Creativity

What do you understand about 'creativity' and to what extent have you been creative?
Creativity is about using your imagination and finding ways to present your ideas in your own individual style. It's about being original and being inspired by existing products similar to what you are creating. I have been creative when making my music magazine and music video as it allowed me to put all of my ideas together and present them to an audience.

How have you tried to facilitate and encourage your own creativity?
When  storyboarding our video, we tried to think outside the box and plan to use a variety of camera angles that would display our ability to be versatile. To encourage our creativity, we looked at existing examples of videos in a similar genre to ours that sparked new ideas for our video.

Did you experience limits/blocks on your own creativity?
Working to a brief was a limit in itself however it allowed us to think more directly and stay focused on one thing, without a brief, both the magazine and the video task would have been too broad. When making our video, we had limitations in that the male role had to be changed three times due to them being unavailable and we had to find a girl suitable to play the female role convincingly. Location was a slight issue as we needed to find somewhere simple enough for the bedroom.

How easy/difficult was it to be creative whilst still working to the brief?
I found having a brief very beneficial since it allowed us to be more focused. Having no brief would have possibly made us go off track at points therefore having a specific criteria to follow was useful. The brief gave us a structure to our research and planning work as it allowed us to now what we needed to look in to and find out about.

Did working within conventions stifle your creativity?
Although we had to work within conventions, we could still develop and challenge these conventions if we wished to do so. We took the conventions and storyboarded ideas that made use of them; instead of limiting us, they helped. We found costume conventions particularly difficult when creating our video since we didn't realise how hard it is too find neutral clothes which showed no colours or styles with native connotations.

To what extent did you need to work with others and 'bounce ideas' off other people to be truly clever?
I had to work with my media partner, Charlotte. We kept a joint Blog with all of our research, planning and ideas which allowed us to keep track of each others thoughts and ideas. In class, we combined our ideas together to create a storyboard which became the base which we could build up on to as we continued through the course. W also worked alongside our main female role to develop ideas, she is good at expressing emotion through acting therefore we used this to our advantage and found ways to convey this in our video.

How much of your creativity was about trying to picture things in your mind's eye?
When storyboarding, we could only visualise in our mind's what we would hope the shots looked like when we had filmed them however this was not necessarily how they turned out. We ended up re-filming the majority of our video because things cannot always be conveyed in  reality with how it is in your mind.

How much of your creativity was about trial and error?
About 99% of shots from our draft video have been removed and re-filmed. This was because initially, we were keen on having outdoor shots for quite a bit of the video however, these didn't turn out as well as we hoped so we ended up taking them out. We ended up refilling quite a few times because we anted every shot to be exactly how we visualised, this trial and error method allowed us to learn from our mistakes and, although at the time it was stressful and repetitive, we have come out of the process with a video we are both really pleased with.

To what extent was a lack of confidence an issue in terms of your creativity?
Our draft video perhaps didn't turn out so well because we lacked confidence in our ability to film however, this was resolved in our re-filming sessions. We had no problems with confidence in our lead role since we chose someone with lots of confidence who allowed us to expand our creativity.

To what extent was a lack of technical competence/confidence an obstacle to your creativity?
As mentioned above, we were not confident with using the video cameras at first therefore this was an obstacle. Also, we used final cut pro, an editing program, which neither of us had ever used before. This was easy to understand once we had played around on it and learnt how to use it, however at first we found we were editing at a very slow pace; this worried us as we didn't want to miss the deadline however, the more we used it the easier it became.