Creativity And The Cold Fear Of Indecision

I’m a young creative whose always caught between what he wants to do - What’s practical - What he thinks will get him noticed - What is in his budget - What will turn his hobby into a career - 

I could go on forever.

You see young professionals making cool projects, relating to people with their images, words and brand story, and you want a piece of that. Technology is getting cheaper. Platforms are getting larger. There’s an ever increasing drive to go viral. In the grand, never-sleeping storm of the internet content machine, is there even a point to you trying?

If I just said YES right now I could end the blog here, but for the sake of the word count, let's keep things moving.

I can’t speak for anyone else here, but for me it’s not about fame. It’s about having a voice. An expression. You just kind of want to throw something out into the world and see how many ripples you make.

So what’s stopping all of us? Filmmakers will tell you all you need is a camera and an idea. Writers would tell you to just pick up a pen. If it's that simple, why are we freezing?

Finding Your Voice

I’m not the person to give advice on this. Not definitively. You’ll see as you read on, I’m not even sure if I’ve found my own voice at this point.

That being said, I guess I’ll have a go at throwing my own opinions into the mix.

The first step to finding your voice should probably be; what do you want to say? Sounds simple enough, right? You can see where this is going - What if you don’t know what to say? It’s only occasionally that I really know the course my work is going in. A lot of the time I’m just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. If I have an epiphany, I continue. If I struggle to put all of the pieces together, the project eventually fizzles out.

I’m a big proponent of discipline in whatever you do. If you’re going to do something, you may as well do it right. Discipline is probably the best advice I could give in this article. Always be working if you have the time. Even just a half an hour with a notebook makes a difference. Sometimes it's difficult to gather the energy, but it helps. I wished I followed the advice of my own experience more often.

What’s My Voice

Please don’t ask me that. I genuinely have no idea.

On any given day I’m either very politically involved or socially nihilistic. 

I love SciFi and all of the analogies and metaphors you can use it as a tool for. Building a world. Guessing how society will being a hundred years time. A thousand years time. How aliens would react to us. How we’d react to the universe as we take our first colonial step out there (spoiler warning - Not well, if history is anything to go by).

I love down to earth and gritty dramas. Representing how flawed and brutal society can be. Real crime. Addictions. Suicide. They remind us of the real world outside our own little bubbles. That real people are out there right now, on our streets, seemingly beyond compassion from those who pass them by to get on with their own lives.

I love superhero films. They’re mainstream, overdone, formulaic and, apparently, not cinema. They also repackage beloved, relatable and amazing characters. They, and their storylines, have been connected into an exciting universe, the size of which film industry has never managed to accomplish before and currently no one is even close to replicating now or in the near future.

I love comedies - but I don’t know if I’m funny enough.

I don’t know what to pick. No matter how much I want to, I can’t have all genres all the time. Even if I could, what if I represent them wrong? What if I completely miss the mark? 

How many suicide scenes exist out there where someone just gets sad one evening and just goes for a bottle of pills? What if I try to make some grand space opera that just comes off as some generic star wars rip off? It's a genuine and understandable fear when creating.

There’s Too Many Minecraft Videos

Who loves statistics? I sure do. Gotta love a good number.

On Youtube alone, according to Google, there is 500 hours of content being uploaded per minute from over 2 billion active subscribers. There are 7.8 billion people on the planet and 4.5 billion of those are internet users across a multitude of different platforms. Every single one of those users is a potential voice.

What’s more, no matter what kind of topic you can think of - Politics, food, travel games - There’s a hyper focused channel or blog dedicated to that topic. There are literally thousands of youtube channels, producing genuinely hundreds of hours of content per day, just about the game minecraft. That is way too many hours of minecraft.

And again, this doesn’t just apply to Youtube either. Whatever you want to reach out into the world with, be it poetry, photography or indie game development, I guarantee you there’s already plenty of people doing the exact same thing. Even thinking about breaking through the noise is disheartening.

Is It Even Possible To Be Unique

With the extreme over-abundance of content that we’ve just broken down, how do you make waves? How do you get people to notice you? The ultimate desire is to be unique. Is that possible when you’re at such a strong risk of just doing something someone else has probably done?

The opinion that a majority of people hold, I feel, is that there are no original stories anymore. Just variations on old archetypes and settings that simply evolve as time moves on. Different and interesting takes on already explored concepts.

Now, its my opinion that it really is possible to create a truly unique piece of content, no matter how difficult it might seem. That being said, I think we have to let yourself understand that its next to impossible for your work to not be compared in some way to something else and that inspiration (check out the next heading for just such an example). My final word on this is however is that, as long as your work means something to you and you meet all the requirements to not be considered plagiaristic, then I don’t see why not.

Stranger Things; The Melting Pot

A lot of filmmakers and storytellers share the advice that there’s a huge difference between inspiration and plagiarisation, and of course there is. Stranger Things is a great example of being inspired by something, in this case 80’s nostalgia for kid adventure films, while still telling an interesting story that relates to people.

The difficult thing is that, even when you try your hardest not to be influenced by anything in particular to strive for uniqueness, there’s always something out there that at least closely matches what you set out for.

Staying with our Stranger Things example, imagine a hypothetical world where ‘The Goonies’ or ‘The Lost Boys’ or ‘ET’ or whatever else might have gone into the melting pot of the Duffer Brothers creation didn’t exist and Stranger Things seemed like a truly original story. In this hypothetical world, I could still draw many comparisons between Stranger Things and the UK film, ‘Attack The Block’. That doesn’t make Stranger Things any less valid. It’s important for myself and anyone else reading this to remember that.

Fake It Till You Make It

Another reason why you’d freeze before bringing your projects to life is just how much time and effort goes into making them, especially if it's not already your career. You can tell by the rest of this blog that I’ve been thinking a lot about the Youtube space lately. What’s always amazed me is how many people stuck with the platform for years. Many of these early creators spent their free time making their videos, and when the time came for them to make it their primary income, the world was blown away by the entrepreneurial spirit it took. That being said however, I’ve heard a number of youtubers in their videos say it can take up to 6 years of dedicated and consistent video publishing, as well as solid marketing and video production skills just to earn a living wage.

It’s the easiest analogy I can make when you think of how much time and work goes into bringing your visions to life. When I was in my third year of college, I wrote my first feature length film script because of the creative environment I was in and the long lunch breaks I had during the mid week.

I haven’t had the same amount of time to really sit down and draft out the same kind of story and world since then, and even though I could start and chip away at the world, I rarely find myself with the desire to do so little at a time on an idea that has genuinely caught my attention, especially when I have so much else to do.

So Is It Worth It

I mean, yeah. Basically.

I think most people's favourite part of the filmmaking process is that initial spark where the idea explodes in your mind. When you’re at that stage, it’s difficult to write down your ideas as fast as you’re having them. I’ve always loved those moments, and my best work has come from those short bursts, following my best ideas.

Time. Energy. Money. Insecurity. They all stop you from doing what you want to do. I’ve been working on my discipline as a creator for a while now and I have no idea if the next thing I do will matter to anybody. The right advice here should be that the only person my content should matter to is me, no matter what form that takes, but if that answer was that enough, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.