Ivan Cash
"The irony is that my father is in fact a fine artist and my mom is a teacher and musician, so I actually come from a very creative and artistic household."
"My dad’s work is in many collections including; The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; The Corning Museum of Glass, NY; Le Muse des Arts Decoritifs, Paris. He has had over forty one-person exhibitions worldwide."
"It was at some point while I was still at middle school, that they gave me a VHS camcorder. At this stage in my life I shunned art entirely. But when I got this camera, it was the first time that a creative medium actually seemed really cool to me."
"I really started to get into filmmaking and got into things like editing camp. One day, I happened to hear of a local feature film that was in production. So I got my dad to drive me to where they were shooting, so I could get onset and got myself a one month production assistant internship."
"While I was onset, I remember seeing all the various departments and being ultimately deterred from filmmaking! What I figured out, was that I really wanted to be a director and that just seemed too impractical a dream."
"You could kinda of say, that going to that film set killed my dream and ambition to become a filmmaker back then. The only other professional creative alternative I could see, was advertising."
"It was while I was at high school that I started to get into artists that I thought really influenced popular culture. People like Banksy and Shepard Fairey appealed to me because they were on a mission to spread a message. I found that whole form of political expression really fulfilling, so I got into political stencils and graffiti art."
"I finally went to college to study communications, but found that it didn’t satisfy my creative chops. Unfortunately my college didn’t have the right study abroad program and I really wanted to go overseas and study art direction. I wanted to go to London, but my parents figured that was way too expensive. In the end, I took a leave of absence from my comms degree and went to the Cape Town in South Africa to study art direction at the Red and Yellow School."
"I knew nothing of South Africa and had never lived away from home before, so I thought it would be a really good reason to go off and have an adventure. I was the only international student there, so it came with its own challenges. But in the end, it helped me get my art direction portfolio together."
"At this stage in my life, I was really trying to find my own voice and advertising seemed one way to do that. But I had some real concerns about the consumeristic agenda that comes with the territory."
"When I completed my degree, I took a road trip across the country to visit a bunch of creative agencies that were known for doing ‘socially-good’ campaigns, including the Adbuster’s HQ in Vancouver. I wanted to check out the political advertising agencies that would enable me to still be creative, but to work on campaigns that had a deeper social good."
"I am also a real Knicks fan and have loved playing basketball all of my life. So one of the things I was doing back then while I was in senior college, was to make hand stencilled t-shirts and sell them at the games for a month or so. The demand for these shirts became so big that I employed a t-shirt manufacturer to make them and then some of my friends in selling them. You have to have a license to do this, and of course I had one! However, the cops didn’t care and one day arrested me and put me in a holding cell."
"When I got out, I immediately called the newspapers and I made all the front page news. It blew up into this huge media event which just meant more people wanted to buy my t-shirts. Soon hundreds and hundreds of people started buying my shirts. Even my favourite magazine, SLAM did a feature on it, so it was like getting my 15minutes of fame." http://cashstudios.co/Hate-The-Coach
"What that experience showed me, was even a college kid could launch a super successful viral campaign. This one project just so happened to get me my first advertising job with Venable Bell and Partners in San Francisco, after reaching out to hundreds of agencies trying to get my first interview. My boss at Venable Bell (and now good friend) David Kim, really liked my initiative and that I was even arrested for the project."
"When I got to San Francisco, I worked insanely hard, working everyday and weekend. For the first two months I never even got around to opening my packing boxes. I was so hungry to work and to not disappoint, that it didn’t take all that long before I started to burn out. After about a year of this pace, I figured that I needed to be doing things that were more important to me creatively."
"That’s when I found the Fellowship of Fabrica for creatives under 25 at Treviso in Italy. It seemed amazing and perfect for me, and really fitted with my whole idea of creative activism. They accepted me and I was all ready to go when there were visa issues which delayed everything."
"In the mean time, I started to think about a fall back plan that would still see me living in Europe. I decided my dream job would be to work at Weiden Kennedy in Amsterdam. Although advertising wasn’t really my first calling,, I figured that this award-winning agency was as good as it could ever get for me."
"I was catching up with friends in my home town when I had a sudden epiphany. ‘If I wanted to get a job in Amsterdam, I actually had to be there to have any chance of an interview.' Within a day or two, I bought a ticket and went to stay with a friend of a friend in Amsterdam for a couple of days."
"Despite not having any direct connections to the agency, I managed to get a tour of the place, and then spontaneously left a posted-it note on the recruiter’s desk with my number. He called me the very next day. Completely unprepared I had this super full-on interview with the Executive Creative Director that went for almost a day. Within two weeks I had the job!"
"However, it wasn’t like my dream at all, as my creative partner and I couldn’t get any of our ideas produced. Being in a new city and finding that my dream job wasn’t for me, got to be pretty dark at times."
"This coincided with the dark winters of Amsterdam… and then my girlfriend back home left me. I just wanted to quit, but I had signed a contract, so I just couldn’t pack my bags without there being some real financial consequences, which made it even harder."
"Thankfully I had a mentor who empowered me to quit if I really wanted to. This decision was one of the scariest things ever for me. This was one of the most prestigious agencies in the world and I felt that by quitting I would be seen as a real failure. By turning my back on this incredible opportunity, I thought my career could suffer as well."
"The funny thing was, that I couldn’t have been more mistaken. The bosses really got where I was coming from and were really supportive. As for destroying my career, well they invited me back anytime I wanted to return."
"A week after getting back home, I was pretty lost and dejected, so I started another personal project called ‘Snail Mail My Email’. I started this website where I invited anyone from around the world to send me an email with the recipients postal address and I would hand write it into a letter and send it on for free." www.snailmailmyemail.org
"Thousands of people accepted my invitation and started sending me their emails. It was overwhelming and I really needed help. Then hundreds of people offered to volunteer and create all of these hand written letters, which made the whole project super human."
"This project was soon featured on CNN and the Wall Street Journal, and from there it was all over the place! We sent out more than 10,000 letters to 70 countries in just 30 days. Now we do this event annually every November. I don’t think I could have done something like this if I hadn’t been feeling so low and heartbroken when I got back from Amsterdam. I think that your best creative energy and focus can come at the most difficult times. I really needed to put everything I had into doing something creative and productive."
"The successes that came with this project (including getting a book deal), opened my eyes to so many possibilities. I really felt validated in terms of my creative abilities and pretty much found myself back in advertising as a freelancer. I started to feel empowered again. If I can make a project where someone is suddenly understood, or just feels heard, it’s totally inspiring to me."
"This idea of being able to connect people through participatory art was very satisfying. About a year after ‘Snail Mail My Email’ took off, I started working on a bunch of other ideas. It’s at this time a group of us launched ‘Selfless Portraits’ where thousands of people draw each other’s Facebook profile pic. So far we have over 50,000 portraits that people have drawn for complete strangers." www.selflessportraits.com
"There is something so thrilling about taking 5mins of your time and drawing someone’s portrait and then just giving it to them as an anonymous gift. I think that there is a lot of potential in this sort of act of random kindness."
"With the success of these two projects, I was becoming more and more involved in a support capacity, the FAQs and all the other stuff that goes with facilitating a community project. It was starting to take a toll on my emotional bandwidth. I really wanted to get involved in something where I could interact one-on-one instead of through a screen."
"As a high school kid I started to get into interviewing people on the streets of NYC with my VHS camcorder. So I decided to use my Canon 7D (which Luis Pena had generously given me), to just go up to strangers and ask random questions like 'What was the last text they sent on their phone.’ I then posted a video of this."
"I then asked what was the last photo on their phone, and made another video about that. This video suddenly got heaps of traction and soon went viral! I had such a fun time making this video, I decided to do the same thing across all of these other cities. I got such a good response that I just kept on doing it. Soon filmmakers from across the world reached out to me to see if they could do the same project in their respective cities; which I am totally fine with!"
"After doing all of these large scale participatory social media projects, I just wanted to do something that had a definitive beginning and an end. It was almost accidental that these evolved into films. But once I started, I soon realized how much I truly love filmmaking."
"Film to me, is the most challenging creative endeavour. As far as the logistics you have to be aware of and all of the planning that goes into just one project. I just love that sort of commitment and effort."
"Being really into meditation and going to retreats regularly, I have become fascinated by the psychological dimensions of what it is, to be human! Film is just another avenue by which I can explore and better understand the depths of the human condition, and it also provides me with an opportunity to connect with people in a truly meaningful way."