This is a place where I talk about professional life, passion and curiosity.
Most recent blogs
Het kunstproject 'Gemaaid' van beeldend kunstenaar Merijn Vrij is nu te zien op twee buitenlocaties en een huis-expositieruimte. Dit project maakt deel uit van de kunstroute 'Grensloos Kunst Verkennen' (GKV 2024) op de grens van Overijssel en Drenthe, in IJhorst en De Wijk. Merij...
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Doing projects in Italy, who doesn't want that? Nature, culture and people give the country a great attraction. In addition, it is just a stone's throw away. Here's a short how-to, about how we ended up in Italy. Of course with lots of our beautiful pictures. Start with your portfolio and never do anything for [...]
Na lang hard werken, veel onderzoek doen en schrijven, is het dan zover: je promoveert tot doctor! Als promovendus schrijf je een proefschrift, welke je daarna mooi inbindt tot een boekje, aan de universiteit onder de supervisie van een hoogleraar die je gedurende het hele proces begeleidt. Vervolgens bereid je de verdediging van je dissertatie […]
Dreamer, geek, creator.
When I was young I had two passions: computers and film. And both are occupying my mind until this day and fuel my fantasies and ambitions constantly. After an IT-career spanning a period of 15 years I quit my job and started my own business, making films. And that is now (2017) 10 years ago.
Over these 10 years, besides film, we started doing photography, webdesign and other multimedia-flavoured projects. We’re doing projects for organizations, consumers and for fun.
There were a few reasons why I quit my IT-job and started my creative adventure. Because the company I worked for kept growing I felt more and more out of touch with my ‘customers’, colleagues of other departments. Besides that I love my freedom and have a broad interest and both became endangoured because of the growth of my employer. Besides that it was time for something new and that could mean only one thing: film. And starting my own business I would gain back my freedom and the close contact with my clients. Ofcourse this would mean that I would also give up a lot of securities; a steady and well-payed job, my colleagues and a great employer.
Now it’s 2017. The year I turned 50, the year I’m in business for 10 years and the year I’m living 20 years together with my partner Erika.
What I do and what I did
I'm the creator of Up North, a visual communication collective. We do film, photography, graphic design and webdesign. From concept to finish we do projects in The Netherlands and beyond.
www.upnorthmedia.nlI am the main photographer at Studio 78A. The photos we make at Studio 78A and Up North are personal and show real people and products. No meaningless pictures but images with depth that have a story.
www.78a.nlWe are a collective of down to earth film-makers and photographers. We have huge passion and an eye for detail. Although we are based The Netherlands our work knows no borders and we have a amassed a great deal of experience at home and abroad. We film, we photograph but above all we capture you. You in the way you are.
www.banganimation.comAnalyzing the information need and output give to the design, planning and implementing designs in the field of technical infrastructure. With as main focus areas: Storage & backup, Capacity & Contingency, Unix and Output processing.
What I can talk about endlessly
No matter how much I love photography, nothing beats well made film. Change the order of some shots and you get a totally different story. And film has audio; the stuff that reaches your emotions more directly then still images ever can. Me and my colleagues at Up North make documentaries and commercial movies. Stories are everywhere and we are constantly pushing ourselves to tell these stories convincingly.
Besides my work at Up North I have my own personal (crowdfunded) projects about topics that are very close to me or about stories that have to be told.
My love for photography began after I started filming and I believe that the way we film has influenced the way I handle photography. I try to keep photography real, personal and fun. On the other hand I like to experiment, but also these shoots are about the experience. The photos we make at Studio 78A and Up North are personal and show real people and products. No meaningless pictures but images with a heart.
Being your own boss means freedom and captivity at the same time. I always hungered for freedom, because that made me become more creative at work. This was the situation at my employer, until the company became too big for me and that hurt my creative mind. To win that back and to see if being my own boss would work for me I started Up North, Banganimation multimedia productions and Studio78A, all based in The Netherlands. Now after 10 years I'm full of experiences about running these organizations and about myself.
On my blog, professional life is one of the topics.
Since I was a teenager I've been playing boardgames and videogames on and off. Ater a black-and-white pong machine and some other prehistoric console my brothers and I bought our Atari 2600 in 1981 bundled with the game Asteroids. Our boardgame adventures started with playing Risk, but really took off after we got into the more serious games like Axis & Allies. The more serious and complex boardgames are all about strategy, diplomacy and a bit of luck, just like life itself.
Both the videogames and boardgames were stored when the weather would let us play outside. During winter it was gaming time again.
I've been out of videogames for quite some time until we got a Playstation 4 in our studio for some fun stress relief. The last 1 or 2 years I'm very interested in the immersive qualities of videogames and their social aspect. I even met some gamers in real life abroad and got in contact with game deelopers. This has even lead me to start a documentary about that. Boardgaming we do once a month with a group of friends, also in our studio.
During my teenage years I already new it; I'm going to do something with computers or film. The digital era wasn't really there yet and that is how I rolled into 's why I started out in IT. A great period, during which my curiosity about how things work got satisfied in abundance. Film was a hobby for which my technical background was a blessing. The company I worked for kept growing in the meantime. The IT-department kept growing until we were almost with 1000 of us, but losing the personal contact with the customer; the people for who we built all those beautiful systems with useful tools. Work became more and more abstract. All those years I kept my fondness for film and all these hours filming and editing with my brother taught me the basics of storytelling. Camera's became digital and soon thereafter I decided to quit my job. The reason for this wasn't money, but to get a chance to focus on people again, and their stories. A few years later I also started doing photography and another few years later I picked up building websites. During all this period I realised I could tell stories. Not only my own, but also the stories of other people. What makes them tick and why do they do what they do.
