The creative process is something that everyone is fascinated by. It can seem like an inexplicable miracle to us that the things we have in our brains can occasionally manifest as physical objects. The why question of the creative process has a relatively simple answer: people think of things, and those same people make the thing they've thought of. It seems like more and more people nowadays are interested in the how question: how do you get from idea to product, how do you continue to obtain new ideas, how do you cope when the creativity seems to have run dry, etc.
I've had a short amount of time to think about the subject, and rather than work on the paper which I have due tomorrow (as I have run out of creative ways to work on it for the time being), I'd like to put out a few thoughts on the subject of creativity.
My first film I ever made was called Sound in the Night. It was a pretty simple, campfire tale type of story, which I wrote with a couple friends as a sequel to a short story written by one of us about an ex-military loner who gets attacked by a forest monster while living in his cabin away from civilization. I knew it was going to be one of those projects that starts off simple enough, but eventually grows beyond your capacity to control it. I spent nearly nine months on the project from start to finish, filming at local state parks on the weekends and learning how to do almost everything for the first time by myself. By March, I'd learned roughly all the basics of writing, directing, shooting, and editing, and I had a happy little premiere at a local theater. The general consensus was "not half-bad," and my first foray into the world of filmmaking was brought to an end.
I wasn't done making films. I didn't know where I was going to go from there though. I felt spent, like I no longer had the capacity to do it all over again. More than that, I felt directionless, like I didn't know what to make of this thing, this "Pantokrator Films" project I had used as the foundation of this creative venture. So I reached out.
Grabbing coffee with Darren Doane was the first of several unusual experiences I have had with fellow filmmakers. The only thing I'll say about Darren right now is that he is one of the most driven people I have ever met, while maintaining an approachability and chillness to his persona. When I told him what I'd been doing, and how I felt post-short-film-release, he gave me this piece of advice:
Make something every week. Post something everyday.
Inside, a part of me just nodded and said "Great. Let's do it," and another part of me said, "Hang on, the heck you want me to do?" It seem insurmountable and easy at the same time. I figured that he'd been in the game long enough to have something solid to say, and that my own resistance to the idea was just me being creatively lazy.
I began posting. At first, it felt really dumb, because I had no idea what direction to take it. It was just random, pseudo-edgy photos and some comments about how the film industry was going in the wrong direction, all while keeping my own ideas mysterious. I tried making a music video out of some footage I took on a trip with my brothers, but I didn't like what I'd put together at all. Then I had a field trip for a class that took me out to the various parks and vistas of northern Idaho. I decided I would try and film the trip, and make something out of it later. Rather than try to construct the shots to match the video I saw in my mind, for I had not idea for a video in my mind, I simply documented what I saw. Late in the week, I found a song that I liked at the time, put my footage in time to match the song, and posted it, with a pretty darn positive response.
I think that something clicked for the first time when I made that field trip video. Creatively, I did little to construct a story, but rather I worked to beautify and ornament a story that played out in front of me. God gave me the story and the intuition to capture something valuable there, and I didn't need to rely on my own "creative juices" to be creative and to actually create something.
So anyway, it's been well over half a year since that first realization. In that time, I've been pretty consistent with putting something out every week. But I'm not necessarily telling a new story that I thought up and wrote and directed every week. More often than not, it's a minute of some object that happened to catch my eye, or an experience that I pulled out the camera for, or an event that needed to be documented. Creativity isn't rooted in my own head as much anymore, for to do so would be to live inside my own head all the time, and never really interact with the world that is the object of the creative person's desire.
There's a way we can go about trying to make things that gets us hooked on that one beatific vision of an idea in our heads, and we can get so addicted to that vision that we can't move forward in any way creatively unless that vision is made fully manifest by the work of our hands. I believe in a God that loves to defy these visionary expectations, to pull our minds out of our own heads, if only to show us something even better. Our love of our own ideas often makes us blind to what is there to be created, so when we can't make something right away, we retreat inside and grow blind to the wondrous reality that God has given us to explore and to beautify.
So what is the how of the creative process? For me, it can be summed up in this phrase: seek inspiration, pray for direction, document everything, and film victoriously. Only in this combination of things have I made anything I loved, and I believe that it is only this combination of things that will lead us to be successful in any of our creative endeavors.
So let's get started.
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