Show notes
What’s it like to leave your stable agency job behind to become a creative freelancer? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Polly Aspinall, a former Creative, Producer and Account Director at London-based agency turned freelance Set Designer shares her thoughts on the importance of creating connections with a diverse set of people and allowing yourself to be open to new ideas. I also share some thoughts on being open to opportunities, even when they’re not exactly perfect. Key Takeaways The best things happen in your career when you stop saying “no” all the time and instead start saying “yes” to new opportunities. Meeting up with everyone you can allows you to expand your network, to make connections with people who may just turn out to be surprisingly helpful. Sometimes, saying yes to imperfect opportunities can open up new doors and uncover unique career ideas that never crossed your mind Tweetables to Share The more open you are to opportunities, the more likely good things will happen to you. Polly Aspinall Tweet This The best things happen in your career & life when you say YES. Polly Aspinall Tweet This Sometimes, taking a job that's not 100% right can still be useful & informative. Joseph Liu Tweet This Resources Mentioned Polly referred to an “Opportunity Mindset,” where you say yes to things and remain open to new ideas. Here are a couple articles on this topic: Entrepreneur article on Recognizing Opportunity is the First Step to an Entrepreneurial Mindset Inc article on How to Change Your Mindset to See Problems as Opportunities. Free Tool: Saying Yes to Opportunity During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about being open to opportunities that aren’t 100% perfect. For some help in doing this, you can download my “Saying Yes to Opportunity” Worksheet. Register free below to access this resource and gain access to my entire Career Resource Hub. If you’re already a member, simply login to access this resource. Register free to access resource Log in if you wish to renew an existing subscription. Receive Joseph’s career newsletter About Polly Aspinall, Set Designer Polly Aspinall spent nearly 8 years working in a hybrid marketing role as a creative, producer, and account director for brands such as Johnnie Walker, the BBC, ASOS, Smirnoff and H&M. After taking a course at Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London (UAL), Polly recently made the move into set design, prop-master, and junior art director for film and tv, including projects for Episodes and a new TV Show by the makers of Inbetweeners. She also does freelance set design for window dressing, photoshoots, and interior designs. If you’re interested in exploring a career in the creative arts, check out UAL’s full list of courses and short courses. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Polly know!Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, or Google Play (it’s free) so you don’t miss out on the latest episodes. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!Leave Joseph a VoicemailYou can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): The more open you are to opportunities, the more likely things will happen to you. When you’ve been stuck in the same role or the same industry for a long time, you tend to sort of be very comfortable, so you say no to lots of things, and actually, the best things happen when you say yes. Joseph: Hey, Polly. I know you had a really busy few weeks, filming until midnight on most days, so thanks so much for making time to join us here on Career Relaunch. Polly: No problem. Happy to be here. Joseph: Can you start off by telling us a little bit more about the work you do as a set designer? Polly: Of course. I have just started off in a lot of set design, and I’m currently working on a TV show. Basically, what I do day-to-day is anything from going out and buying props. I can be given the color scheme and the design of a room, and then I have to go off and find the perfect vase for example that will fit or the tea towel that one of the actors would use in that kitchen. Other times, I can be making things. Just this week, I made 100 fake hamsters for a scene that is coming up. Joseph: A hundred fake hamster. Hang on a second. How does one go about making a fake hamster? Polly: Obviously, they have to look like they were moving and have to look semi-realistic even if they’ll only be in scene for sort of 10 seconds on camera. I needed to make 10 hamsters that would move and 90 that would just sit and look like hamsters. I bought a whole load of cat toys, and then I bought some plastic eggs and some fake fur and basically covered 100 plastic eggs in fake fur and then attached some to cat toys so they move. They were surprisingly realistic actually. Joseph: Wow. Are there guides to making fake animals or do you have to improvise and come up with this yourself? Polly: No, and actually that’s the really good point about the job. I would say that the main thing about the job is that it’s all about problem solving. You will be given a problem like, ‘We need 100 hamsters, and we need them in a week,’ and you have to work out what the quickest, cheapest, and most realistic way of creating things is. It comes down to things like making fake wine and find a liquid that looks most like wine that obviously won’t mean that the actors are drinking alcohol whilst they’re acting. There’s all kinds of things like that where you really have to use your brain to creatively problem solve, which I absolutely love. Joseph: What’s the strangest thing you’ve been asked to do as a set designer? Polly: A few weeks ago, I had to make fake ashes, as in human ashes. There’s a scene where, sadly, one of the characters’ fathers has died, and they are presented with the bag of ashes to sprinkle somewhere. They throw them up in the air, and then they blow back into the actor’s face, so we have to use something that is safe to breathe in. It has to be something that’s not too disgusting or gritty that might hurt the actor. There’s a particular type of earth that the theater industry used to use to make ashes, and it’s now been proven to be carcinogenic, so I again had to go off and problem solve about how to do this. I ended up dying a whole load of baby powder, talcum powder, and I dyed it gray. Then you have to let it dry, and I had to measure out exactly the amount that a human man makes. Now, we are the proud owners of 2.5 kilograms of fake human ashes. Joseph: Wow, very interesting and stuff that I have never really thought about. I feel like we could spend this whole time just talking about all the different stuff that you make. Set design is very interesting, but we are definitely here to talk about you career, so let’s come back to the set design—because I’d love to hear a little bit more about your current projects—at the end. When you and I first crossed paths, you were doing very different work. At the time, you were working as a creative producer and account director at a marketing and advertising agency in London. Can you take us back to what you were doing before you got involved in set design? Polly: I used to work at a lovely, little agency. It was an integrated agency where we did a bit of everything from strategy to events to publishing. We even created and developed a few mobile phone apps. I’d actually been there for seven years, and being such a small company, I’d done a bit of everything. I dealt with clients on a daily basis. I wrote strategies. I came up with the ideas for campaigns, and then I actually produced them. It was a background that taught me to do a lot of different things and to be very chameleon-like and to sort of become an expert in something very quickly, but it was very much focused on the world of marketing and advertising. Clients were alcohol brands, so I spent a lot of time talking about nightlife and cocktails and things, which is really, really interesting, but I got to a point where maybe it was starting to not challenge me as much. Joseph: Can you tell us a little bit about how you started to realize that you weren’t being challenged and you weren’t growing or that you were stagnating? Polly: I did architecture at university. When I left university, I was searching around for what I wanted to do, and I found this amazing agency. I kind of never looked back because it took me low end, and I learnt so much, and I loved the people. I found that I was quite good at what I was doing, which is kind of intoxicating, but I think I looked up after probably about four or five years and thought, ‘This is great, but actually, if I had sat down and thought, “What do I really want to do?” would this be it?’ I think I started thinking back to my more creative, more design roots, and more about creating spaces and places. I really started to hanker after that. I realized that the world of marketing and advertising, although I loved it, it probably wasn’t my first love as it was. I think I really felt this need to try something different. Joseph: You mentioned something there: being good at it was sort of intoxicating. Obviously, you were good at your role. Can you take us through what it was like to walk away from something that you knew you were pretty good at but maybe wasn’t something that your heart was in? Polly: It was about this time last year that I handed in my notice, but it took me a good six months to come to conclusion that I should. I have to say it’s pretty terrifying because you’re walking away from a place you love, the people you love. A lot of my friends in different industries complain about their jobs a lot and are day-to-day quite unhappy in their work, and I had never once been unhappy in my old job. I was very lucky. Compared to most people, a lot of my friends said, ‘Why are you doing this? You already have the perfect job,’ and it was sort of the perfect job. Also, not to mention, walking away from being paid quite well into an unknown abyss of being very junior again. It was really scary. Telling my boss who had been my mentor as well is also somewhat terrifying. Joseph: Do you remember the moment when you finalized your decision that ‘now is the time to go’? Polly: I found a course at Central Saint Martins, which was actually in set design. It was a week-long course, and it didn’t cost a huge amount. I took a week as holiday and did the course, and I said to myself, ‘By the end of this week, I will know if I really love this and if I should do it or if actually I hate it.’ It’s going to be a whole load of drudgery to get there. I did the course and absolutely loved it, so on the Friday night, I just thought, ‘Monday morning, I’m going to do it.’ I was pretty emotional the weekend actually. I may sound like such a baby, but I spent the whole weekend on and off crying. It’s like going through a breakup. Joseph: Oh, wow. What do you think was making it so emotional? Polly: I think because my old agency was such a small team, and I’ve been with them for such a long time, it’s like a family. Because the world of set design is entirely freelance, it’s not like I was leaving to go to a permanent job. You leave to basically put yourself out there. It was also probably quite terrifying. Joseph: So you make the decision, you resign, what were the next few weeks like for you? Can you just take us through your new life and how you started to build your new life as an independent freelance set designer? Polly: When I handed in my notice, I had a three-month notice period. Then after that, basically because of staffing and capacity issues at work, they actually asked me if I could stay for another couple of months until Christmas and go down to two or three days a week on which the other days, I could do set design work. Actually, that was sort of the perfect launch pad for me because it gave me half a week to go off and meet people, do work experience. I basically started by making this huge list of people I knew, people I knew who knew other people. I stalked a lot of people. I would watch TV shows, find out TV shows I loved, find out who the designer was, and then basically send them an email and say, ‘Hi, I’m now free,’ and I did a lot of free work experience for people. I basically said yes to everything. I worked on theater things. I went in to watch a TV show being filmed for a couple of weeks. Basically, by Christmas, I got a whole load of experience and a whole load of meetings with various people under my belt, which set me up really nicely for the moment that I left work permanently. That’s what I was doing – making lots of contacts. Joseph: What do you think was the toughest part of recreating your life as a set designer? Polly: As a freelancer, you are continually looking for the next job. Therefore, it really relies on you being very, very proactive and also very good at networking. Networking was never ever something I ever prided myself on. I think I’m naturally quite shy. I define putting myself out there and meeting new people quite terrifying. Obviously at the beginning, it was all that. I didn’t know any of these people, and I have to just put myself out there. I think as well, combined with that, there’s the moments when you write a really well-crafted email or you call someone or you have a coffee with someone, and then you never hear back from them again, and you chase them a few times. I realize now that that happens. You have to send 20 emails to get one response. Coming from a world where I spoke to clients all the time and clients have to call you back, that was probably one of the toughest parts – the rejection combined with constant, relentless networking on your own behalf. Joseph: I think when a lot of people talk about networking, they’re thinking about going to an event with a nametag that says, ‘Hi, my name is…’ with the wine glass in one hand and you’re shaking hands with the other, which can be really terrifying for people. How did you get through that period? Because it sounds like you don’t love networking, yet at the same time, you were doing it. What kept you going? Polly: For every few rejections, I would get a real breakthrough. One memorable breakthrough was I went to go and see an incredible exhibition at the V&A, and I came out and I just saw the design was wonderful. I researched the guy that had designed it, and he’s won awards for films, and he was this complete hero and sort of idol of a man. I write to his agent, and I actually met up with him for coffee. I’m now in quite regular email contact with him. If I was going to aspire to be anyone and realistically never get there, he would be the person. I think victory is like that. It really kept me going through the rejections, I guess. Joseph: Is there anything in particular that you’ve learned about networking that you think would be valuable for someone to hear if they are struggling with trying to figure out how to get started with networking? Polly: Meet up with everyone that you can in the sense of, sometimes, a friend would say to me, ‘You should meet this person,’ and at the time, I think, ‘Are they really relevant? They’re in theater,’ or, ‘They have nothing to do with a lot of set design,’ but actually I think, everyone you meet has interesting story. You never know wh…
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