Lessons

Lesson Info

Creativity: from Idea to Product

We spent some time on how to figure out how much to charge and so are a little off of our schedule that's okay we gonna roll with it so we're doing now is we're gonna talk about how to work with ideas and uh uh again all of the stuff that I'm sharing with you right now is all about marks process this is my personal process in fact, at lunch before he went to the lynch with mark stuff I was talking tio linda and diane we're talking about our different approaches and diane had a different approach to the way that she charges specifically she never uses a day rate she uses a creative licensing fee creative fee s o we even within our business we have a little bit different ways of charging stuff so just note that this creativity stuff that I'm giving you I'm giving the tools that you can use a reject or to modify so that it works for you but I hopefully seeing this stuff it's gonna help you get from brain to paper to print and center of our goal is all right so let's start with understandi...

ng creativity and so creativity is definitely uh something that you do is not something that you are a big difference there is not you know, a lot of times we say okay, I know something that's really creative um and what we mean is maybe they're very they're smart or they can paint or they could do something but creativity true creativity is something that you do and it always has a medium creativity always has a medium so when your when your creative your creative at doing something, you're producing something so you're producing photos or you're fixing cars or your recording music or your something there's always some in product of creativity if you're a writer, you're writing books and so creativity has this end product and so it's it's not your either creative or you're not you can become anybody can become creative anybody can be very, very creative and be very prolific only difference is how original are the things that you're doing in your creativity so creativity is something that's done it's not something that you are right so, um the other thing is creativity you really need a framework for creativity and so I've spent to at least the last fifteen years developing my specific framework for how I am creative and I have a process for this and I'm gonna share my abbreviated process with you have got it charted out it's a downloadable pdf that you can get it built in mind jette mine manager and the thing is it's not linear it's not even cyclical it's chaos and so I'm gonna walk you through the different ways that I've refined my creative process and then from that process I've got ideas I've got just a torrent of ideas on dso it office it's sort of fun because kelsey and michael and matt I'll be coming in like all right here's the idea we're gonna do this this afternoon that it did and literally ten minutes later scrap it now we're doing this no scrap it now we're doing this I think kelsey had a hard time with that the first a few weeks but anyway it's how it is there's just like this torrent of ideas I'm sure that all of you know somebody that that is like that they have ideas ideas, ideas ideas that is being original being creative is taking those ideas and actually being able to produce something with them it's a big difference it's not just having ideas it's actually being produced something from those ideas that creativity is so um we're going to a little exercise and our students here are six students are gonna help us out kelsey has some cards kelsey can you give me those cards you guys if you could get your cameras get your cameras get ready to go and so I'm gonna hand these cards out here the rules for these cards um I don't want you to discuss with anybody what's on these sir stand up don't discuss with anybody what's on these cards I don't show what's on the card to anybody and then I'm going to give you exactly two minutes two minutes to do what's on this card okay, I'll tell you this if you have to take a picture of something all right so I'm gonna give these to you so don't look at them yet here's your card don't look at it yet all right um here's your card okay um uh here's your card here's your card here's your coke here's your car okay, now in a second here we're going to do I don't have a timer to someday have a two minute timer it's on the screen. Okay, good. Wow, awesome creative live rocks so here it goes on the count of three what we're gonna do is you're gonna flip your cards, you're gonna look at them, you're gonna look those and just I want you to see if there's any clarification needed I'm not even gonna give you that. Just look at it acknowledge that you've read the card and then we'll start the timer and you go take your picture are you ready? Look at your cards right? You can read what's on there and go two minutes of starting mark the internet wants to know if they get cards the internet will get no cards, they will get bonus cards, you know they don't give any cards it doesn't work unfortunately in our virtual uh event so these guys are out I've provided cards for them they're looking at stuff they're shooting we'll flip this thing over so to make sure nobody sees that they have exactly one minute and thirty five seconds left josh just tear it up tear it up alright this's interesting this is very interesting this is not a quite untested activity but what are you doing that's awesome I don't know what car to give him that's interesting so okay you have a minute and ten seconds left a minute ten seconds and the question is can you see these pictures uh not in this session we're going to try to figure out how we can get these pictures to us so you can see what they shot but there's an exercise for this you have fifty three seconds left on the clock is counting down can you do it forty six seconds all right these guys are going like mad men and women woman madwoman you had thirty five seconds left there's more cameras here than people it feels like it's crazy its great live could've live ticket out twenty four seconds left I want you in your chairs at two minutes so you got twenty seconds wow check that out fancy fancy machine gun it machine ten six five four three two go back to your chairs your time is up okay time is up all right grab the card that I gave you now here's the question I have for the students I want you to raise your hand if you absolutely nailed what I put on that car you know without a shadow of a doubt that what you have what I said for you to take a picture of you succeeded raise your hand if you got that without a shadow of doubt three people may well if you think maybe then it is shadow of a doubt so you have shot opened out no I like that I think I got I got you okay all right well we have three and a half maybe all right so the so you guys don't know for sure that you got it right when you see your this card says take a photo of something everyone will find interesting something really cool extremely vague fair big alright this card says take a spectacular photo that's crazy what does your card say? Your card says take a photo of something to show the detail of the workmanship get very close so we can see detail may be a dress or a piece of camera gear you decide much more specific is this ok? What did you say? Take a photo of the windows tried expos for the glass and you can see the texture you got it what does yours say you're says take a photo of something mechanical to show something that controls something else aguirre knobbed I'il etcetera fill the frame with that control you got it right and yours you got it for sure no shadow of a doubt I think that you brought mate might have it frames I got it I got it perfect this one says take a spectacular photo ok the point of this and chris maybe he did get a spectacular photo every will agree um is that three of these cards are extremely vague right? And they they set expectations that air very unrealistic that are just like get something awesome get something great right and is difficult right to go out there you're you don't really have direction teo maybe you get it but probably you don't whereas if you have very specific direction you get it right you have that and so your creative process that was your creative process is going to give you boundaries but those boundaries we're actually making more creative not less creative it is much more easier to create when you have boundaries than when you have unlimited boundaries and so when you start working with commercial clients and you start shooting and they start giving you boundaries saying it has to be this way it has to have this color it has to be vertical or horizontal we wanted hike key or loki or whatever the initial reaction is to go I'm the artist leave me alone let me do that but what you find is that's gonna free you to actually create mohr and you'll become more prolific because you can work within those boundaries and you'll have more teo show for it, and this is something you can take with you for any type of discipline. Instead of just saying, I'm going to go this friday and shoot teo experiment with my limbs horrible way to go and shoot this friday to learn how to use my fifty millimeter lens specifically at the one point four aperture and I want to make sure that I know how to focus in manual mode at things that are three foot away and less and maybe, but I'll also do is make sure I know how to expose properly in manual mode with that lens with a model in soft light in an alley that I know that I've scouted out in advance much higher success in the second scenario than the first, and you can give yourself these these assignments on dh. When we talked about failing with purpose this morning, did you notice that we didn't just say, we're going to just try something out? We said, we're going to see if we can figure out how to separate the table from the background and make sure that carly is out of focus and see if the dress blends into the background and eliminate the shadows and a really specific exercise in mind when we did that. And so it's not just go out there and I'm failing but fail with parameters and what you'll find is you'll not only be better at learning but you'll be better delivering from your clients he will do much better job okay uh we're gonna go next year to a bunch of stuff and we did that two minute card activity and I'm gonna dive in here to mark's creative process and I'm actually going to show you a few things and these things are all the different things that I consider when I'm creating new ideas and formulating new workshops and making new videos and all that kind of stuff have a process for this and again this was developed over decades so it's not something I did by myself there's a lot of different resources and then after I show you that I'm actually going to show you mark's creative live creative process and so um I'm gonna show you the process that I went through to create this course and a cz much documentation as I can and then we'll go on from there so let me go through here first thing I'm gonna do is zip over to mark's creative workflow and I've got celtics telling me things so me shut this office it doesn't bounce the whole time break is over get back see this is how my computer treats me you see that get back to work all right laptop all right so this what I'm showing you here is um this is software's called mine manager it comes from a company called mind jet and it creates mind maps and the mind map basically is a central topic and then off that topic all the different thoughts that come off of that and you can just keep branching keep branching and keep ranching andi it's non linear and it's awesome and I use it for almost anything that I create as my initial starting point and so to document my creative work flow I used mind jip eso there are about five things that I consider when I'm being creative the first and I think probably the most important for me is my thinking how I think about things and so um I have a constant sluice of stuff coming into my brain on a daily basic basis in a disciplined way ivan organized way of putting things into my brain uh and so I called this stuff stimulus and this comes from a book actually on this book in fact I think chelsea's gonna bring it to me this book is called jumpstart your brain there's an excellent book written by doug hall used to be a huge advertising guy he wrote this book um I think it came out in the early nineties and it's got tons of exercises on how you can actually work with the team to create ideas and we have taken this these principles, along with a bunch of other principles and what we've done, is literally when we sit down and say, we need to create a new idea for an ad campaign. In the span of an hour, we can create two or three hundred ideas. Just blame o big time. So this book, I can't tell you how to do that right now. But I read this book, and you'll get some great insight on just a note. You're gonna have to suffer through the first half to get to the second half, which is the good stuff. So there's, the book's called jumpstart your brain.