Last week we told you we needed a break.
A moment of reflection.
A moment of looking back at the past and listen to see where we want to go in the future. Slow down and refocus. Not just looking at the here and now, but look at the bigger picture. Why did we start this creative collective. What did we achieve. Where did we want to go. And where did we actually landed on our journey. What is the road ahead for this group of spacemen stuck in plastic. All good questions that cannot be answered in a single tweet or an overnight post. It needs time.
Here we are.
A week later.
A week full of reflections, long talks and creative fun in the pool.
A week that gave us a plan on the road ahead.
The journey we will be taking here on Stuck In Plastic in twenty seventeen.
A journey that started a long time ago, with a smaller post in February 2014.
Two spacemen became three, and not long after we turned into four.
In the early days of our creative journey we were exploring the why we were doing in earnest and we have never stopped asking the question to ourselves and a lot of you (just clicking the link will take you to the full why series of the last three years – a legacy we are all very proud of).
Here we are.
Beginning of 2017.
We asked the question again. Not on the blog this time as a public self reflection sharing with the wider audience, but in the long discussions we had offline. One idea that kept coming back in these conversations was having fun.
We want to have fun.
It needs to be fun.
No major world changing mission statements here on Stuck In Plastic.
No storming the barricades or enforcing a creative breakthrough.
No big inc. master plans about conquering space, becoming the largest, the best or making big money.
No lofty goals like that.
Having fun instead.
Fun is the first goal or mission statement of the road ahead.
When talking about fun, we also went back to the roots of the four spacemen. What were we looking for in those early days ?
What was the sound we wanted to play in our little garage just around the corner ?
Who did we want to play it for.
What made it fun for us to stand on stage and connect with the audience ? How did we want to engage and jam with the other creatives around the corner. Creatives who have their own band and their own sound.
We do want to exchange ideas, share notes, jam together, learn and explore yet never lose our own fun.
Keep the original sound and grow.
And this is where we may have gone slightly off track in the last few months here on Stuck In Plastic. Focused too much on the other great creatives out there, losing our own fun and sound along the way.
Chasing numbers and statistics.
Trying to grow bigger, get more hits, more posts, more people.
Creating engagement.
Feeding the social frenzy.
We became that little cafe around the corner that is gathering all the artists and we forgot to play our own music.
We became more and more a stage, and less a band of space cowboys in our own right.
A band of space cowboys sharing their journey, their sound and jam together once in awhile with you, our beloved friends and creatives alike.

And this brings us to our second goal.
We are going to rediscover our own sound, and play acoustic for a while.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Stuck In Plastic goes acoustic. Rediscovering their own sound …” quote=”Play acoustic for a while.”]
Look for what truly drives our creative journey and share that with you.
We have mapped out a plan for twenty seventeen.
Not in detail, but the key notes.
The sound, the jam sessions and maybe that little acoustic gig on stage later this year.
We will be much more intimate and slow going in twenty seventeen.
We hope you will follow us on our journey and be part of our sound.
The spacemen stuck in plastic.
Nice post.
I will try to read it also as advice.
“Do what makes you happy”.
Can’t wait to follow your journey and see where will bring us!
Thanks, Aphol.
It has been two intense weeks behind the scenes, and like you say, we always came back to “have fun”. Do what makes you happy, like you say. An advice we will try to stick too !
Best,
Boris
It’s so easy to get stuck in the social media cycle. I’ve been on a similar journey to get back to why I started this in the first place and fun was a big part of that.
Thanks for sharing and I’m looking forward to what happens next!
Thanks Ben !
The social media frenzy can really take the fun out of what we do and at least has for me been a creative block in the past. Now back to getting some fun :)
That’s the whole reason I do what I do is for the fun of it. I found out that there is a serious art to having fun. I run a mining company and I’ve found if I’m not having fun I’m doing something wrong. It doesn’t mean all aspects of it is fun – but there can be some fun in every aspect. That’s why I do toy photography – because it is fun. I think that’s enough of a reason for me. Is there deeper meaning and reasons? That’s up to the folks that enjoy looking at my shots.… Read more »
So true ! I get a heck of a lot of fun of being behind the lens and directing my little shoots. Offcourse the recognition is a key part, and we should not downplay it, but having great fun while shooting plastic and loading batteries for other challenges is one of my drivers. I do have a few others, more on that later, but fun is key. Shooting plastic keeps me happy. I think that is one of the challenges when people try to put their fun time into making it a business, as that sometimes takes away of the… Read more »
Your are totally right. We do it for fun, at the moment when we see that there is no soul in what we do, we are lost.
It happened to me two years ago, when I lost my two DSLR cameras and the same time and I realised that my photos were losing creativity and punch. I decided to take a rest to put my stuff together.
It took almost two years…
Ouch, loosing two DSLR at the same time must hurt.
Happy you are back with new creativity and ready to give it a fun punch !
Boris