Ideas About Ideas

As creatives we’re constantly honing our craft. We watch, study, experiment, we invest hard work into being good at the things we do, but I have a question: Do we invest and hone our ability to create ideas in the first place? I think the great artists do. Often when I’m in an early production meeting, the most valuable person in the room is the one with the best creative input and ideas, because without them we’re all just staring at each other thinking, “hmmmm.” (Moment if silence) Now I’m sure everyone’s process is different but let me share one of ours with you as an example. A while back I created something we call the FrameWork concepting worksheet, it’s something we send to people we’re working with to get them to think about the project in ways they may not have realized are relevant to production. It asks all of the key questions I as the director want answers to, but it also asks all the key questions they need to be asked for their own sake. Questions like, “What are you trying to accomplish?” And “What is the primary emotion you want to evoke?” But here’s the secret, we didn’t really make this for our clients, we made it for us, and it was so helpful that we began to share it with everyone we work with. Because every time I go into a project there are a million questions I want to be asked about all the little details regarding the concept and who is the target audience and who is the protagonist and what do they want and fear and to map out the basic structure of the story and so on, and we even have different worksheets for different types of projects whether it’s a music video or a brand... The point is, this is a way we’ve found to help ourselves be better at coming up with good ideas. And beyond this, we actually regularly practice coming up with ideas and refining them. I mean, for every good idea there are hundreds left in some ethereal half finished idea twilight zone floating in the back of our minds. And this is why I don’t mind submitting treatments for videos that may never pan out, because every treatment is practice, and over the long game, that practice adds up. And let me just say for the record, ideas are the greatest commodity to the creative process and I believe that ideas are what will separate you from the pack. There’s a sea of filmmakers who can make a pretty picture, but if that picture doesn’t say anything real, then what’s the point? Don’t just invest in your ability to execute good ideas, invest in your ability to come up with them in the first place.