Archives: Creativity

This weekend, I caught up on the BBC’s awesome BTS doc on COME FLY WITH ME, the new series from LITTLE BRITAIN creators Matt Lucas and David Walliams.

One thought from an interview with Matt Lucas really struck me. Inevitably, there was a question about how you follow up a series as successful as LB was1. Lucas commented, on topping LB:

Can we do something as big as that? No. Can we do something better than that? Certainly.

And there’s the rub: whatever we’re setting out to create, the aim should never be about creating something bigger, simply creating something better.

Striving for size and reach will bring pressures and compromises; striving for quality will not only better ensure excellence, but also come with its own–much wider–rewards and may end up being both bigger and better.

1. and love it or hate it, you can’t deny its success [↩]

Sky Atlantic, the brilliant new HBO-inspired channel from Sky, is currently running a number of great, classic shows from the beginning. Last night, I caught up with the Pilot and first few eps of ER, a show I used to adore but only started watching from around Season 4 or 5.

The pilot isn’t anything all that special: there isn’t much in the way of plot; it’s just a random collection of traumatic events and an introduction to the characters. I’ve seen many better pilots in my time.

What’s easy to forget some 17 years on from that first airing is just how revolutionary and innovative E.R. was at the time.

Never before had a medical drama been shot in such a kinetic, absorbing style. Never before had a show allowed its characters to speak “normally”, without qualifying what “O2 sats” or “insanelylongmedicallynamedthingy” was. Never before had a show stretched its character’s personal arcs across more than a few episodes before nicely tying them up.

Now TV can’t get enough of the verité style; the best shows all worry more about the characters than the events; our favourite shows stretch character arcs and storylines across entire seasons1, without wrapping things up nicely at the end of each episode.

It’s easy when we look back at our old favourites2 to see them in the same light we see things now. But if we’re going to continue to innovate, it’s vital that we don’t forget what innovation looked like in the first place.

Remembering how someone set about doing things differently can inspire us new creative heights, allowing us to see how people looked at things from new angles and created something fresh, exciting and–ultimately–hugely influential.

What innovations did your favourite films and shows introduce? How did they change the landscape and inspire other creators to go further?

1. or even longer in some cases (LOST) [↩]
2. be they TV shows, films or any other artistic or creative endeavour [↩]

I opened up my TweetDeck this morning to find a tweet from Jon Reiss who, you’ll remember, featured in this PotW post a couple of weeks ago.  His linked through to a TechDirt article about building audiences and why those who think it’s too much time and effort are misguided at best.

The salient point, for me, is the following:

while building a loyal audience and community may take time and effort, in the long run, they provide you with the ability to actually focus more on creativity.

Mike Masnick, techdirt.com

Read the full article here.

Are you working on cultivating an audience right now? Is it too much work, or can you see the payoff on the horizon?

It doesn’t take a genius to work out the value of “Event TV”. Take last night’s Superbowl: people all over the world tuned in and felt compelled to take part in the chatter, bantering back-and-forth with friends, followers and random strangers.

In the age of the DVR1, VOD and online catch-up services2 more and more of us are watching our TV content time-shifted to suit ourselves. But if you want to be part of a conversation – if you want to experience the feedback as it happens – you need to be watching live.

The LOST finale is the obvious fictional TV reference3. Although it’s easily dismissed as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence for fans of one particular show and thus something of an exception, it’s still worth noting that the LOST team had spent 6 years working up to this moment, carefully building their following and fanaticism to the point when it became not only “must-see TV” but “must-see-at-the-same-time-as-everyone-else TV”, the very definition of “event TV”.

Can we, as independent filmmakers and creators, produce the kind of content that is best experienced live and as it happens? Can we create “event” content?

The closest we have to it right now is probably The Production Office Live and Film Snobbery, shows that are available almost immediately after airing on the ‘net for anyone to view it at their leisure, but which the vast majority of the audience wants to see live so they can engage in the chat and discussion, whether on the website chat or via Twitter.  Even this, though, is factual content rather than fictional.

If they key to it is interaction and immediacy, is it possible – or even realistic – for us to create “event TV” in a fictional format? Or are we foolish to even aspire to such heights? Do the indie forms of distribution (VOD, digital download etc) inevitably mean it’s beyond our reach, or can we create content that will get people buzzing across platforms as they all watch our product together?

What do you think?

1. be it TiVo, Sky+ or whatever the dominant service in your area is [↩]
2. like the BBC’s iPlayer [↩]
3. just check out the spike in Twitter traffic as recorded here by the NY Post [↩]

This week’s most popular post on the blog was my Pick of the Web featuring Lucy V. Hay and Daniel Martin Eckhart‘s cross-talking posts on what it takes to succeed as a writer. You can read it here.

Today’s Sunday video for your viewing (and educational) pleasure it this fantastic piece by Turnstyle News on Lance Weiler‘s Pandemic 1.0 project that’s been running all week. Watch this video1 and learn how transmedia should be done. Spectacular; and makes me even more gutted that I wasn’t at Sundance this year to be able to participate.

1. you can also see it on Vimeo here [↩]

Last night I was invited to K’s uncle’s Rotary Club meeting to give an after dinner speech about Cystic Fibrosis and transplant/organ donation1.

I have to confess I’ve been so swept up in work the last couple of weeks I hadn’t actually taken any time to prepare what I was going to say. It’s not difficult to tell my story off-the-cuff, but I usually like to have a rough game plan.

What I love about being unprepared, though, is what crops up from the proverbial blue when I’m winging it.

Last night I found myself saying this:

We all learn very early on that life’s not fair.

It’s not fair that anyone should have to go through what I’ve been through; it’s not fair for a 28-year-old to have been to as many friends’ funerals as I have; it’s not fair that a friend of mine has waited 2 years longer than I did for a transplant that still hasn’t come and is on the verge of giving up altogether.

By signing the Organ Donor Register you may not feel like you’ve done very much, but you will have taken a very, very small but very, very important step towards making life that little bit fairer for the people who are waiting [for transplants] and the families who love them, support them and don’t want to lose them when there’s a simple solution.

There’s an old army adage known as the 6 P’s that tells us “Proper Preparation Prevents P*** Poor Performance”. Yet sometimes – just sometimes – lack of preparation can lead to inspiration, to creativity and to an outcome you’d not considered.

I spoke at the Rotary Club of Harrow because I wanted to help spread the word about how life-transforming organ donation and transplantation can be. I walked away with several pledges to sign up and nearly £300 in donations for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. Sometimes lack of preparation pays off.

(Now, if you haven’t already, go here and sign the Organ Donor Register!)

1. most of you will be familiar with my own transplant story from my SmileThroughIt journal [↩]

I heard someone yesterday say that the most important thing in starting a project is making the decision to do it. I beg to differ.

We frequently make decisions and resolve to start things that we don’t see through, just see my pair posts about Mondays (Don’t Start on Monday and Why I’m Right). How many times have you heard someone is starting their diet, stopping smoking, beginning a new health kick, but they’re always doing it “next week” or “on Monday”?

Committing to starting a project is the most important step. Once you’ve committed – be it public or private1 – you’ve taken the first step towards making it happen.

Don’t sit back and relax in the knowledge that you’ve decided to do something so therefore it will happen; unless you fully commit, it simply won’t.

1. although we all know that doing it publicly makes you far more accountable, even if it’s only to your friends [↩]

Just before Christmas, Seth Godin, über-leader of tribes and the man behind the seminal ideavirus revolution, created the website for a new publishing project aiming to launch in early 2011, in association with Amazon.

If you haven’t already, go subscribe to their newsletter and have a look around the site. The Domino Project is, in their own words1, “reinventing what it means to be a publisher”.

These are exciting times for global publishing; when someone with Seth’s ability, influence and forward-thinking partners up with such a global powerhouse as Amazon something exciting is likely to happen, whatever it may eventually be.

If you want to be a part of it, they’re also looking for a Domino Street Team across the world to help them roll out their plans throughout the next 6 months or so. You can read more about the role and the people they’re looking for here or head straight over to the application form and dive right in2; I already have.

The Domino Project is named after the domino effect—one powerful idea spreads down the line, pushing from person to person. The Project represents a fundamental shift in the way books (and digital media based on books) have always been published. Eventually consisting of a small cadre of stellar authors, this is a publishing house organized around a new distribution channel, one that wasn’t even a fantasy when most publishers began.

The Domino Project, thedominoproject.com

1. and I emphasise the “their” in that sentence – it’s truly a collaborative effort [↩]
2. you’ve got until this Friday, 28th Jan 2011 [↩]

When we take on new things – from launching a new project to starting a new health kick – we almost universally choose to kick off “on Monday”.

Monday is convenient because it’s the start of the week and we imagine we’ll be as fresh as a daisy and raring to go.

Ask around, though, and general wisdom will suggest people hate Mondays1. Why choose to start something fresh and exciting on such an energy-draining day?

If you genuinely want to start something new, start it today. Or Wednesday. Or Tuesday. Or any day of the week that will allow you to start with a bang. Don’t put it off ’til Monday.

1. try Googling ‘Monday’ and see how many of the results are positive [↩]

Recently re-reading Robert Rodriguez‘s REBEL WITHOUT A CREW, the story of the making of EL MARIACHI and a filmmaking career, I came across this quote:

Low-budget movies put a wall in front of you and only creativity will allow you to figure out how to get around that wall. The less money and/or resources you have, the more you are forced to be creative.

And what is a movie anyway? A completely creative endeavour. Anything you can do to get away from the things that aren’t important, the better chance you have of being truly creative.

Robert Rodriguez, Rebel Without A Crew

Love him or hate him, we could all learn a little about creativity from Rodriguez.

Creativity isn’t about the money, the resources or the box office draw; it’s about telling the stories you want to tell in any way you can tell them, even if it’s not what you originally envisioned for them.

Exercise your creative muscles and get your project made, however you can. Finding your own way around that wall will harness the true power of your own creativity. And who knows, it may just unlock the doors to the studios.