Meet Brandon Duke

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Brandon Duke. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Brandon, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
Two things: the love of the arts and the love of learning from other people. During the pandemic, one of my favorite things to do was discovering various YouTube channels of people focusing on very specific things, whether it was cooking, making cocktails or making weapons out of random scrap iron. Seeing people still sharing things they loved and knowing that it was helping other people, like myself, even in a small way was tremendously inspiring. On the audio side, I listened to audiobooks and podcasts that expanded the way I thought about storytelling and got me thinking more broadly than I had previously. I would not say I took those things for granted before, but I came away with a deeper appreciation and better understanding.
Like many people during the pandemic, I was probably nowhere near as productive as I wanted to be, but I definitely came out of it with some knowledge and wisdom I might not have had if I had not spent hours digesting a wildly new media diet.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
I am a Multimedia Producer with two production companies. The first one is Karkata Media LLC, which focuses on documentary-style videos and podcasts, such as my newest one called Scratch Claw push which is about creatives clawing out a place for their work in the world, and often helping others in the process. The second company is Novis Opera LLC, which deals more in fictional storytelling, such as our flagship project: Garfield’s Crossing, which is a modern day Southern Gothic anthology series about a small town dealing with supernatural events in the mountains of north Georgia and a strong criminal element at its borders.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1) Willingness to learn – With so much new technology and so many platforms out there, it’s almost impossible to master one, much less several skills to be great at them all. Learning to do things well often requires being willing to be bad at something before you can get good at it. Adding some humility to your ambition is a good mix that can take you far.

2) Let others shine – Someone else’s victory is not always your defeat. I’ve been fortunate to work with many talented people and it doesn’t hurt to recognize when someone else has the better idea, especially if you get to be part of the end result. I like to believe in the notion of a rising tide lifts all ships, even in the arts.

3) “Stonecutter mentality” – One of my favorite quotes goes like this: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
That quote by Jacob Riis can be applied to creative endeavors as well. With many of the projects in the media, the payoff is not instant like making a painting or playing a musical instrument. Until you get to the end result it can feel like nothing substantial is happening and that can be the hardest part of the work (at least for me). Sometimes you just have to do the work and trust in the process.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
It’s great to be really skilled at one thing, but working on skills outside of your main area of expertise can be helpful and can even improve your main skill. I started out wanting to be a writer and director, but learning to be a good editor has helped me in both of those areas. I’ve done a bit of voice acting over the last few years, and while I have no intention of being a full-time actor, it has helped tremendously with my directing.
In my time working as an editor-in-chief for the Garfield’s Crossing project, I got to read and edit the work of other writers, which in turn made my own writing better.
These days, it is not so bad to be a specialist at being a generalist.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
All photos and logos are copyrighted by Karkata Media LLC & Novis Opera LLC.

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