Calling something melodramatic in cinema is usually used as a pejorative term.  Brings to mind daytime moves, odyssey international pictures (in fairness some of these where cool) and those watch out for drugs, bad crowd, alcohol information films. 

Even in film school one of my most respected and for me personally the best teacher in the university by a good country mile. He is a great film writer (many books in BFI press including one on Hitchcock) and teacher. Talking over some of my favorite films of the 50's he mentioned in conversation he used to like & enjoy melodrama but recently had changed his opinion. 

One feels that when you are a cinephile surrounded by critics of the time its hard to keep to what is true in your experience of film. That just sitting back and enjoying the film as it unfolds and reaches further than just your visual cortex but rather into the primordial lizard part of the brain that is steeped in emotion, instinct and pleasure. 

A film either hits you or doesn't, whats worse than someone gushing over a film only to go and see it and think goddamn that sucked. Or the cardinal sin in every film course M.A tell people what to think about the film before they see it.

I just like to sit back and let it wash over me, be it a great hammer B move like Vampire Circus or something more towards that pinnacle of cinema like Paris, Texas. 

Melodrama avoid it in life, catch it on DVD (or Netflix) 

Try this one for size directed by the great Vincente Minnelli and staring Old Blue eyes

On Wednesday morning our preferred CMS squarespace went offline for the first time. This meant all of our sites went down for a period of a few hours, luckily it was early Irish time and they where back up 100% by 10.20am, 

I have been assured that this was a once off and will never happen again. 

We are lucky as we had a film crew here and filmed the whole event live and you can find that video bellow.

In it my beard is a little more groomed (or a lot, needed to show off my state of the art hands free microphone) and my hair sleek and straight (great hair dept working here). 

I should have known Johnny Lee Miller was behind the entire squarespace thing. 

The Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-Sabi is very interesting and is something that has no direct English translation but can be best described as something that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. This idea clashes with the Western need to have perfection in every design

This concept can be integrated into everything from web design, to video production and films. It can add an enormous amount of beauty and authenticity to a project, it differs greatly from something that sets out to be perfect but fails, it is rather an acceptance of the imperfect. 

No posts on skateboarding and its links to entrepreneurship would be complete with mentioning Rob Dyrdek the man who redefines what it is to be a skate mogul. Rap label, retail, multiple TV shows, animated show runner, founder of the street league skateboarding comp, multiple world record holder, serial investor and philanthropist. 

Sponsored at the age of 12 only one year after he got his first skateboard, he has always fostered the necessary mindset to succeed from a young age.   

"I was a pretty driven young man. I was so focused on becoming a pro skateboarder. I would sit in school and think about all the tricks I was going to do, then I’d get out of school and skate until they made me come inside."

It will take many posts just to scratch the surface of lessons you can learn from Dyrdek, for now just sit back and learn from the man himself. 

Video marketing is the one of the most effective ways to create relationships with your clients. Having original video on your website increases the chances of getting that page one spot on google by 53 times.

Using the video site Wistia to upload all of our video allows us to track the metrics (how many people are playing it , for how long, what they are doing on the site after etc...) it shows that video on the website we run has over 65% more engagement on average than any written content and people watch it for longer on average than they stay on any written page. 

Why make a video with Lost? The Lost team is run by Stephen who holds an M.A in video production and has had his work shown on RTE, his short film premier in Temple Bar festival, and been shortlisted for major screenplay awards.

Lost Studios are based in Shannon, Clare and have a range of loyal clients from both Clare and the Limerick regions. 

We are interested in making dynamic, modern videos with businesses who see the sea change towards a visually hungry audience (the era of netflix binges) and want to ride the next wave towards a better relationship with their clients, get more customers and create further interest in their services & products. 

If you want to just stand against a white backdrop and talk that's not what we do.

We can create videos at a range of budgets, to find out more Contact info@weareloststudios.com

Great clip from the super documentary Bones Brigade. Shows what it takes to be success in anything in life. Lots of imagination, hard work, vision and obsession. Be it creating amazing websites and content here at Lost Studios Clare or creating the ultimate life of your dreams. 

The best business book I read last year was Peter Thiel's Zero to One.

Great insights into business and innovation, it was complemented with my visit to Nevers in France to witness an innovation tech hub in action with the Local Enterprise boards of Clare & Limerick or the LEO's as they are now known.

It was my feeling that a shared building where start-ups of all types could avail of a cool space for client meetings, work and to just bounce amazing ideas off each other would serve Clare amazingly leading to more jobs and allowing the great minds formed here to stay and find work here.

Each start-up growing & achieving more benefiting ten fold by being around like minded ambitious entrepreneurs.

The Clare LEO has a great range of grants and soft help available for start-ups be sure and check them out if you live in the county here https://www.localenterprise.ie/Clare/About-Us/.

Be sure and have a read of Thiel's excellent book and watch his top 10 tips for success below.

The second question we get asked most after why Lost? is what is a creative agency?

The answer is pretty straight forward and short. Creativity is in everything we take on from the creation of a website or branding for a small local business in Clare or Limerick, to the creation of a worldwide online advertising campaign for a online retailer based in Ireland.

Any project that we take on is something that can be explored, enhanced and made unique by a creative approach. This approach allows us to take on projects that vary widely and apply a creative methodology to each new task. This means we are not chained to any one approach or pigeonholed into being on only one path.

It allows the freedom to pivot quickly and give each customer what's the best for them. It removes the feeling that there is only one way but allows us to explore what is the best way for the clients outcome. .

"Even a business call that may seem out of your league, when you apply your creativity to it, can add something, have a different approach, and solve a problem for them"

Robert Rodriguez

"If you accept your limitations you go beyond them"

Brendan Behan

We here @ lost are a pretty open minded bunch, after doing numerous website builds here in our local region of Clare & Limerick. We started brainstorm on what worked and what didn't for our clients and for us.

Every time we built something on wordpress I just couldn't shake the feeling that I wished the client was on squarespace. With its sleek templates, automatic updates, tight security, great developers mode (which we use) and SEO friendly layout. Not to mention the super slick mobile responsive designs.

The pros are so compelling we couldn't ignore them @ Lost we don't like to have to charge clients for every small change they want

We consistently looked for solutions for this from giving over free time, to helping clients navigate their CMS and hosting. Squarespace is the perfect solution as it allows clients to make those small text, image, formatting changes themselves with relative ease allowing them to save money.

At a recent conference I heard a developer tell an audience member that his squarespace site wasn't a good idea as the SEO was an issue, well that was just wasn't true as the SEO gurus at Moz.com have congratulated sqaurespace and its SEO functionality but like any SEO you need to invest time & money into it.

I think a few developers are afraid if squarespace and others take off they won't be needed anymore, instead I feel they should see themselves as designers not just builders.

Some of the cons are the cost it runs around €110 per year basic hosting & domain (plus €5 per months to add email @ own domain) and a little more for ecommerce though all payments are through stripe our Local Limerick success story. If you take wordpress its constant security issues, needs to be updates, broken links, plug-ins crashing, your hosting & domain the price doesn't differ all that much.

Also it needs a little code help at times to help it do exactly what you want but that's the fun of  web design.

We @ Lost will no longer be doing any builds unless they are with squarespace, we can recommend some super talented developers to those who need a different solution.

In honour of our new direction we are offering the next 10 clients who move to squarespace with us the offer of a brochure website for the super discounted price of just €795 for the build, design and first years, hosting and own .com domain.

As an end note we are also offering any client who wants complete control over their webpage after the initial build the full ownership of everything to do with their own webpage. This seems like a given to us here @Lost but we hear a lot of stories of people not owning their own webpage after the final build & payment and that just seems unfair to us.

Kindly your Team @ Lost

"we contribute back to the community the inner way that edifies the community itself."

Rodney Mullen