenties desire to work for a company that cares, that inspires, and is more human than corporate. Is that dream still there or has the process of day-in/day-out sucked it away?

Inspiration Research is the path to Where?

At work we are about to begin an ongoing project and though I can't say much (anything) about it, I will say that I went looking for design inspiration directly for this project. I'm not sure I know how to design something that has a style that will last for many many videos and over a period of many years! Anything for that long will eventually get boring and old. It's interesting that in my TAM class we learned about classic styles that never truly go out of style - pea coats, jeans, Chanel jackets, trench coats, etc - they get re-invented or re-invigorated but they remain in style. So that's what we are challenged to do in this multimedia video project.

I found little in my search that truly helped me solve this current conundrum, however I did come across some inspiring videos. I wound up on a website called MographTV and there I watched a well-told and beautifully shot short called Apricot by Ben Briand, which is hosted by Vimeo:

APRICOT — A Short Film by Ben Briand from Moonwalk Films on Vimeo.


After stumbling on Mograph, I decided to stick around and see what I could find. There was a link to a nice talk by designer Cameron Moll giving a lecture about good design versus great design. So far, I've only found time to watch about 15 minutes of it, but it seems worth my time to revisit and watch the rest of the lecture.