Bar Napkin Brainstorm

ReCharge your Creative Batteries. ReThink Success. Reinvent your Business. 

We're hosting a one day meeting of the minds where freelance creatives can come to get inspired, forge new bonds with other professionals, and workshop their own ideas in a lush productive environment. 

What's different about this from other workshops? 
Well hopefully a lot! But the biggest thing is that it's interactive. Bar Napkin Brainstorm is a creative foundry-where ideas, concepts, passion projects, brands, and marketing are melted down and ReConstructed. We won't just be talking at you-we're actually hoping to find new people to collaborate with as well! Plus we have a party at the end. 

Who should come to this workshop? 
The curriculum has been developed so that it's applicable to a diverse group of people. You don't have to be a visual artist to get the benefits from The Brainstorm. It will be good for photographers, but it would also be good for: entrepreneurs, creative directors, musicians, writers, makers, builders, destroyers, and shamans. No robots please. We aren't down with your kind. Except Smilebooth. That's one great robot. 

Wheeling & Dealing! 
It's our first time (blushing) so we're going to have a great deal on spots. However, space is pretty limited so if you're really interested don't delay!  Email us here to sign up! 

The Details 
The first Bar Napkin Brainstorm is going to be held at the Ace Hotel New York on Thursday October 10th. 

  • Presentations from Michael Antonia, Whitney Chamberlin, and Brian Morrow as well as a special New York based professional creative. 
  • Speed Date: Have your ideas dissected and reconstructed in a one on one consultation. We're open to a two on one thing too. If you're into that.
  • The Board Room: Join us for a full group brainstorm, where you present ideas for passion projects, new businesses or creative meanderings and collect feedback, critique, support and hopefully future collaboration from the group. 
  • After Party: We'll take the workshop to the bar to field test the concepts from the day. Dancing and drinks help the ideas from the day soak in and encourage more to keep coming. Michael and a guest will be playing records and the smilebooth with be going off. After all, a lot of our best ideas where written on bar napkins!

 

MICHAEL ANTONIA - music obsessive. entrepreneur.brunch aficionado. 
founding member of the flashdance, YEAH! rentals, & YEAH! weddings

i bought my first record at the age of 9 (45 of Frank Sinatra's - New York New York). in 1996 i started djing by night, while booking and producing shows in night clubs, theaters, and festivals by day. two years later i took a job in marketing, advertising, and brand strategy. after 10 years of the ad world i realized i needed more, so i walked away from the clients (stayed pals with the creatives) and moved to LA. i started the flashdance from my dining room table during the worst recession in recorded history with a pregnant wife and no money. in almost 5 years we've turned it into one of the most highly regarded brands in the wedding and event industry. the flashdance now houses 6 companies and supports over 30 people. 

i currently juggle my time between creative direction and marketing YEAH! rentals (my furniture and props rental company), and our newest wedding collective YEAH! weddings. i still maintain a dizzying travel schedule djing, and get my music obsession fix working as music supervisor for the ace hotel. occasionally i brunch. 

 

BRIAN MORROW - film maker. day dreamer. rapper.  
creative director of Shark Pig, a full service production company/digital agency

I've done about a million weird gigs. I was a paper boy, a wood workers apprentice, a projectionist at a movie theater. I installed a telecommunications network at a housing project for Indian Monks.  I worked at the flag ship Taco John's in my home town - Cheyenne, Wyoming. I painted two building sized grain silos in the world's weirdest town - Fairfield, Iowa. I was the head of Security on that movie, Hesher. I got sent to Dubai as an air courrier with one hour notice, same thing with Rome except that time I saw the Pope! I've stood at the finish line of marathons and photographed thousands of runners drag their nearly broken bodies across. I've shot hundreds of graduations and hundreds of weddings. I've spliced fiber optic cable in cold tiny trailers, and mounted giant satellite dishes on the top of radio towers. One time I was hired to pretend that I worked at this architectural design firm so it seemed like they had more employees during a big client meeting. I ended up editing a rap video and answering to the name "Brant". It's all in a days work.    

I finally stopped taking day rates when I started a production company called Shark Pig. Now I just have one job, but it keeps me busier than ever. Our recent clients include: Levi's, Purina, UGG, Midori, Audi, McDonalds, Pfizer, Lucky Magazine, and Paul Mitchell. 

 

WHITNEY CHAMBERLIN – cultural engineer. innovator. spiritual nerd. 
Smilebooth inventor, Our Labor of Love director, all-scale event producer. 

I've always been fascinated by widespread adrenaline rush. Starting when I was 16, I poured that stimulus into producing raves and festivals. In the early '90s, I worked as a tour manager for rock bands. At age 20, I started transitioning into the club-oriented nightlife scene with Tasty Shows, a Seattle affiliate of Neverstop. When I was 21, I joined the Neverstop team as one of their Cultural Engineers. We took the experiential stimulus and applied it to marketing, revolutionizing the standard model. At the same time, United States of Consciousness provided my outlet to the younger crowd. I became a company partner and helped turn a modest business into a phenomenon. We took the buzz and excitement of big acts like Black Eyed Peas and Daft Punk and coupled them with the wonderment of an experiential atmosphere (one event featured indoor motorcycle tracks), drawing crowds of ten to fifteen thousand. 

Throughout all of this, I did my own documentary work. Which came in handy years later when my wife, Jesse, convinced me to do wedding photography with her. In the years that followed, Our Labor of Love rose to the forefront of the industry as one of the top ten wedding photography studios in the world. But as a wedding photographer, I became acutely aware that guests wanted to be involved in the creative process. This is how Smilebooth was born, a user-operated photo booth that is intuitive, empowering, and connective. 

Over four hundred weddings later, as well as multiple incarnations and innovations of Smilebooth, I feel that the time has come for me to pass this particular torch along and start sharing what I've learned. I am currently in that process of transitioning back into doing more as an event producer, but I still have a hand in both Our Labor of Love and Smilebooth (Smilebooth is a particularly clingy robot who gives me guilt trips about abandoning it).

 

Josh Rosen, co-founder of Saturdays Surf NYC, is going to share with us from his experiences in taking disparate passions and fusing them to create a totally new and unique expression of culture and art. 

For Josh it's never just been about speed, but speed + grace. Whether it's skateboarding, surfing, snowboarding; whether it's music, art, fashion; Josh knows there's a difference between clumsy, directionless speed, and the precise movements of a creature in flight. And wherever he goes, his passions come with. Moving to NYC should probably have deterred his surfing itch, but instead it inspired him to take advantage of the new space, not to mention the hole in the market. The NYC perspective combined with the surf lifestyle was a hybrid waiting to happen. 

Years after building the surf shop literally with his own hands, now at the helm of a globally thriving fashion line, Josh still hasn't lost his sense of direction. He is just as excited as ever to keep pouring himself into new outlets of collaboration with other artists. Which is why it'll be so awesome to have him with us: to bounce ideas off of each other, to seek new outlets together.