Interview: Georgia Koch of SoulPancake
…why don’t people want to feel good?!
The Mood is the Medium: A Conversation with Georgia Koch of SoulPancake
“75% of YouTube comments make me want to vomit.” – @IngridMusic
The tweet above, from accomplished singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, speaks volumes on the current state of social media engagement. For every commenter armed with welcomed appreciation or — just as welcomed — polite disregard, there would appear to be a thousand more waiting with sociopathic glee to vehemently oppose and then actively attempt to undermine, well, everything. Trolls, some. But genuinely mean, others. An unfortunate tendency toward jadedness inspires many to simply accept this as a reality, an immovable beast — or worse, reject social media engagement outright. But others, like Michaelson, have attempted to balance the scales of multimedia interaction by offering opportunities for engagement which, by their very nature, appeal to the beautifully unjaded child in us all.
SoulPancake is one such “institution of unjadedness.” Both an interactive web presence and diverse media company, SoulPancake, founded by Rainn Wilson, Devon Gundry, and Joshua Homnick in 2008, seeks to explore life’s “big questions” across a variety of platforms. Since its launch in March of 2009, SoulPancake has given us refreshingly existential viral sensations such as Kid President, Metaphysical Milkshake, Have a Little Faith, The Science of Love, and many more.
NAILED contributor Trace William Cowen reached out to SoulPancake channel manager and series producer Georgia Koch.
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NAILED MAGAZINE: I feel that SoulPancake beautifully exemplifies the concept “the mood is the medium,” meaning your collective work approaches existential touchstone topics from a consistently positive stance. You’re exploring Positivity (capital P intentional!) as a medium and, in turn, are discovering and sharing the sentiment that intellectual prowess need not necessarily be permanently coupled with chronic negativity (i.e. the over-romanticized notion of the “isolated, creative genius”). Could you speak on this a bit more? Is this “Positivity, the medium” a conscious effort at SoulPancake or more of an organic revelation?
GEORGIA KOCH: Thank you! That feedback means a lot to us.
At SoulPancake, we are definitely a mission-driven company, and everything we make is made with the intention of having a positive impact on the world. So yeah, it’s a conscious effort. I think one thing that makes our content stick out among others — is that having a positive impact doesn’t necessarily mean we are heavily attached to one specific campaign (although we often collaborate with these individuals). Sometimes the most simple, and often subtle things can make you feel something that’s wonderful, positive, and joyful.
Some content creators can rely on one format or topic for all of their videos, but for us our consistency comes from that positive feeling — so it’s the most important part of what we do. We want to make stuff that helps people learn more about themselves, and engage in the world and with each other in a new way.
NAILED: Furthermore, can you approach this from a personal perspective? What lead you to the SoulPancake team? What inspired you before working with SoulPancake / What inspires you now?
KOCH: I’ve always wanted to be a part of a team that was making a positive social impact on the world, so when I first saw a SoulPancake video I thought, “I need to work there!” It was amazing to me that this place that looked so cool was also creating joyful, uplifting content.
Coming from other traditional media, it shows that they had a huge respect for their audience because they wanted to make things that made people feel good about themselves and each other. Too often in entertainment (and particularly in Hollywood), conversations around making content are so rooted in what’s going to sell and it definitely weighs you down. We have so many people who come and meet with us with ideas that were “too feel good” for a network. Which still confuses me to a large degree…why don’t people want to feel good?!
I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned since being here is that having a strong emotional impact online and in videos is a specific and calculated thing that can take a lot of work. At SoulPancake, we have such attention to the details that make you feel something. Whether it be a close up on someone’s face, the way that they are framed, the colors we use or the vibrant, oversized props. All of these strategies have a specific intention to make people open up on camera in a natural and heart-warming way. I never realized how much those things help, and that attention to those details goes a long way.
I am so inspired everyday by my team here. They will do whatever they can and work all hours of the day and night to make something as good as it can be. When you know that you are making a positive impact on people’s lives, I think it makes it a lot easier to spend all of those hours doing it, and we are definitely really fortunate to have one another to do it with. With every video we make or decide to make we ask each other, “why are we doing this?” and, “what are you going to feel when you watch this?” I’m constantly inspired by everyone who pushes us to take this idea further and further with everything we make.
NAILED: I’m sure you’re overwhelmed with memories of emotional and deeply personal responses to different SoulPancake productions (be it an episode of That’s What She Said or The Science of Love or even just a tweet). That being said, do you have any responses that have stuck with you? Do you make an effort to remember these responses whenever you head back to the proverbial drawing board for a new production?
KOCH: Absolutely. As channel manager, I spend a lot of time every day reading and responding to our comments. It’s easy to lose sight of them in the day to day craziness, so I will often go over to our board where our office manager, Alex, hangs some of the best letters we’ve gotten and read a few. I remember these at the beginning of a project, but also at the end. We are always asking ourselves what our audience will take away from a video, and it’s extremely important that those things are clear, concise, and impact people in a positive way.
There are always those final moments where you are working to finish something and it can be really hard or overwhelming to get everything done. It’s then when I think about our audience and remember that it’s so important that we never stop holding ourselves to our full potential to make something as good as possible. There are a lot of great videos online, and I try to never take for granted the fact that our audience comes back and engages with our content in the way that they do. If it makes them take time out of their day to write us a message, or share one of our videos, that’s an amazing thing.
NAILED: Following the release of Spike Jonze’s lovely Her, there’s been a great deal of blog-talk surrounding the idea of modern love. I feel, and I believe Her posits the same thesis, that the idea of “love” hasn’t really changed that much. We have more tools for love, so to speak, but what we require in order to feel loved or to give that same love back hasn’t changed. If anything, I’d argue that the Digital Age has allowed love to flourish in new and exciting ways. What are your thoughts on “modern love”?
KOCH: I agree, we definitely have more tools for love, so to speak, which I think has both helped us and hurt us in a lot of ways. The Internet has given us an incredible ability to connect with one another and engage with each other through similar interests and beliefs.
I guess I think that love has always been pretty complicated, and the fact that we have more and more choices available to us can make it more distracting. Whether that be through ways to meet people or types of relationships to have. At its core though, Love is still the same and we still want the same type of love.
We are currently working on a show called The Science of Love, and it’s been fascinating to meet a variety of couples and investigate the idea of “modern love.” I think because things are changing too quickly, it’s hard for us to always keep up and emotionally adjust to new practices and traditions. We are way more laid back about our relationships in a lot of ways, which again, is not necessarily good or bad, but just something worth talking about.
NAILED: One could say that we are in an age of “moving away from” traditional ideas of religion, specifically in relation to the competing worlds of organized religion. This, of course, casts a thankfully more societally accepted light on agnosticism, atheism, and even more general ideas of “non-god-specific” versions of spirituality. Would you agree? How do you feel SoulPancake fits into this paradigm shift?
KOCH: That’s interesting — at SoulPancake, we all come from different backgrounds, so whether you grew up with an organized religion or not, we aren’t afraid to talk about faith, no matter what it means to you. The important thing being that no matter what you believe, it’s important to have conversations about it. It’s funny to me that talking about God and Religion have become “taboo” when it’s something so many people believe and have strong feelings about.
I think one of the coolest things about SoulPancake is whether we are talking specifically about spirituality and faith, or more generally about life and love, we approach it with an open mind and from a place of finding our similarities rather than our differences. We are all so much more alike than we think.
NAILED: Complete this sentence: When life gets __________________, I get _______________.
KOCH: “When life gets TOUGH, I get GOING.” Which really comes from the phrase, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” 🙂
NAILED: When was the last time you NAILED it?
KOCH: When we hit one million subscribers, absolutely that!
Georgia Koch is a channel manager and series producer for SoulPancake. She’s also an artist and a self-proclaimed “child at heart with a cynical sensibility.” You can find her official website: here.