When Birds on the Black began rolling out, @cardinalsgifs sent me a few videos that would be premiering on the site. Beaming with rainbow like pride, he asked me what I thought of them.
“I hate them.”
He was aghast, of course. Everyone had worked really hard on these videos and here I was trashing them at the last second. We had a bit of a fight, some words were said that we now regret, I’m sure Gifs cried in his DMs to some 16 year old girls who think his Grichuk pictures are SUPR KOOL, and we moved on. The videos were posted as normal. The reviews told us everything:
“Joe is even boring for a pharmacist.”
“Why does Kyle’s head look like a medieval battering ram?” “
"Zach could put an insomniac into a coma.”
“Watching Alex is not possible, I can not find him.”
And Who the hell is this Nicholas guy anyway?... that's not a quote, I am really asking.
Those were just MY comments.
The comments from the users were much, much worse.
As in: There were none. Were people even watching?
The fact of the matter is, Birds on the Black isn’t worth doing unless we feel like the things we are doing are the best.
We want each piece of content to be the smartest, most interesting, most entertaining, most click-baity things you’ll find among the Cardinals blog-o-sphere. The videos simply weren’ and the best was still blowing us away. I knew there were other videos I’d rather watch over our own. Those videos were created by Tara Wellman.
Have you ever seen Tara’s work?
It’s silly good. She’s silly talented. She’s silly smart. She works silly hard. Her vocabulary is silly better than mine.
I’ll be honest with you: When I first saw the videos she created in her “Bird Seeds” series, I thought she was already famous as a Cardinals fan, and that I was just catching up.
Now? To have her join us? To have her offer us actual money to be a part of the team? Talk about fake career goals.
I’m excited. I’m excited to collaborate with Tara. I’m excited to see how our creative team might find ways to enhance Tara’s content. I’m excited for Tara to find ways to make Joe watchable, if such a thing is possible. What I’m most excited for is to see and promote Tara’s work (she’s loaded with new ideas) because, let’s face it, her creativity, intelligence, and presence means that she is already way above us. She’s going to get a bigger audience here, and a whole bunch of Cardinals twitter is going to wonder why the heck they weren’t already groveling at her feet.
Tara is going to make it in this business, and it’s going to be awesome to say I knew her when.
Video, both live and taped, is the median of the future. Tara is the best at it, and now she’s a part of our team. I continue to get more and more excited about this site, and am thrilled to see what a re energized and motivated Tara does for us in the 3 weeks she contributes here before she moves on to bigger and better things.
And then I’m going to trash the Hell out of her.
Welcome aboard Tara.
Just remember, if you ever decide to leave, I will destroy you.
With all love, stlcardscards