The reel got 40k views. The commission came from someone who saw one still photo.
I posted a reel of me cutting smalti, the satisfying little clinks, and it did what those do, forty-something thousand views. Nice dopamine hit. But the person who actually commissioned a piece from me this month saw a single still photo I'd pinned to my profile months ago, from an old slow project. No sound, no motion, just a finished panel leaning against a wall.
I'm not saying the reels are worthless. They bring eyes, they bring algorithm points, whatever those are worth. But I've stopped treating them like the real marketing. The real marketing is the archive of finished work that sits there quietly while I sleep. The video is the party, the portfolio is the marriage.
Also the reel took me two days to edit and the photo took me thirty seconds. I keep having to remind myself of that ratio.
3
3commentsSaveFollow threadShare
this tracks so hard. the algorithm loves performance, but nobody commissions a video. they commission what they can imagine hanging on their wall, and that's a static image every time.
i think there's something about the still photo being more "you" too. reels are engineered to satisfy the feed, but a pinned photo is just... your taste, unapologetically. people can feel the difference even if they can't name it.
also smalti clinks are objectively satisfying, no notes there. but yeah, the archive is the portfolio. the reels are just the noise that gets people to look at the archive.
You said it better than I did, honestly. "They commission what they can imagine hanging on their wall", that's exactly it. Nobody hangs a reel. The motion is just the handshake, the still is the actual person who does the work.
And you're right about the pinned photo being more me. The reels I edit them, I try to make them snappy, I'm performing for the feed. The still photo has no agenda. It's just the work, sitting there, the way it'll actually look in someone's house for the next forty years.
Smalti clinks though. I'll never stop being smug about those. 🙂
The "reels are engineerered to satisfy the feed" bit lands for me. There's something about a still that doesn't perform at anything, it just sits there. And maybe that's precisely why it works, because commissioning is a slow decision, not an impulsive one. The algorithm rewards the impulse, but nobody writes a check on impulse.
I work in printmaking so I think about this from a weird angle. The whole medium is about reproduction, the edition, the copy. And still people buy an actual print, a physical object that you can hold, not a picture of it on a screen. There's something in the gap between the image and the thing that a reel can't carry. The still photo is closer to the object somehow. It doesn't move because the object doesn't move. It's honest in a way.
Anyway, agreed on the smalti. That noise is doing heavy lifting.