Creative ideas and narratives are like seedlings. They require constant attention and nurturing.

It’s a rite of passage for anyone who considers themselves a creative looking to share a breakthrough with the world. For its audience are the catalysts and often first adopters for some of the most innovative ideas alive. Many take the pilgrimage - Austin, Texas, SXSW.

When I was invited, Twitter was pivoting from being a tool of ambient awareness to collector of social followers. Clay Shirkey’s revelatory?Here Comes everybody?was unveiling an early understanding of online organisational behaviour and tech.

And as the video I made below shows the father of multimedia Henry Jenkins was unravelling fresh concepts enveloping a burgeoning social media. I was riding a boomer — all things digital in content creation and coding. And that wave was about to lose its kinetic energy, masking several career highs and potential new developments. This is my story which might help you prevent a wipeout.

July 2004, I cracked it. Two major things in fact. The first how you collapse multiple disciplines together. That is code, create compelling content and start ups. I entered the web in 1995. My first blog (blogger.com) was given a ranking of 8.5/10 attracting industry praise.

I became a creative in the first dotcom working in Soho with leading advertisers and start ups like Justgiving.com — where I was their first news editor. The Net was the transformative home for those like me who had proved their ability in industry, but were either still outsiders and often voiceless. Now, that could change.

My other milestone stemmed from addressing a major breakthrough that occurred in the 1960s. The 60s is when television journalism took off and broadcasters devised a story form still used today. But back then a lone, and growing powerful voice questioned TV News’ approach. It was filmmaking by cookie cutter, he said. That lone voice, who gathered friends together to form a movement, was Robert Drew. He would become the father of Direct Cinema or Cinema Verite.

Drew’s discovery was revolutionary, but its impact was felt more in documentaries than news. His films, like?Primary?(1960) rest in the US Library of Congress as testament to extraordinary filmmaking and innovation.

Procuring a $1,000,000 from his employer he radically changed cameras — originally the size of an office desk — to become mobile whilst enabling the camera to synch (link in real time) with sound. He also introduced a new filmic language. It seems relatively simple now.

Today, it would be the equivalent of creating an AI programme that prefigured filming in virtual reality environment that didn’t require goggles. Drew was so far ahead of his time. So far ahead the News industry couldn’t see what he saw, and didn’t want to. Plus ca change.

I had a hunch borne of personal work and pursuing a PhD. The personal work included working in various positions for network TV, being the videojournalist/ filmmaker for the World Heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis fighting Tyson, being invited to the creative think tank for Olympics 2012?from a new platform I’d made profiled on Apple, and becoming one of the UK’s artists in residence at the Southbank Centre alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and acclaimed poet Simon Armitage. There I created Obama's 100 days in office video, with the help of his official photographer which was screened to the score of Prof Shirley Thompson OBE.

Drew created cinema verite that primarily influenced documentaries. In the 90s, Doc maker Michael Moore’s?Roger and Me?(1989) would be a key influence in the genre of cinema documentary. Why, I asked, if Drew’s cinema was designed to frame news (it did but minimally) and there was a whole cinema documentary genre now courtesy of Moore (see Netflix), why couldn’t there be a form called cinema journalism?

It wasn’t just a question of slabbing two words together, but it did require evidence, and even if it could be proved, so what?

In 2006, an international jury in Berlin started me on this road. The UK’s Press Association asked if I could train their clients into video makers; some 1000 plus of them. It was the dawn of word press websites and Youtube. I accepted. But I had a different type of video style in mind to train them as captured by one delegate.

Whilst many journalists would go onto win awards scooping the BBC, I made a film of them on their last training day as they faced a real national headlines murder case. The film,?8 Days, would go onto win Best documentary for an Independent at the World Videojournalism Awards in Berlin, sponsored by broadcaster DW. As I accepted my award on stage, one of the judges referred to my work as cinema.

But what was its impact and was I just a fluke? I spent a busy schedule travelling the world training and speaking about the form, and in the process came across others in Egypt, Beirut, China, South Africa, across Europe, Syria, the US and Russia. I was asked to be a juror of the UK's leading TV awards providing a means to study other award winning news makers.

And without exception, those practicing the craft were feted by audiences, and they’d win awards, journalism awards. The icing on the cake was speaking to Robert Drew, learning from him, whilst he agreed with my thesis.

Pioneering news makers created a conventionalised way of sense making which was an enormous find in the 1960s. It had got there by years of experimenting, backed by necessary rules that have gradually atrophied, particularly in the 1990s.

It’s little wonder young people don’t watch it, and moreover PR and spin doctors know how to game it. A PhD would reify my calculus by examining its history and contemporary givings from examples like Vice.com.

Cinema journalism wasn’t just a fad it was the foundation of the language of non-fiction filmmaking in which culture and diversity were seared into its form. Cinema too is a moving target. It’s not one style or form. Philosopher Andre Bazin said as much. The effectiveness at understanding its lingua franca is the very antidote to sub and unconscious spin PR and partisan news some outlet’s dole out.

And then the wave’s energy I was riding began to collapse. In part because whilst I was keen to devote my time to share cinema journalism, the other half of me was juggling innovation, startups, design thinking, behavioural psychology and diversity and inclusion. Time can’t fold on itself, and if it could, I’d still need help.

I’d once joked that the adage:?Jack of all trade and master of none?was itself outdated back in 2005. It’s proved today by the term multi-hyphenate. But multi-hyphenating requires attending to.

Idea and narratives are like seeds. Different seeds give rise to varying plants and if you’re fortunate you develop a diversely rich garden. But those germinating seedlings need constant attention and that attention lives in the shape of ally ship and degrees of mentoring.

For all the focus and energy, there’s a space and place where I know more now than anytime mentoring and ally ship keeps me hungry and focused. Mentoring is the art of listening and guiding, and where possible providing a ladder. I’ve mentored many people over the years, but I know I’m badly in need of mentoring myself to invigorate direction.

That characteristic within us is often hidden from view. For all his incredible achievements Diddy sought mentorship to understand himself and learn afresh from Ray Dalio.

Stories often in journalism are treated as a given, framed as “and this is so” but the psychology of visuals and words, often invisible, hides choice. Great stories impact the psyche, and told time and time again are the seeds of societal conventions and behaviour.

We know this from the absence of knowledge now surfacing amongst different cultural groups and the mono stories society has invariably been made to absorb as the only narrative.

There are so many rich stories I itch to tell, from within the UK, about Ghana, the diaspora, and the continent she nestles in. I’ve made some starts. In 1997, the United States of Africa was a collaboration I helmed between Ghana state TV and South Africa which yielded many benefits. It was re-digitised last year by a global body that deemed it historically important.

There’s the book I must revisit where the publisher and I got to an inch of signing. There’s the project that captures Britain’s Innovators, and the grand visions that correct the past, like Bass Culture — a promo I made on a mobile phone showed at the famous Regent Street Cinema where the Lumieres brothers showed their first film in the early 1900s in the UK.

Bass Culture asked about the contribution of Reggae to British life, supported by a ￡500,000 AHRC fund for its architect Associate Professor Mykaell Riley.

The stories to be told today rest, not in the screen, but in the physical innovations towards building better futures. From websites in 2003, to training companies and students as entrepreneurs, to co-creating two years ago a national journal about diversity, to this summer working with the British Library on their 500 years of News Exhibition, and Google’s News Initiative.

Culturally and societally-sensitive, take a simple idea and magnify it. But in the process, as several clients have commented, challenge antiquated dominant modes of thinking. One of my most enjoyable periods of growth was being an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre under Jude Kelly CBE. Art is about challenging life and views by the spectrum of knowledge acquired to break from norms.

Art, storytelling, start ups, leadership, and a science methodology ( I trained as an Applied Chemist), how can those skills be collapsed and given new breath?

There is a Ghanaian proverb that says: “Woforo dua pa a na yepia wo” as they say in Twi ( Ashanti). When you climb a tree well then we’ll push you.

I want to be pushed.