By Lcid Crescent Fernandez
A partner of mine pointed out a key weakness in some people in the freelance creative industry: focusing on technical skills to achieve a certain shot or look rather than how the big picture forms around these skills to elevate that shot. So the focus of the work is on the way that shot comes out rather than the imagination to build something around it.
A key case in point is the creative wedding industry. I’m not gonna sit here and shame the hard workers in this field, because they’re some of the best at what they do. It’s the nature of the field itself that creates this situation. Most wedding studios will have wide varieties of shooters who are there solely for that wedding ONLY.
They arrive at the wedding.
They do the mechanical shots they’ve been contracted to take.
Then they turnover their footage to the studio and leave.
That’s all they need.
Conversely, the wedding studios subcontracting these shooters create templated means of storytelling in order to ensure that they can manufacture the same output in record time and move on to the next one. Since they know all the specific skills that the industry shooters have, they will pattern their templates along these skills.
What’s the result?
Every wedding video will have the same feel, the same vibe, the same look. Sure, there will be key differences in that some will be much better by virtue of the extravagance of the wedding, the beauty of the vows, and the chemistry of the bride and groom.
But imagine with me for a second. Have we all not seen the same spinning rings? Don’t we all recall the speed ramps in the edit? The shot of the dress? The groomsmen striking a badass pose?
It’s the same script, despite vastly different characters, setting, and conflict. That’s the weakness of the industry.
We had this realization when another person told us about how people in Prometheus constantly produce new creative ideas and how the quality of the output is constantly maintained despite having dozens of outputs produced daily.
It’s simple, really. It’s not about the output at the end of the day.
It’s about the process.
We aren’t just individually more creative than you. It’s not sheer natural ability. We don’t just constantly churn out creative output. We focus on the process of understanding what end goal we want to achieve. To make it simpler, what does our client want? What should our target audience think, feel or do? With that thought in mind, we developed a process that allows people to have a north star from project to project.
Is the creative output technically good and achieves the goal?
Good. We meant to do that. The process is designed to deliver those things. We created a system where we deliberately gave ourselves spaces and direction to be creative. If we were to handle a wedding, the audience would feel happy at junctures we want them to, sad when we want them to, melancholy when we want them to.
It’s deliberate creativity.
When my brother and I worked on our basketball jumpshots back in the day, we had what we called “bad makes,” and “good misses.” A “bad make” happened when our form, timing, and flow were off when we rose up to shoot, but made the shot anyway. A “good miss” happened when the execution was clean but the stroke was just a little too strong or short.
A “bad make” is accidental creativity. To focus on the templated output means that when your audience feels sad, that was not intentional nor did you give them enough time to actually have that emotion. Perhaps you produced varied unintended responses and interpretations, but hey the video looks good right? That’s what we set out to produce. That is accidental creativity.
Deliberate creativity by focusing on the process allows you to exactly pinpoint where you went wrong if things go wrong, and that allows you to perfect your craft.
Be deliberately creative.
It’s all about mindset; How you talk to and view yourself in your journey to be a better you. Every monday, we’re going to talk about getting better.
